Practical Ethics for Our Time. Eiji Uehiro

for the future of the earth.

      CHAPTER 2

      Questions of Modernization

      Merits and Demerits of Technology

      Minds Distracted by Technology

      A young boy was playing with the horned goliath beetle that he had bought the week before at a pet shop. A full three inches long, it had six powerful legs, a shiny hard shell, and a horn protruding from its forehead—truly the king of beetles and a proud possession of its young owner. Probably because he had already played with the beetle for many days, it was badly weakened. It crawled slowly across the floor, stopped for a moment, began to walk again, but only made it as far as the middle of the hall. When it suddenly stopped as if dead, the young boy shouted, "Its battery's dead! Gotta change batteries!"

      It is hard to imagine that the boy didn't know the difference between his other battery-driven plastic toys and this really living beetle. Yet his first reaction on seeing the beetle in its dying moments was to exclaim, "Its battery's dead! Gotta change batteries!" His overreliance on battery-powered toys destroyed his sensitivity to the life and death of the goliath beetle. This is a depressing example of how young minds can be distorted by technology.

      I once read a novel describing the decline of America; its Japanese title means "The Yellow Bus." One of the people in this novel is so out of joint with nature that he walks like a robot, moving his right hand with his right foot, and his left hand with his left foot. The author warns against our blind faith in technology by describing this human being whose very life rhythm becomes unnatural when technology controls it.

      The rhythm of life is the supreme creation of nature, a sacred domain where no human consciousness should intervene. It transcends the differences of races, cultures, and histories; it is a secret of life affecting all people in common, in every civilization, no matter how disparate. If this rhythm is disrupted, human beings cease to be human. So when we find symptoms of unnatural disorder in our lives, we must nip them in the bud. The schoolboy's remark "Its battery's dead!" is no longer merely a symptom, but a real indication of damage to the sanctity of nature, not only in the boy's running the beetle to death, but equally in the boy's insensitivity to the sacredness of natural life.