Science and Values

Values were once transmitted mostly through the religion people practiced.  I'm sure this is still true to some extent, although large swaths of the populace are now godless.  For the most part, we fashion our values from authority.  Religious authority is really good at this because God has no boss.  But the real authority now, the Holy Ghost that permeates everything, is science.

Every waking (and sleeping) second is total immersion in a manufactured environment.  It isn't just the constant connectedness and cars and sounds and advertisement.  We can only value what we know, or are told.  There isn't much room in our lives for old-fashioned values anymore, so they have been replaced by something else. The problem is that we don't exactly know what has replaced religion, largely because we don't understand our manufactured world.  Science is so good at figuring out how nature works that it has enabled the most extraordinary control of our physical world.  Almost none of this manipulation is understood by most people, from flipping on a light switch to inserting human genes in a mouse.  Manipulating nature is the norm.  Light, magnestism, electrons, chemicals - they all do our bidding and in turn shape our world.  And our economy, and our values.

Albert Borgmann, in Crossing the Postmodern Divide, laments the impact that technology has on family dynamics.  When choosing what to do, he notes, the family is not simply presented with more options if there's a nice big TV.  It dominates them, limits them, leaving little room for anything else.  The question is no longer whether to watch TV as one of several options.  It is, 'What shall we watch?'.  Nothing else is on the table.

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