What is the future of humanity?
I was having this conversation with a great friend of mine the other day, and it made me a bit nostalgic because several years ago I would've had an answer right away: scientific progress.
That was the meaning of the world; technology would become a part of us, and we would advance ourselves until we reached the perfectibility of man, and that was that. This time around, I was kind of stuck. My first thoughts on the subject were mostly a cop-out, saying that I think I would have to better understand what it's like to be an average citizen of the world, and what tendencies will continue and which are willing to be changed.
But I kept thinking about it. I went home and moseyed around and started reading The Grapes of Wrath again, because I missed it, and because I knew that I had missed so much when I read it the first time. Soon enough, I came across this passage:
"The tractors came over the roads and into the field, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects.... The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat.... A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat', but the driver's hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow got into the driver's hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him--goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals" (35).
Chilling, isn't it? Despite the hot red sun beating down on the California desert, the world had become very cold. Not animals, but insects; not only blinded, but goggled, and muzzled; not a god, but a monster. The world became bitter and twisted and unnatural. The tractor seemed to rob that man of the fabric of his being, not only his physical features, but his compassion and dignity and love. Worst of all...this sounds pretty familiar in our modern day. Maybe it was the rise of technology and big business that incurred people to lose their humanity, give up their hearts to a machine--"[a]nd all their love was thinned with money, and all their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make" (231-32).
Is technology to blame for this? I acknowledge that we need scientific minds to find out how to make farming more efficient and make medicines more effective, so that people can live longer and happier lives without having to worry about their physical sanctity. But it becomes a dangerous thing, living ninety or a hundred years, if one lives only with the hope of seeing more, conquering more, consuming more.
Life has a way of turning very, very cold when one comes to realize that devouring everything in his wake will only make him feel like he never has enough. I suppose greed has existed from the time that man was born, but technology has so blatantly constructed a wall between seller and consumer, widened the gap between the lower and middle classes, separated big pharmaceutical companies from the people who so desperately need medication. It is a tool that is too often used to gain power, and power is never the answer. I worry that in ruthlessly searching for knowledge of the world, we are losing knowledge of ourselves. But the concept of greed causing nothing but isolation applies to any object of avarice: knowledge, money, power. Maybe technology only exacerbates this ever-growing problem, because it contributes to big business and the media and all sorts of political stuff that I don't want to get into.
One man sitting in a tractor, who took the jobs of a hundred men who loved the land that was theirs. I know stories of friends of mine who had stuffed animals as children--I did, too, a panda bear named James and a penguin named Chill--and sometimes they would become so beat up and worn, their ears replaced by patchwork and their colors no longer bright. But they would never give them up. Why? Because it's a part of who they are, silly as it seems. And when it gets less silly, when it's not a stuffed rabbit but a piece of land, or a school, or a career, or an identity, even if it's not favorable to the world's ruthless idea of progress--what then? What if our imagined lives for ourselves are replaced by new plans that are more efficient, more robotic, more practical?
In fact, this isn't only about technology. It's about the world valuing profit over passion, material wealth over inner fulfillment. There are some people that have so much in riches or in security that they no longer have an idea of what they're searching for because "the hunger was gone, the feral hunger, the gnawing, tearing hunger for land, for water and earth and the good sky over it, for the green thrusting grass, for the swelling roots. They had these things so completely that they did not know about them any more" (231). It delves into this fundamental question of what it means to be human. Is it scientific discovery, or the domination of nature, or is it something else?
Because when we have all these things we think we desire, we become less of ourselves, in my eyes. It is in our nature to fight, and when we don't have anything left to fight for, we really have nothing at all. A lot of people are worried about robots becoming too much like humans. I'm more worried that man is becoming too much like a machine--losing all humanity within himself. I fear we're losing sight of the enemy, which is not technology but the mindset that everything in the world should become mechanical, and cold. Whatever happens in the world, we can face it; we can fight in the name of "the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed" (238). But if our hearts turn to stone, to gears and cold machinery in the name of turning a profit, there will be no battle left to fight.
Even in the face of all this hardship of the Dust Bowl and the bankers taking away their homes, there are some beautiful stories in The Grapes of Wrath. One of the intercalary chapters tells about these destitute farmers in Hoovervilles who are talking about just how little money they have left, and how afraid they are for the future when they have nothing. Suddenly word spreads around camp that a young child has just passed away from malnutrition; the family has no money to pay for the funeral. People look at one another, knowing that they have so little--but they look, too, at the family, mourning the death of their son, and they see a family who's been robbed of everything. So the silver piles up by the door, because they all know what it's like, and their own tragedies have softened them to others' hardship.
"Our people are good people; our people are kind people. Pray God someday kind people won't all be poor. Pray God someday a kid can eat.
"And the associations of owners knew that someday the praying would stop.
"And there's the end" (239).
But that doesn't have to be the end. We are made to fight. The whole book is about fighting--all of life is about fighting, and sacrifice, and the impossible dream. The perfectibility of man is not found by triumphing over all; it's found on the battlefield, in innate our courage and will to fight the good fight.
"And this you can know--fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept, for this one quality is the foundation of Manself, and this one quality is man, distinctive in the universe" (151).
So what is the future of humanity?
I don't know what the future holds, but I know what it has the potential to. We have to take advantage of all the good things technology can give us. We have to look to each other and fight like Jim Casy fought--not against technology, or even against the monster of the bank, but against the hatred that corrupts all these things in the first place. We have to be ourselves and overturn the world's notion of us becoming only another instrument of profit, another robot moving along the factory line. We have to stand up for ourselves, against individuals and against institutions that oppress our freedom. But most of all, we have to reunite ourselves with what it truly means to be human: to fight. I have a lot of faith in that notion of man suffering and dying for a concept, even if bombs have to fly to make things right. We are always in a war against something; it's just a matter of keeping that courage and love so strong within us so that we act in the name of others instead of simply ourselves. If we keep that hope and faith within our hearts, we'll always be on the path to better days.
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