“Technological progress has merely provided us with the most efficient means for going backwards.” (Aldous Huxley). Do you agree?

Humankind has relied almost exclusively on technology to progress to where we are today. Technology has provided us with the means to acquire our basic necessities, and we have since progressed to the point where it can provide for us the means to satisfy our wants and desires – even our fantasies to some extent. What drives technology forward is an impetus to go faster, further, and more efficiently than we have ever gone before. But as we rely on technology to accomplish more things for us, Huxley laments how we also seem to have traded off those qualities that make us human.

It is true that human beings and technology are inextricably linked. To rise to the top of the food chain on this planet, we have had to compensate for our relative physical weaknesses by enhancing our capabilities to be stronger, faster and deadlier than our competing predators. Without our early hunting and domestic tools, our cave-dwelling ancestors would never have survived, let alone spread across the globe to dominate life on this planet.

However, as with other biological lifeforms that find themselves happily in an environment with no competition, there are no checks and no limits on us capitalizing on the spread of our influence and essentially go overboard with our excesses. Technology has allowed us to survive in almost any climate this world has to offer. Technology has allowed us to extract any resource we need, and with technology what may once have been inhospitable terrain very quickly becomes reshaped and redesigned to suit our comfort, regardless of what existed there before our arrival.

It is this blatant disregard of the rest of the planet apart from ourselves that Huxley addresses in this statement. While we have been busy bringing more and more “progress” for ourselves, we have been simultaneously bulldozing over our natural environment without caring that the resources we take for ourselves are exactly the same resources other lifeforms depend on for their survival.

In our distant past, our ancestors were more careful with how they conserved their resources. They knew about the interdependence of all life, and they were conscious, respectful even, of the non-renewability of resources. They kept seasonal calendars to regulate the appropriate times to engage in specific agricultural activities; they developed rituals and ceremonies to remind themselves that resources are finite and their availability depends on the capriciousness of the weather or on the whims of one deity or another.

Technology has eradicated such conservatism. We called it “progress” when we developed methods to grow food out of season. We developed machines that could tap into resource wells so deeply and so quickly that we imagined our resources would never run dry, and we invented substitutes to expand our resource pools further.

But as technology allowed us to progress, Huxley notes that we have lost our respect for the regulating mechanisms that keep our available resources in check. The earth still operates on natural cycles beyond our control, but our dependence on technology has blinded us to that fact. As we lost respect for our gods, the case for today’s world is that we also seem to have lost respect for our fellow human beings as well as for ourselves. Those of us with the greatest access to the latest technology use it to exploit other people whose technological capabilities are not so advanced. Wars between nations (because we refuse to share resources) are dependent on the technological prowess of one nation over another. Throughout history, the loser is almost always the more technologically disadvantaged. And usually, the hunger for resources is actually driven by the need to feed technology in the first place. Many “hotspots” in today’s world are located where oil is most accessible – in the Middle East. While we cannot eat oil, our engines of progress most certainly do, and they have by now almost eaten themselves (and us) out of house and home.

Likewise, those of us with greater access to technology are either suffering from obesity or diseases caused by excessive consumption or resources made too abundantly available, too over-flavoured and too saturated with non-nutritious substitutes. By technology we are ‘fixing’ these problems through cosmetic surgery and other pointless medical procedures, all the while feeling sorry for ourselves even though these maladies could easily have been prevented.

However, Huxley may be overstating his case. Today, we have reached the saturation point of stupidity and we are starting to realize that our excessive lifestyles will have a serious impact on our long-term survivability on this planet. We are now turning technology towards reviewing how it and we can cope with being less resource-hungry, such as through the development of new green initiatives in our industries. We have begun studies on our impact on our environment and are starting to see success in improving our situation through collective action. For example, since reducing our dependence on aerosols and CFCs, the once horrific hole in the ozone layer has since begun to close. Globalization has encouraged technology transfer between the nations along with education initiatives to ensure the transfer ‘takes’ and is used properly.

Conservation efforts on wildlife are being taken more seriously and initiatives like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault which prepares for major biodiversity disaster have been put in place. On the Internet, human beings are contacting one another at the personal level around the globe, so we ourselves are starting to understand and even influence each other as friends rather than as distant inscrutable “classes” of faceless people groups.

We have only recently arrived at this point in the development of our symbiosis with technology. There are still many abuses and many problems yet to even be addressed, but the fact that we have woken up from our tech-induced trance and are now starting to find ways to mitigate our excesses means that Huxley’s lament has not been in vain.

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