Plus Ça Change …

Friends, I shall be unable to access the Web until Sunday, so this will be my last blog, probably until Monday next week. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Lionel

Born, as I was well before the half way point of the last century, I have seen many changes. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say I have seen more changes in my lifetime than any of my forebears. The growth of human ingenuity during this time and the amazing technological developments achieved seems little short of miraculous when I remember what we assumed were the greatest boons to human life when I was a boy.

People were still talking about the twin transport disasters of The Titanic in 1912 and the R101 in 1930. Each craft was designed to be the last word in comfort and offer larger passenger capacity than any earlier craft. They were to herald a new era of luxury and comfort, as well as making long distance travel more affordable. Instead, each brought a huge increase in human misery and subsequent investigations have shown that greed and a thirst for power contributed enormously to both disasters.

Europe had but recently emerged from “The war to end all wars” and yet most people were anticipating another war before long, and they were right of course. Many homes in Britain when I was a boy had neither running water nor electricity and central heating was an undreamed-of luxury. Horses still did most of the heavy work on farms and horse-drawn carts were a common sight in the city in my younger days. The DC3 or Dakota was still on the drawing board and the only acceptable way of travelling from Britain to the USA was by steamer. It was the days when the leading steamship companies competed avidly for the ‘Blue Riband’ for the fastest trip between Britain and New York. Television had begun to make a nominal appearance in London but general access to TV was still thirty years away! Telephones in the home were a rarity and those who used public phones had to contend with Button A; Button B and making all calls through an operator. Inland long distance calls, called ‘trunk calls’, were difficult and overseas calls frequently involved making an appointment for hours ahead! Computers had never been heard of and the first Tabulator had been invented by the founder of IBM only a few years earlier. Remember those Hollerith machines?

I recall being asked at school to write an essay on “The Future.” I felt the greatest boon to humanity would be if all drudgery was replaced by machinery. Man released from such soulless toil, the money saved by using machines would be distributed fairly amongst all and humanity would become more caring and I saw a time of great happiness for all, where no-one had an empty belly. The drudgery has effectively been removed now – there are very few jobs that rely on human beings carrying out monotonous, repetitive tasks like Charlie Chaplin did in “Modern Times” - Are the bellies full? Is humanity happy?

These are rhetorical questions, for we all know the answers; but why is it that the arrival of the ‘promised land’ has not brought the anticipated benefits? For the answer, we need to look closely at ourselves. The complex collection of things tangible and intangible that comprises what we call a human being is a great deal more than what is seen when we look into a mirror. We are similar to icebergs – at least two-thirds of us lies completely hidden from view beneath our ordinary, day to day consciousness. However, we have allowed the five senses to so dominate our lives that most people have no idea that they are anything but a bundle of flesh, bone and nerves. No matter to whom you speak about ‘progress’ during the period I have mentioned, they will refer to exactly the kind of things I have mentioned, plus perhaps urging you to marvel at the progress made in medicine, thanks to new technology and new drugs. Nobody is likely to mention progress in human behaviour or morality. Ask them if they think we as a race, are happier and the answer will be at the best a hesitant ‘maybe’ but more likely it will be negative.

In scientific research, as in all fields of human endeavour, if you concentrate your efforts too narrowly, you produce an imbalance. Drinking too much alcohol produces drunkenness and early death; smoking cigarettes damages one’s lungs; over-stimulation of any of our senses produces insensitivity; over-use of antibiotics produces immune bacteria, etc., etc. It was a wise man who said “In all things, moderation.”

Moderation is exactly what we are missing. Not only in our relations with one another but also in the focus of our research and technology. Human beings are spirit, mind and body. I set them down in that order deliberately because that, I believe, is their relative importance. During my lifetime humanity has focussed almost entirely on the latter and ignored both mind and spirit. We do this at our peril! The imbalance we have thus created is becoming more and more serious every day. Some will tell you the mind has not been ignored but I take issue with that for what such people think is the mind is in reality the brain. They have so confused themselves by their exclusive focus on things material they believe the brain (a physical organ) and the mind (an intangible organ) are the same.
What is needed is a complete re-orientation of our priorities and a good starting place would be to remove the air of ‘godliness and infallibility’ from those engaged in all scientific disciplines. Secondly, the distribution of resources needs to be re-examined. For the next century our main focus should be research into the mind and the spirit, using the same methods of reproducible results before accepting anything as fact, but retaining open minds. We need this in order to redress the balance. Only then can we really take stock and consider what real progress we have made.

Accepting that the spiritual and mental parts of humanity are imperishable, unlike the physical body, such research is not only long overdue but will produce some amazing and fantastic results. For the time-being however, man’s spiritual and moral nature remains largely unaltered despite all the ‘progress’ on the technological front. As the French say, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.”