Sunday, August 05, 2007

Moral Courage, Fear, Technology and the Decline of the West - a follow up note

Neil in his kind response to my post Moral Courage, Fear, Technology and the Decline of the West suggested that the title did not quite match the post. That's true to a degree because of the direction the writing took me. So I thought that I might briefly tie my argument back to the title.

Fear and moral courage link in that I feel that the fear response to terrorism, the way we present terrorism, is in part a lack of moral courage.

Instead of accepting that there are some things that we cannot control or can only control to a point and attempting to preserve our life and values in spite of them, we are altering our life and breaching our values in an endeavour to defeat the threat. In so doing, we have lost our sense of perspective.

Technology is central because Governments could not even attempt to do some of the things that they are now trying to do, to control, in the absence of computing and communications technology. We have become the victim of our own technology.

The patterns that have appeared in Australia can, I think, be found in most western countries and especially the US. Hence the linkage to the decline of the west.

2 comments:

Lexcen said...

Jim, I agree that we are using the latest technology to monitor,control and regulate our behavior. We are indeed becoming enslaved by this technology.

Jim Belshaw said...

It's a real pain, Lexcen.

Even where we agree with a particular use, the fact remains (at least as I see it) that in total we are becoming people that can be monitored and controlled. And, as pretty self-evident, i just don't like it.