Author: Thomas Eckert

We live in an incredible period of history which might one day be viewed the same way the Renaissance is viewed today. The past twenty years have seen an astounding leap forward technologically and socially. This pace of innovation can be exhausting and has contributed to the increase in nostalgia for times this generation never lived though.

The nature of nostalgia is often blind to the less desirable aspects of a time or place. The filmic 1950s is certainly aesthetically pleasing, but nobody would desire its visual sleekness if they had to endure the sexism and racism that came with it. Luckily, we no longer have to. The Internet has made the act of picking and choosing features from past generations as easy as managing a Pinterest board.

The namesake of the Renaissance is the French word “rebirth.” Most scholars agree that the cause of the Renaissance depended upon a dissemination of new technology, intercultural communication, education, and what could be called nostalgia. The printing press democratized publication creating a literacy rate never before seen. One day, we will look back and gawk at the breakneck pace of innovation in this age, especially in regards to the changes caused by smartphones, artificial intelligence, and self-driving vehicles. Each of these have the potential to greatly disrupt economic and social norms that are taken for granted.

We are already in the midst of the changes caused by the pocketable computers we call phones. These devices challenge our sense of community. They have created new social mores and accelerated the pace of work in an already progress-obsessed Western world. The role artificial intelligence will play in our lives in the future is yet unknown. When its time comes, we may be faced with questions of our very morality. What is most pressing, currently, is the economic shifts that will take place due to vehicles that can control themselves.

At first, self-driving vehicles will be primarily used by shipping companies. When shipping by truck, drivers often face long hours on the road which can be aided by driving assistants. When human drivers are no longer needed, there will be a huge economic hit and a tragedy of unemployment if we do not provide alternative job options for these men and women. Private use of these vehicles will flourish because of their adoption by the young and the elderly. Today’s young people do not tend to see driving as a totem of freedom in the way previous generations have. The smartphone seems to have supplanted the car.

It is unlikely that young people will buy these cars outright at first. Like all new technologies, they will be quite expensive when they first hit the market. I think young people will start out by renting these vehicles, severely disrupting the taxicab market. However, if driving is not important to them, it will not make sense for them to pay for a vehicle that spends over 80% of its life on a small plot of asphalt. There will be Time magazine articles about the crazy millennials who don’t drive their own cars! (What an honor it is to be part of the very first generation not understood by the older generation).

The part of the older generation that I think will understand the shift to self-driving vehicles is the elderly. The prospect of losing one’s freedom with age is understandably frightening. Self-driving cars allow older people to retain their freedom even in a fragile state. They can connect with family and friends without being limited by their age.

Despite the benefits of a more technologically saturated society, there will be great economic costs that parallel jobs lost in the shipping and taxicab industries. The disruption caused by technology might lead to a horrific crisis of unemployment in our lifetimes. This veritable Pandora’s Box cannot be resealed. As there is no road back, we must do what we can to ensure that our society can adapt to changing times.

This means that we must ask questions of ourselves about the economy and society we want to live in. If we do not anticipate the challenges that will come about because of autonomous vehicles, we will not be prepared to embrace their arrival without great pain. There are questions we should have asked before the smartphone became such a staple of our society. Now, these questions of social correctness are being answered in situ, without the wisdom that comes with forethought. If we are not careful, the more difficult quandaries posed by autonomous vehicles will catch us unaware as well.

We tend to forget that the Renaissance must have been incredibly stressful for certain people in society. The state of knowledge, status quo, and the perceived purpose of life was being forever altered. Our lives happen to take place in quite a similar time. This period has come about because of intelligence which drove forward innovation, but its pace must be mediated by wisdom. Will we live the life posed by 1950’s futurists and John Maynard Keynes in which we devote our days to leisure while the robots do our mundane work? Will we move to a socialistic universal wage doled out by the government after all the jobs are gone? Will we try to forgo our electronic toys in lieu of a simpler lifestyle? It is hard to say, but we will need to answer these questions in our lifetime. Otherwise, they will be answered for us.

There is much confusion and mystery surrounding food. Despite its necessity, the modern consumer can be easily befuddled by contradictory statements about what foods are “healthy.” Is organic a marketing ploy or a genuinely better way to eat? What does “organic” actually mean? How can you have yogurt that is “chemical free”? Buzzing in this cloud of needlessly innovative lingo is “Non-GMO”. I wanted to figure out what that meant, so I did some research.

Almost all crops since the advent of agriculture have been genetically modified in some way. Our ancestors developed better yields and more resilient plants through the aid of anthropogenic evolution. We selected plants with the traits that benefitted us and helped them to produce more offspring. Many organisms today are considered in codependence with humans because if we did not deliberately seed them, they would die off.

One crop whose continued existence depends on farmers is maize. We commonly call maize “corn” because of a British tradition wherein “corn” was used as a general term for any grain-like crop. The closest biological relative to corn is a Mexican grass called Teosinte. The seeds of this grass are not ones humans would readily eat. Nevertheless, Native Americans cultivated the grass, selecting from the crop, the best specimens in each generation for planting. This grass turned to the Taino mahiz, to the Spanish maize, to the modern american corn. Now, 90 million acres of corn is planted each year in the United States. The fact that this even happens, is owed to the ancient farmers of the same lands.

While the genetic manipulation of agricultural products once took generations to reach fruition, the same effects may now be achieved in a laboratory and in a much shorter time span. This technology, which produces what we consider to be “Genetically Modified Organisms”, is neutral in its moral implications-as all technology must be. However, there is some question as to whether the manipulations performed are detrimental or beneficial on the whole.

Genetic modifications are performed by injecting modified DNA on microscopic gold particles into plants or by infusing bacteria with an ability to alter the genetic code of the crop into the soil. The intent is most often to produce immunities in the crop to herbicide and insecticide. This allows for a more liberal application of chemicals which, while protecting the crop, can harm the environment. However, this does lead to a greater yield of food, upon which a growing population is dependent. Even today, genetic modification serves to provide answers to world hunger. In addition, the loftier goals of many in the biotech industry include drought resistant and healthier food for a future in which water and food may become scarcer resources due to climate change.

Genetically modified food is not considered dangerous within the scientific community. There have been no studies to demonstrate ill effects of the food itself to human beings. Nor have there been any incidences of health concerns to the general public for the past twenty years GMOs have been on the market. Today, nearly 80% of the processed food we eat contains ingredients that are genetically modified through artificial processes. So far, everyone is fine.

Regardless, the secrecy with which agricultural corporations create the frankenfood is alienating and disconcerting to consumers. I believe this is a true fault in the companies by not being straightforward with the public, especially the scientifically literate among them. Nothing about bioengineering is worth hiding aside from fuel for semantic arguments of what is and is not “natural”. There are incredible benefits that can be achieved through bioengineering, on par with the development of maize, but within our lifetime. Such technology could one day become necessary for our survival. It is important that we, as consumers, educate ourselves with a great degree of skepticism. Most often, the information available to us is biased.

An excellent mode of research is to read articles from a variety of sources and to investigate peer-reviewed scientific journals, many of which are available to students for free through the Houghton Library. It is perfectly fine if you want to avoid GMOs when you grocery shop, but if you do, be sure that your reasons for doing so are based on sound evidence, not sensationalism.

Samuel P. Huntington’s thesis on the “Clash of Civilizations” is a seminal work in political science. The work describes a post-Cold War theory of conflict that occurs between groups of nations, monolithically bound together by their ideologies. No longer were individual states warring against each other; the industrialized and post-colonial countries now warred over cultural differences, not for the pursuit of territories or economic properties.

Huntington’s thesis was countered by Edward Said in his “Myth of the Clash of Civilizations”. Said’s primary criticism of the thesis was that it grouped cultures too homogeneously. In his speech, Said outlined his criticism thusly,“Huntington defines Islamic civilization reductively, as if what most matters about it is its supposed anti-Westernism. I mean it doesn’t matter to him that Muslims have other things to do than to think about the West with hatred. But you get the impression that that’s all they are thinking about is how to destroy the West, bomb it and destroy the whole world really.” The myth that Said makes reference to ought to be broken by examining the more nuanced and individualistic qualities of cultures. One must break a culture into sub-cultures and further break this sub-culture into sub-sub-cultures ad infinitum.

Although, as academics, Huntington and Said would be repulsed by the suggestion that a proper approach to the foreign entity might be found in the middle-ground between the two philosophies, that is exactly what I would suggest.

When one begins to address a foreign entity – sex, race, political philosophy, country, city, town, club, group, team, major, etc. – one must begin as Huntington suggests, defining a culture by its known tropes and stereotypes. Truly, there is no alternative. We cannot separate our deeper prejudices, whether good or bad, without complete emotional reservation. Where we must differ from Huntington is in how we treat our judgements.

Firstly, we must not allow any prejudice to keep us from pursuing a meditation and understanding of the entity. Every culture, no matter how violent, intolerant, or dull it appears to be, is worth a deeper examination. There are always motivations for every aspect of a society. One can rarely be too granular in dividing a culture into parts. Even the motivations of individuals may be subdivided at least once or twice.

Secondly, we must allow for the possibility that our judgements will change. One must admit that one’s understanding can, at any point in the process, be wrong. Perhaps you think physics majors give their opinion pieces pretentious titles. Here you would have some evidence in your hands, but in order to understand that culture properly, you must be open to the idea that next week another physics major will publish an opinion piece with a non-pretentious title. It is a definite possibility.

Through these steps, we apply Said’s thesis, breaking a culture down into sub-cultures. However, these subcultures cannot be understood without some application of generalization. Therefore we are required to take Huntington’s approach of stereotyping again. This is then followed by Said’s in a cycle that breaks and constructs new deeper cultural understanding with every iteration. This approach is applicable to any foreign entity, even to an individual.

In practice, you select a group, let us say “people who hang out in the coffee shop”. Look at what assumptions you can make about the group: they drink coffee, they are college students, they listen to music on headphones, they use laptops, etc. Don’t let any of these assumptions keep you averse from getting to know “people who hang out in the coffee shop”. Dive into learning about this group. Find that not all of them use laptops. Develop two categories: “people who hang out in the coffee shop who use laptops” and “people who hang out in the coffee shop who don’t use laptops”. You begin the process again, splitting these groups even more until you reach the absolute limit perhaps, “woman who hangs out in the coffee shop who uses a laptop, listens to Arcade Fire, drinks black coffee, wears jean jackets, runs every now and then, has read Camus, etc. etc. etc.”

You might be able to see a few problems with this. The perspective is wholly superficial. Despite this, there isn’t enough time in the universe to fully analyze everyone in the coffee shop in this way.  The finished description is non-plastic; it can’t contain the person’s changes throughout their life, only those that are present at a precise moment.

Despite these known limits, a moderated application of this Huntington-Said cycle works against prejudice and toward a better understanding of the foreign other. It is this understanding that must always be sought. It brings a greater peace between people and cultures.