This benefaction has allowed me to communicate more simply. I am not much of a letter writer. I tend to feel that by sitting down, writing, addressing, sealing and mailing a letter, I ought to produce something of some significance. E-mail has allowed me to overcome this obstacle. Now when I don't have a lot to say, I can simply jot: "Had a good day, thinking of you." And leave it be. No mailing, no stamping, no addressing, and no guilt.
And so I appreciate this gift of the computer revolution.
A few years back, I suffered a severe case of pleurisy. I was immobilized by pain. A client came to my door, saw me on the floor and called an ambulance. It whisked me off to the hospital, where I was injected with enough morphine to make me giddy and where I was eventually cured with penicillin.
So I am thankful for modern means of travel and for modern medicine.
The fact that I can appreciate technology's contributions leaves me less than a pure Luddite. The Luddites, you will recall, were those bands of laborers who rioted in 1811-16 in the industrial area of England against the onslaught of machines. Starting in Nottingham, they destroyed the textile machines by which owners displaced laborers and cut the wages of those who did work.
I.
But neither does my appreciation of technology dissuade me from the dangers deriving from technology, which the Luddites protested.
Technological innovations typically are unequally empowering. Those in power are the first to afford a new technology, and they usually appropriate it for their benefit. The next in line often use it to dominate others further down, who can't afford it or are otherwise outside the technological loop.
But I raise questions about our enamored espousal of technology for a deeper reason. I question whether technology has the power to bring us the fulfillment we often expect of it.
Though it has relieved my guilt over letter writing, sustained my life, and connected me with others far away, I would be hard pressed to say that technology has made my life happier.
Though my life is longer thanks to penicillin, the quality of living I have enjoyed during these additional years is not simply the result of having more time. It is the result of some good luck, some psychological growth, and much spiritual deepening.
E-mail keeps me in touch with distant friends and allows me to send brief, simple messages, but it has also complicated my office schedule, because I now have to read letters, listen to my answering machine, and turn on my e-mail. I would be hard pressed to say I am happier connecting through e-mail than I was when I lived in a close-knit community in Brooklyn Heights. There we saw each other daily. We often ate together; we celebrated together; and we supported one another.
Better highways have made it possible for those of us who lived in that community to commute over greater distances. They have in fact separated us. Now I live in Morristown, those friends are scattered, and we must travel some distance to visit one another.
The main contribution of a new technology may be that it helps remedy the problems a preceding technology created. When the use of automobiles made possible long-distance travel between us, telephone and e-mail have arisen to help bridge this separation.
Technology may be most beneficial in the short interval of pleasure that exists between a problem it has solved and the new problems it has created. Digital telephone dialing at first saved time. It was certainly quicker than the old days when you had to wait for an operator.
But now the use of automatic menus has so increased the wait at many businesses that it is longer than ever; and it is growing ever harder to find a specific person for a specific need.
In the long run, I would have to say that as great as the technological advances of my time have been, they have not made my life happier, and they have not contributed to my spiritual well-being. That which saves me from my lesser self and delivers me to my higher self derives from ancient philosophies and from perennial spiritual teachings.
II.
It is easy to confuse technological convenience with a deeper spiritual satisfaction. For instance, we use the phrase "standard of living" to refer to both the quantitative and qualitative character of life. We use it to refer to living with running water and electricity. And we also use it to imply the "good" and happy life. But better things and better living are different, despite an old advertising slogan I remember: "Better things for better living."
We also use the word "progress" in two senses. We use it to speak about material gain, and we use it to connote our human betterment. When we complete a new Internet installation, we acknowledge our technological "progress," but we also frequently suggest to ourselves that we are improving our human condition.
Over the past 50,000 years, it is unfortunate but true that human beings do not seem to have progressed ethically or spiritually. We can make a case, for example, that today women are more equal, or that we have more regard for human rights, or that we increasingly accept gay and lesbian lifestyles. But we are comparing such accomplishments only with the attitudes of the previous few decades or centuries, and not with other cultures and civilizations further in our past.
Each of these values has been highly respected at other times and other places. For example, there is an ancient pygmy tribe in Africa that also has 10 commandments, but these include the responsibility of parents to children, and the tribe's responsibility to nature, and the rights of animals. Some societies have been cooperative. In other societies, women have been very much honored. In still others, homosexual men and lesbian women have been respected.
On the other hand, I am afraid nothing in primitive or other civilizations can top the violence of recent Western civilization, for example, violence that occurred in the 20th century in one of our most technologically advanced cultures. Ask author Elie Wiesel about this time:
How do you describe the sorting out on arriving at Auschwitz, the separation of children who see a father or mother going away, never to be seen again? How do you express the dumb grief of a little girl and the endless lines of women, children and rabbis being driven across the Polish or Ukrainian landscapes to their deaths? … I don't understand how Europe's most cultured nation could have done that. For these men who killed with submachine guns in the Ukraine were university students. Afterwards they went home and read a poem by Heine...
III.
And so we ask, what is it that encourages us to live ethically, and to live from a sense of happiness and from a grounding of spiritual security?
Historically, there have been just two answers and their variations. One is the philosophy most common to our culture. It is that what makes us happy is to experience a desire, then work like heck to gratify it.
Being able to fulfill a desire certainly does bring us a kind of satisfaction. I can attest to this, from as humble an experience as enjoying chocolate. But unfortunately, my pleasure is usually short-lived, and it is superficial.
We can't avoid having desires, even if we were to desire otherwise. But another way of living is to release ourselves from becoming addicted to their immediate satisfaction. This way of living also produces happiness. This happiness is usually longer-lasting and more deeply satisfying than the short-term pleasures.
Without question, the goal of gratifying all our desires has become the rarely questioned, entranced state of our Western culture. It is epitomized, of course, in the juggernaut of U.S. consumerism, the philosophy of which is the continual creation of new needs, new dissatisfactions, and new products to satisfy them -- an economy dependent upon the growth of dissatisfaction.
The gap between desire and gratification is usually less embedded in circumstances than it is in our minds. Recently I experienced an example of the influence upon my happiness of how I think, when Carol and I were vacationing in Mexico. The weather, which was mostly lovely, turned one day cloudy, damp and a little cool. I was complaining.
Carol turned on CNN. She found out that there was a large snowstorm blanketing metropolitan New York, where temperatures had dipped into the teens. All of a sudden, I found myself becoming quite happy with my circumstances in Mexico.
IV.
So I think happiness resides less in Mexico than in my mind. It is not a product of convenience stores, as convenient as they may be, or of labor-saving devices, as pleasant as they may be. I think it resides in our ability to realize the "moreness" of the selves we already are, as contrasted with the moreness of what we think we need to be, or what we think we need to have in order to be who we want.
We are, after all, much more than a package of desires, aversions and needs. We approach true happiness as we begin to realize this fact.
Now, I want to be cautious in this contrast of happiness with technology not to romanticize poverty. But neither do I want to romanticize middle-class comfort.
In When Things Bite Back, Edward Tenner writes:
Historian of technology Ruth Schwartz Cowan has shown in her book More Work for Mother that while vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and other "labor-saving" appliances did gradually improve the working-class standard of living, they saved no time for middle-class housewives. Women who had once sent soiled clothing to a commercial laundry began to do more and more washing at home. And as laundries and other services went out of business, fewer choices remained.
Cowan continues:
And what are we to make of stepping from office elevators into our cars and driving to health clubs to use treadmills (a feature of nineteenth-century prisons) and stair-climbing machines?
The more we appreciate the difference between the true source of our life's meaning and the wonderful, but not salvation-bestowing, benefits of technology, the wiser we become.
We will gain an understanding that enables us to maintain our spirit, even when we don't have what we want, even when things don't go right, even when we are dejected or sick.
When we understand technology as our capable servant but not our god, we will become able to more carefully evaluate the benefits and the liabilities of each innovation, realizing that every technological innovation has trade-offs.
We will learn to observe technology's side effects as well as its primary effects. For example, we will see through the infantile fantasy that we can safely store atomic wastes, whose half-life may be thousands of years, in geological strata whose movements we can't predict with certainty beyond a few decades.
We will gain the perspective to evaluate a given technology, not just as a means, but as to its end.
Being overly enamored with technology tempts us to focus on means more than our ends. This tendency to focus on the mechanics of all aspects of our lives, rather than our lives' ends, is endemic. In the recent political campaigns, analysts have spent more time discussing the campaign technology -- strategies and winning probabilities -- than the beliefs of the candidates.
When we understand what truly brings happiness, and that understanding enables us to realize our spiritual wholeness -- the completeness of who we already are -- we will cease to ask only "What?," "When?" and "How?" and begin to ask "Why?" and "For what?" and "For whom?"
Labor leader Eric Hoffer once said, "You can never get enough of what you don't really want."
A question arises for us with new urgency in this new age...
What is it that we truly want for our lives and how may we achieve it?
May we live happily considering this question. And may our answers to it lead us into the true state of our being that is our essence and that is available to us in all circumstances and at all times.
The sermon in a Unitarian Universalist setting is never the last word on any subject, but rather an invitation to further dialog.
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