Civilization is Advanced in Technology, But Short in Real Wisdom

by Jack Lee

If you look back over the past 100 years or so, the scientific advancements in civilization are huge, the airplane went from 25 mph to supersonic jets in the blink of an eye. In medicine we discovered penicillin, the polio vaccine, heart transplants became common. Then we have radios, TVs, computers, the internet, synthetic fabrics, nuclear and solar power, spaceships, and most this arrived on scene in just the last 60 years!

Go back another 100 years and we’ve got the industrial revolution, the cotton gin, telegraph, the assembly line and more. We’ve come a long way technologically speaking, but can we say the same about society? We still have the barbarians among us as evidenced by every war you care to look at right up to 9-11 and Boston. 3000 years ago we had idol worship and today…we still have those among who are idol worshipers. In the 21^st century Voodoo is as legitimate as Catholicism, or so says our government.

The ignorance in over half the world’s population is staggering! Europeans living in medievil times had about the same understanding the world these 3rd world people. Even now,with all of our great advancements in medicine, science, education, information technology, engineering, etc., we still have people who subscribe to slavery. We still have male dominated theocracies. We still have genocide and other barbaric abuses of authority by the powerful over the weak and helpless.

Human nature lends itself to emotion first and reason is a distant second. It’s a genetic thing that had to do with our survival in the wilds, a flight or fight kind of thing that we needed to escape danger. Now it seems to put us in danger, when the times call for deliberation and reason.

We have no trouble reacting emotionally do we? But, we have to force ourselves to pause and think logically and rationally, because this does not come naturally. It is an acquired attribute found only in the most advanced cultures. People who are quick to anger and say or do hurtful things are seen as stupid, because they have not evolved as much as those of us who are more stable, logical and reasonable.

Have you ever spoken with a person that was so emotionally invested in a subject near and dear to them that you couldn’t reach them with a ton of facts or common sense logic? I’m sure we’ve all been there. But, the really scary part is they are multiplying faster than us and despite our best efforts global ignorance is gaining on humanity. Look at that dumbed down woman who married the Boston bomber. She has a solid start in a modern family. She was educated and yet she was able to easily be turned back into a citizen of the 10th century through coercion and duress. It doesn’t help to be educated, if you don’t have the courage to back it up.

Here’s another bad example and this 0ne is far less forgivable, because she’s from our own Congress. I listen to this idiot Congresswomen for about 5 minutes yesterday on CSPAN and she was so emotional over the Zimmerman verdict that she broke down on camera! She became so overwrought she couldn’t speak and lost her train of thought before the media. This ridiculous, shallow woman, I forget her name, but she spoke with a thick Spanish accent that it was sometimes hard to understand her is representing America in Congress? I’m thinking, how in the world could we elect such a fool to Congress? She can’t even speak English and she’s an emotional wreck, completely devoid of logic and reason?

What does that say about us?

It’s disturbing to think that at the pinnacles of power here and in places around the world, we have people with such low emotional development, a low E.Q. (emotional quotient) Even the President of the United States fails. He has repeatedly demonstrated he is given to using emotion over reason. He has been unable to aside his personal bias for the good of the nation. His emotional development, or lack thereof, cuts both ways. He was so underdeveloped emotionally that he could not understand how spending tens of millions of dollars on air travel for vacations during the height of this nation’s worst recession was not a good idea. Like a child who wants ice cream for dinner, he just did it because he could and he did it repeatedly.

On another level he has allowed his racial identity to cause his insertion into local issues heretofore considered beneath the dignity of the White House. And this is the man with his finger on the nuclear trigger? This is the man who can order military forces immediately into action without the consent of Congress or who can spend millions of our taxdollars by a presidential order. But, we elected him and again, what does that say about us?

We’ve not come very far emotionally and that’s scary, because for the first time in history we have the power to destroy ourselves.

The philosophers of ancient Greece would be appalled at the lack of progress in mankind’s maturity especially when it’s back dropped against our miraculous technological advances. The danger here is too obvious, if we don’t catch up emotionally to match our technical lethality…we may not have long to go before global events results in a great thinning of the human herd. Then we’ll be reduced back to a level equal with our intellect. In other words, if we stay on course… logic says we’re headed for ox carts, not space ships.