Emerson argues that “Society never advances.” He says that “For everything that is given, something is taken.” Do you agree with him that society never advances, and that there are trade-offs for every scientific or technological breakthrough that we make? Are we now better off than aboriginal peoples, or are we just trading one thing for another without truly moving forward?
society never advances because the problems that it always face are the same just in different forms. For Example, civil rights was an issue first for colonists, then for blacks, and now for homosexuals.
ReplyDelete-asmigelsky
Progress and trade-offs.
ReplyDeleteSociety certainly has progressed, I won't debate that, but how much of this is necessarily FORWARD motion?
Spectacular things have happened in the last three hundred years alone. A new democracy, man on the moon, technology, atomic bomb, de-colonization, AIDS, trains, cars, et cetera.
We have new medicines that save millions and have prolonged our lives.
We also happen to have new technology that could easily wipe out everyone on Earth.
Planes have made world travel easier for humans (thus diminishing ignorance) but disease also finds journeys easier. Likewise, with all our vaccinations and "extinct" diseases, should another outbreak occur millions could die.
Computers have served to shrink the world as well at the cost of a whole new set of health problems: tendonitis, eye strain. Plagiarism is easier to pull off.
With so much knowledge at our disposal… not only can you find reliable news stories and see the videos of them happening on YouTube, but you can find some idiot blogger who makes stuff up to get attention.
Trade-offs the whole way round. Most things we invent to make life easier have darker sides.
So, yes, progress. Yes, trade-offs. We've moved forward in myriad ways yet we've also created a lot of new problems, and forgotten many things—"aboriginal strength" and the skills needed to survive outside the time period and place.
Welcome to the present.
I'm pretty sure that other people from the past have had the same sort of musings. Each generation would love to think that they have hitherto unprecedented problems, an amazingly busy decade to deal with, et cetera. In the grand span of things, do we?
Ford Prefect
Although society appears to advance with rights and technology, ultimately society is a mindset and people have always had and will continue to have their own opinions that will not change. Technological advancements are only temporary.
ReplyDeleteSue
Todays technology is hindering our cognitive abilities as humans to problem solve and do things for ourselves wether outdoors like we should be or not there was a time one had to write a letter by hand and mail it and now you can do that and have an arcade or whatever else on the little magic ibox or whatever. alot of folks nowadays aint got no clue about life or how to be independent and live blissfully ignorant of the natural world and are content in their artificial plastic and metal world, while others keep the primordial spirit alive and enjoy doing things the "old fashioned way" and usually turn out to be much better quality folks.
ReplyDeleteI still find Mr. Clarke's point on this quite valid. Would any of you like to go live as a peasant __ number of years ago? Prooobably not. And I'm not saying that new things are always,always good. But good or bad, they do advance.
ReplyDeletelillipbaum
Though technology does leave many people behind, the people that it helps are far greater. In many cases, society does not advance, but that's what progress is...not everyone can benefit from everything.
ReplyDelete-Yellow Rose
When I think of "progress" I think of writing. Aristotle (I think) didn't want us to learn to write because it would make us lose our ability to memorize or other things. He was right. But because we write, we can look things up or expand on others' ideas more easily. So I guess I agree with "Ford Prefect" that there are trade-offs. But I guess I have one question - Are trade-offs equal to the "progress" or does one weigh more heavily than the other?
ReplyDelete- Zaphod Beeblebrox
Define advance. I personally am extremely glad that we're still not living in caves eating mammoths. If that's not progress, I'm not quite sure what is. There is so much more opportunity now. Technology expands on so many levels the depths of communication, it helps maintain long distance relationships, etc. So Andy, I feel like it is not hindering anything, but allowing a new way to think about things and approach how we are learning. I think personality really has nothing to do with technology, some people are just naturally better quality folks.
ReplyDeleteSociety can continue to advance technologically, but human nature remains the same. We adapt ourselves to our environment, giving the illusion that we evolve technologically, but we still ultimately have the same social and intellectual mindset as well as precedented problems that all generations deal with.
ReplyDeleteBecky
In "Self Reliance," emerson talks about how people have lost their "aboriginal strength," meaning that we have lost our natural survival instincts. I think that while society is progressing nad making life more comfortable for us, we can't totally let those survival instincts disappear, otherwise society never does advenance because we lose something important.
ReplyDelete-ViciousTrollup
Yes we have advanced in technolgy, and no we are not going to go back to the "hunt and gatherer days". This reminds me of AP Human Geo last year when we had to debate with the hunt and gathers and the workers or something like that, and how hunt and gatherer days were more dependent on survival , while the present is focused on leisure time and knowledge.
ReplyDelete-cheers
This is a subject that me and my discussion partner disagreed on. I do beleive that in many ways society never truly progresses. With all of our new technology and ideas I think we do lose sight of nature and our acutal world, which is very inportant. Although, if asked to move out and live off the land it's hard to say if I would or not. Orangutan
ReplyDeleteIn this case there is no black and white at ALL. For every trade off we are exchanging something for something different. We can travel faster and keep better connections with realitives and loved ones, but the cars that take us there put off emmissions of CO2 that are hurting the atmosphere. There will always be a part of an advancment that can be used to refute emmersons point and refute those that we have advanced.
ReplyDeleteI agree that society never advances...i think this becasue even though the aboriginal people didn't have computers or cell phones, they had the ability to be in tune with nature to live off the land, to appreciate what was given to us by mother nature. They respected the land and didn't take anything for granted. Now we have all this new technology but with it we have lost all of the above or at many people have. Many people noe could not live without their cell phones and with that comes the disability of having to rely on something that was of importance years ago.
ReplyDelete-laxchickie
I would definitely say that we're better off than the aboriginals, or other ancient societies. Society definitely advances. This isn't saying that we don't have our fair share of problems. But over all, compared to even just two or three hundred years ago, the way we relate to each other, the way we accomplish things, and overall quality of life have advanced.
ReplyDeleteUp and Over
I like what yellow rose said up there. I agree that when we advance some people are left behind, but there are so many things we get from it. There is no way to advance with out leaving people behind or making something better so we don't need the original product anymore.
ReplyDeleteAnita Goodman
Like it was said in class, society does move forward, it is human nature that never changes. Peiople will always have their primal ID instincts deep at the core. Society in not human nature however. Mr. Clarke mentioned that Emerson argues that the person moves forward, not society, but what happens when that person dies? He/she leaves behind a legacy that will change society as we know it, hence it is moving forward. I know there is lots of bad shinanigans that comes along with this progression, but society pushed forward despite this. Above someone argued against the fact that socity moves forward with the mention of Aids, the atomic bomb, etc... but those are results human nature, which as I said above is what truely never moves forward.
ReplyDelete-Dat Ca Iz Tow Up
I think society's track is similar to the circle of life. Technology has brought forth great advances but it has also caused some serious problems. I think it's similar to Whitney's reference to you have a rat problem, you get a cat, then you have a cat problem you get a dog kind of a thing. The problems just don't end but you have to deal with them until one day we realize we have an extreme elephant problem and the world is going to end. :) -iloveorange52
ReplyDeleteI agree that as society advances many of the parts of it are simply replaced with something else or traded but I do think parts of society do advance, not necessarily huge advances but still advances. This doesn't always mean technology but it also applies to how people live or view other people.
ReplyDeleteHasty "G"
Ford Prefect-
ReplyDelete"Spectacular things have happened in the last three hundred years alone. A new democracy, man on the moon, technology, atomic bomb, de-colonization, AIDS, trains, cars, et cetera." Well duh, however like I said before, those kinds of things are just material possessions and do not help a society progress. The fact is that the same basic problems with human will always exist and will always be magnified by society. And also, humans as individuals progress. The progression of an individual has to be done by them personally, it can't be passed down from one generation to the next. In other words, each generation starts off at the bottom.
-asmigelsky
Society inevitably does progress, although I would like the abilities that those had before our progess such as a great memory, it is no longer neccesary in the society in contemporary times. It would not truly be useful to be able to do the same things people did in the past, would they have the ability to work a computer as well as we can?
ReplyDelete-leo
I totally agree with this: "Anonymous said...
ReplyDeletesociety never advances because the problems that it always face are the same just in different forms. For Example, civil rights was an issue first for colonists, then for blacks, and now for homosexuals.
-asmigelsky"
It always seems that one group of people is at gazing down the barrell of the opression shotgun. This appears to be a cycle- not progress.
-dj p0m0
Mr. clarke's argument on this issue is completely invalid because it only takes into account the major technological changes that influence the false perception of change in society.
ReplyDelete-asmigelsky
I agree with Emerson that with every advancement that is made technologically there is a trade off. Like we learned before, when books and written language were invented, the ablility to memorize so readily was lost, but then knowledge was available more rapidly. So whenever there is an advancement, there will be a step back somewhere else..
ReplyDelete-*67
"society" is merely a concept unique to the thinker- how can we decide if society is advancing if we all define society differently?
ReplyDelete-dj p0m0
good point dj p0m0. How do you define society?
ReplyDelete-asmigelsky
I think it also depends on perspective. What is advancement for one person may be the opposite for another.
ReplyDeleteWe have the technology to create a mass media culture and that's pretty amazing in it's own regard. However, we also have people starving themsleves because they think they are "fat" compared to those they see in media. And that's not advancement. So perspective is key in this argument.
-jumping.lily
Laxchickie:
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure the basis of our needs are still the same, which would demonstrate that we have advanced, especially in the way of technology. I personally feel that you can still learn to appreciate the nature of your surroundings. Maslow's hierarchy of needs suggests that you must meet basic needs in order to appreciate true beauty. I'm pretty sure these "aboriginal" people had trouble feeding themselves fairly often, I don't think they sat around and appreciated the land. Remember, when that began to happen was when the Greeks and the Romans invented civilization.
I totally agree with dj P0m0. Is society even real? How do we define it? Why do we care about the advancement of society?
ReplyDeleteSue
I think about the question that Clarke asked us the other day when we talked about this in class. Would any of you really like to go back in time hundreds of years and live as a mideval pesant? Even a mideval King? I wouldn't; disease was rampant and living conditions were poor, even for Kings; and compared to society in many developed nations of today really life for people all those years ago was quite horrid.
ReplyDelete-Yellow Rose
Obviously this is a good reminder of The God's Must Be Crazy. It does a great job of explaining how our new technologies can affect us very negatively, and take us away from the happiness that I think was at one time very real. Not to say that technology is a bad thing, but we have to be careful about how far it goes.
ReplyDeleteOrangutan
I think its not society that doesn't advance but human nature. Even though the world is extremely different today than it was 100 years ago humans are the same. We still behave the same and never really progress.
ReplyDeleteHasty "G"
asmigelsky--
ReplyDeleteDemocracy is not a material possesion.
I guess I get hung up on the definition of "society" and "advancement."
ReplyDeleteIt's hard for me to come up with clear, concrete definitions, so I can see both sides of the argument.
-jumping.lily
this is a complicated argument. I say that society does advance, but not very far. When we talked about this in class, I agreed with John's observation that society can advance, but human nature can't. We can advance through new technologies but when we have to adapt the new technologies to our human instincts, we take as many steps forward as we do backward.
ReplyDelete