How the World Changes
Part 1
The World Changes When Something
Changes How People Think
Join me to think about technology changes that have had a
profound impact on our culture. I worked in the IT and telecom industries for and with innovators from about 1980 to 2005, so watched much of it happen and I am thinking about context.
Access to information and the amount, speed and delivery range
of information escalated dramatically with these leaps in technology.
We don’t seem to be much smarter because of it. In fact, we can use those same technologies to observe humans all over the world doing thoughtless, misdirected, counter-productive, hateful, world-harming, people-crushing things. So, in Part 1, let’s think about getting smart.
How Does Someone Get Smart and Learn to Think?
Well, the limits for how smart we are likely to get are set early in our lives… Every person is more likely to get smart if:
A. From the time we are born our moms and dads love us, pay attention to us, help us when we are weak, pick us up, talk and sing to us, teach us that we have a positive purpose
in life, show us things and name those things, give us food, take care of us when we are sick, and see that weshare and appreciate others. Thus, our God-provided brains get all those synapses going and growing. About 70% or 80% of our lifetime brain is in place by the time
we are 3-4 years old, according to the early childhood experts. No sophisticated electronics or technology required. Mom and Dad do this.
Question: Can a society that does not value the family unit expect to have smarter or less smart generations to come?
B. We learn to read. Really read and comprehend – we can start with just about anything like labels on the cans in the grocery, and blocks, silly Seuss, and comic books (my personal favorite when I was a kid), and maybe Mad Magazine. We can progress to books with lots of pictures and then no pictures. And reading the Bible, of course, which I will get around to eventually.
Question: How much is it worth to know how to read?
We begin to understand, compare, and process what we are told and what we read. Even as a little kid, we begin to develop what people now call a “worldview,” which is the framework of thinking within which we process what we learn and experience.
“Worldview” is the construct of what we believe to be true. Even very tiny children appear to have this capability – they know their parents love them and they make their little kid decisions based on the safety and love and care they have come to expect as true. “Jesus loves me,
this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” This basic element of truth is core belief to one who holds the Christian worldview – even a very young someone.
Worldview can be positive, realistic, and wholesome. But worldview can also be died-in-the-wool off-planet like some people I knew in the 60’s, some of whom appear to be occupying parks this week!
Teachers and parents make the big difference here, because a child’s mind is malleable and has little defense against sincerely delivered falsehood and cultural programming. We get authentically smarter if we have a school where truth is told and where parents defend the individual “smarts” of their children. (See http://www.celebratekids.com/)
In the truest sense of the word, we are “smart” when our worldview is accurate, (built on immutable truth), and comprehensible (it makes sense to us and others), and helps us make decisions that meet the requirements of life in a wholesome way in the company of family and our larger circle of life.
Our worldview is fed by what happens to us, what we learn, and what we let into our minds whether on purpose or by accident. I am a Christ-follower and have an orthodox Christian worldview that is based in Christian understanding of what is true.
If you are a Christian we have real truth in common. No matter where you live at least one aspect of our worldview is the same – the eternal one.
We got here by thinking about information and how it affects life. It reminded me of how the whole world changed in two historically separate technology leaps and how those changes have both intended and unintended consequences.
See Part 2 of this discussion tomorrow.
Elizabeth Eisenstein Knows Something That Changed the World.
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