EXCESS.
Do you remember when your parents, grandparents or others reminded you as a child not to get “too smart for your own breeches?”
Certainly, the saying must have originally read as being “too big for”-”too large or cumbersome” for - rather than “too smart for” which is the way I remember it used in my family. Today we tend to conclude they were referring to the physical dimensions of the posterior portions of the human body, but, in truth, the intent was to warn you not “to get to smart-alecky, self-impressed and not to get too smart-assed in our thinking mechanisms for our own good.
It still applies. We, today do not realize it very often but the truth is that we so much more aware of what is going on in the world -far more than Man has ever known before. We have, in a very real sense, come to a point where the average one of us is endangered by being too smart, too knowledgeable, too satiated with facts, figures, potentially existent circumstance and tons of non-essential trivia. We have even developed precise insights into procedures, methods, theoretical processes and programs. We have come to the place where we need to heed the warnings set so obviously before us before we stumble over them and fall.
On a personal level, wouldn't you agree that, because of today's communications systems alone you are so far ahead of ourselves the accumulation and bulk storage that you are forced to back off at times. You are ahead of yourself in so many facets of living. Such as the healthful condition of the physical bodies in which we live and aware of those things which might harm that tentative shell. We expend great effort seeking to determine the proper place of that containers in the whole Cosmos.
Part of the basic problems we face is to negate the false idea that we are all equal. It is entirely probable that we are “created equal”. That is a fine political and social concept but it has little or no application to actual living conditions in the real world. The vast majority of the inhabitants of this Earth are not. The last down the social and economic ladder has even less than that segment who have the least and about whom we express a measure of sometimes sincere religious concern.
Warnings? Some watch for religion-tagged, signs, omens and oddities of Nature. We have an even larger group of people who think of the future as an uncharted mystery realm and they are guided by hosts of spirit beings they alone can see and associate. Some place complete trust in the holy writings which has their approval. There must be scores of such methods - ways in which Man seeks to equate with his Maker. The strong emergence of any one of them can be seen as an indication that a ferment is in progress beneath the surface and that change is pendng.
The success of is, in itself, such a warning. It will take a hundred years or more for us to realize what the coming of The Computer Age has meant to all of us. We are still too close to the trees to see the forest.
A.L.M. November 19, 2004 [c553wds]
