Throughout our history, varying cities have been the crux of an emanating American spirit. New York, for many of our mid-epochal decades, embodied a spirit of freedom, dreaming, and opportunity that Lady Liberty displayed for all to see. The imagery of the torch, crown, and face evoke feelings of pride, melancholy, hope, and more across a liberal-minded populace.
Forty years ago, Neil Postman wrote about 20th Century America's symbolic move to Las Vegas as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration with iconoclastic slot machines, hookers, and entertainment inside the city of sin and sand. Postman's belief that public discourse had fully taken the form of entertainment is epitomized in this move. No longer was the dream of New Yorkers and Californians one of hard work and prosperity, but of lavish trivialities of leisure. How much this century of opulence (best exhibited in 1925's The Great Gatsby) prepared (or, rather, inhibited) us for the coming age is unknown.
Thus, in America's final emblematic move west, the 600 mile drive from Vegas to Silicon Valley displays our recent departure from the Entertainment Age to the Information Age. Restoring many of the boot-strapper tendencies of early America and the Industrial Age of progress, this new age and icon carries with it a pernicious danger in its emphases...
While progress and hard work has long been positive attributes of our Western culture, there is a distinct reason the Valley, not the barley farms of the mid-west, is our new graven image of flourishing. 80-hour work weeks and technical jobs are the new pride and drive of our educational and economic system. Physical and philosophical work have quickly fallen out of vogue.
For one, technological substitution is sought after with vigor and value. For the other, considerations of the abstracted kind are not pertinent in progress' wake.
Progress itself has been coopted by Silicon Valley's main export. No longer does culture value advances in being human, but in pushing forward technology. Presence, connection, and wisdom are rapidly undervalued. Many now see our dilemma and swiftly try to patch the ship's leakage. But how can patients, with only a minority trained in wellness, address their own illness among rooted, systemic solutions. For, truly, the problem is the system of education, economy, and government.
Many of these problems unfolded in the Enlightenment when spirit was downplayed and material was emphasized. Biotechnology now masquerades as an attempt to make improvements upon the human base model. It does so through the reduction of man to mere technological parts (not a corrective worthy of trial when the reality is in a duality). We are sent adrift from our essential components and holistic, heart-soul-mind-strength composition.
This sort-of "technological progressivism" is in our very air.
So much so that some call our disposition and governance, Technopoly, and both sides of the philosophical aisle call it, Technocracy. This means that when global, systemic problems are conjured up in our minds, we tend to think of technologic solutions. Creating (often, better or more) tech to solve climate change, income inequalities, mental health crises, or multi-year pandemics is not an effective impact strategy.
Many have pointed out the fact that societal issues should be solved using society-level changes with systemic, ecological considerations. It's easy to see the value in changing effects upstream of problems. Obesity will never disappear with increased liposuction, dietary pills, and more cardiovascular surgeries.
But still, the Techno-fixers persist.
The irony is that each problem's cause can be traced to tech that was a fatal convenience, like toxic band-aids on a gaping chest cavity. They hold together the wound long enough for more damage to seep in. These alone can never solve all of society's problems. In fact, a good majority of them hurt our epistemic capacity to work in a globalized economy. As long as we proceed with this assumption, we will find failure at each new race to capitalize on innovations.
Alas, our national symbols have moved to the very edge of the Western world.
To establish a more humane future, the solution is not to find another radiant, symbolic headquarter of international prosperity.
The solution lay in the philosophy of Emerson and the strategy of Berry to reunite what was lost in a global forrest with what thrived among our local trees. It lay not in looking to some place far off, but in finding the land to admire in our own backyard....
