This is a bit loose and seat of the pants, but I think technology has contributed to a general moral decline, even as the overall picture of right and freedom has advanced. From a great distance we appear more free and greater respecters of right and liberty than ever before in the history of man, our lives a comparative picture of ease when judged by times not long past. But closer up, at what cost?
I am no longer certain that men will ever use ease to reflect and better their individual state, that the rule is one of decline and moral abdication instead. At this nation's founding men struggled mightily to set their table and meet the obligations of body and faith. Whatever the failings of the age the aim was for the good and the evidence of that is found in the steady progression of that good until women and men of all color were as free in fact as they were in conscience. But remove that struggle and I believe you take something essential from a man that impacts every other aspect of him. Give him ease without a sense of great responsibility and he becomes indolent in body and spirit. Give him the means and power of technology without that greatness of spirit and you invite an entropy that ravishes the heart of the body American...
Those great technological tools that could and should be utilized for our individual and larger good become, more and more frequently, instruments of intellectual and moral decline and corruption....I don't think it is an accident that we find, in the midst of the greatest advancement of technology the proliferation of abominable acts to an extent unprecedented, despite the Radishy one's assurance that the distinction is simply one of knowledge, that the world has always been much like it is now but that we simply knew less of it. I think our experience tells us otherwise...that we understand the neighborhoods of our youth are more hostile, that the world about us is less stable and that men are more lost and confused than was the case within our living memory.
I look at the fragmented family life of our nation, the celebration of foolishness as greatness, the elevation of entertainers to the ranks of genius and the conflation of goods with good and I say there is more than that, than a simple expansion of information at work.
While I believe in the care and provision for those who through no fault of their own have fallen on difficulty from which they cannot rise unaided, I also believe it is integral to the needs of the human spirit that we do not usurp the notion of every man's responsibility for his own provision and the importance of that role in the life of our nation's character. The misguided construction of many social programs in this country has undermined exactly that understanding of individual worth, accountability and respect and we must address it, both with compassion in the moment and an eye toward the future or in our unconsidered charity we will further our own undoing.
But back to the question of technology itself...we cannot put that genie back in its bottle, nor should we desire to given the range of accomplished good and the potential for more under diligent stewardship, but we must, must find a surer footing for man in its shadow, must while celebrating the idea of individual liberty and right, raise and recognize that the greatness of those ideas in exercise rests upon the shoulders of men who carry the responsibilities of the nation on theirs with a sober and vigilant eye. We must reinvest that sense of purpose and common respect, need, and acknowledgement of every man's role or we will with dread certainty fall into the dustbin of cautionary tales and tragic failures. We must begin the serious distinction between the tool we use and the one that uses us.
