This week the internet contained a brief report about a woman trapped in her burning car because a lightning strike jammed her automatic door locks, an event causing me to reflect on the verse from the Koran that titles this essay.
The profusion of the increasingly automated and robotized products and operation of the modern world cause us to cast ourselves into destruction, and with increased frequency. With each passing moment the welfare of humans becomes more dependent upon technology. We sit in the subway and trust that the lights will remain on, that the tracks will switch properly, and that power failures will not occur. We exhibit this same trust while riding in building elevators, railroads, airplanes, ships. buses, and automobiles, and yet we have read recently how people have died in these highly automated and supposedly safe vehicles of transportation.
Ferries sink, ships run aground, planes disappear (although I’m not ready to fully believe it), buses explode, trains run off the tracks, and cars stall and/or explode. Pipelines rupture, nuclear plants spill contamination, and mines become enfired. With each passing day we become more dependent –not on each other—but on the material world we have created and the powers that control it.
In efforts to make these material creations safer the number of regulations and operating instructions has increased along with the installing of more sophisticated safety devices resulting in less judgment permitted on the part of the operators and confining them to a more physically and mentally restricted environment. The true god of the west has always been mammon and its creations; its power grows by the day as people willingly become more dependent upon it for all that they need, and even applaud its growth.
Viewing the advertisements of advanced technology as used for patient care causes me to cringe as I look at illustration after illustration of monitoring, examination, and drug administering devices hooked up to human beings in hospitals under the guise of advanced medicine. Rather than be in a room filled with sophisticated medical equipment I would much prefer to be in a plain room attended by a loving nurturing nurse. People are not machines, they are spiritual entities in a material sheath and they need nurturing love to survive. Unfortunately, with the destruction of the family and the manipulating of women into industry both the source and the environment of nurturing love has been removed from society, and its members are breaking down mentally as a result of it.
The demonstrations, insurgencies, revolutions, and societal discontent that we see occurring on every continent are in large part a subjective reaction to the increasingly dominant nature of governments and their lack of spirituality. Man does not live by bread alone, and to treat him as if he does—regardless of his objective thinking—will cause his subjective thinking to rebel. Also, an instinctive feeling is developing throughout the industrialized world that society is crumbling, that things are not working as they should or at least as promised they would. The god mammon is failing us, as it always has, no matter how many times it is has been resurrected over the ages.
The method of resurrecting and empowering the god mammon has not changed. First an increase in material abundance focuses the attention from toiling for need to working for greed. Instead of working for the benefit of the family, tribe, and race which includes a reverence for matters spiritual, people begin working for personal gain. Men begin to lose their authority because the focus on ethics needed for the preservation and propagation of the species—which only they could provide—gives way to a focus on how to accumulate material things. As the attention of women shifts from nurturing the race it gravitates to self-aggrandizement. Entertainment becomes the focal point of society and reverence to matters spiritual wanes. The god mammon becomes stronger because the family structure has broken down, the values normally learned to maintain ethical relationships with other members of society have no longer been inculcated to the young, causing the need for the enactment of more laws to maintain stability. Eventually the government becomes all empowering, people become enslaved, and society collapses because of the debaucherous lifestyle that ensues.
The modern love affair with technology serves as a more sophisticated form of gross materialism and its worship, but in all other respects the modern materialistic society is on the same path that ancient Greece, Rome, and Sodom and Gomorrah took. With our own hands we cast ourselves into destruction.
E.G.
