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Stefan H. Farr

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Debate: Our culture isn't adapting to our rapidly progressing technology.

There is a lot of talk about the current economic crises. Projections, promises or just plain old confusion, everybody seems to have an opinion on when and how it will get resolved or on the contrary how it will not resolve, but rather bring about the end of us.

Personally, I believe that it "can" resolve, but not by traditional economic measures, because the cause of it is not purely economic in nature. I believe, that this crises stems from a profound conflict brought about by the increasing incompatibility of our cultural, social and economic values with the ever more advanced technological progress that we are accumulating. Our inability to culturally adapt to this rapid technological progress is like a dead weight that impedes our metamorphosis as a species altogether.

Consequently, I believe that the next giant leap in our evolution must be a cultural / spiritual / intellectual / social one and not a technological one. Technologically we are way beyond what we can culturally accommodate and so any more progress in this domain will only deepen the conflict rather than resolve it.

Thank you!

Topics: culture economy society technology
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Closing Statement from Stefan H. Farr

It's been a pleasure reading your comments. Thank you very much everybody for the excellent insight.

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    Linda Zhou

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    Nov 10 2012: Interesting thing is that I still remember the time when the Education Department of our city is struggling of whether students in junior high should use calculators. Even then, I thought the adult can be so hesitant and ridiculous.
    First, we are encouraged to use the calculator and everyone is demaded to buy one powerful Casio calculator which can even calculate the sin, cos of trangle; then, we are not allowed to use that. At last, the calculator is back.
    Maybe, the officials are just using us to make a profit, but this really leads to a contraversial question.
    Or maybe these specialists were trying to do a good thing, but in my view this constant left-and-right change should not be tested on teenagers.
    Many people in China say that our generation is one that is just like the guinea pig. How sad it is...
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      Fritzie Reisner 100+

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      Host
      Nov 10 2012: Hi, Linda. I don't think this confusion over calculators was related to profit. Rather there was a dispute among educators as to whether mental math skills are vital and would be impaired by excessive use of calcultor, whether the thinking that develops to provide facility with arithmetic calculations is foundational to understanding algebra and higher mathematics, and so forth.
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        Linda Zhou

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        Nov 10 2012: Thanks for your reply. But you should know that this can happen in china.
        really. Educators or civil sevents usually do this kind of stuff.
        in our city, a second-level one in china, the same road is being digged and fixed over and over again. Why do they do this? If they want to make a profit, they have to apply a project to get the money from a higher lever govenment. and sometimes they give the projects to their relatives thus they can make an indirect profit.
        My point is: in some countries, policy-making can misguide our society.
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          Fritzie Reisner 100+

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          Host
          Nov 10 2012: I understand that people will often promote their commercial interests in any country.

          I shared what I know about the calculator issue generally just in case you didn't know that there is a genuine pedagogical question involved.

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