Interesting article from Jeremy Leggett
Human beings should not have such power/knowledge they cannot creatively live up to.
Aristotle could have said it - the distinction between human beings as they are and human beings as they could be. Goethe could have said it. It's the Goethean ideal of personality: 'a state of balance between what man is and what he can do.' (as Erich Heller expresses it in The Disinherited Mind). It's a wisdom you can find in the great religions, insofar as anyone bothers with wisdom. Pity it always seems to be issued in fear as a warning, which tells me something - men as gods gambling with Gaia.
Yes, that one again - human beings possessing the cleverness, skill and ingenuity to develop immense technological capacity, but not the wisdom to use it well .. it's for moral capacities to catch up, say those who have placed their faith in technology. Epitaph for the human species, nothing learned, everything forgotten.
I'm adjusting a quote from Nietzsche here: "Man ought not to know more of a thing than he can creatively live up to." It's a challenge that Marx could have given us, but as advice and inspiration rather than a warning born of pessimism. Something in the intervening years has plainly gone awry, with an evident loss of faith in the power and promise of technology having us wondering if there is a God after all.
“Is this what your machine gods have done for you?” asked John Ruskin at the end of the nineteenth century, surveying the industrial wasteland before his eyes.
I'm just wondering why all the really clever people I like were pretty gloomy - Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger ('only a god can still save us'), Mumford ('it is likely the ship will sink.')
Marx took the high road, and thought human beings possessed the creative intelligence to live up to the powers they had created, once they succeeded in reappropriating them from the alien forms within which they were encased – the same with respect to sociality and subjectivity for that matter:
"No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation."
A generation or so later, Max Weber came to see the intransigence of institutions, and an emancipatory reason incarnated in the repressive form of the iron cage. The forms that Marx saw as alien and as subject to practical restitution on the part of a self-organizing social order, Weber saw as rational and untranscendable.
My view? Men as gods as an abomination and an insanity.
On every day, God paused and looked at His work, and declared it "good."
The road to Hell is paved with good inventions.
Or
with good inventions diverted and perverted within bad social relations.