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The
Impending Moral Revolution
Jason
Tennenhouse
We make choices every day.
We make so many choices we don’t even
recognize them as such anymore.
You have a choice right now to continue
reading these words or just skim for boldface and
italics and get on with your life.
It wasn’t always this way.
By looking at an overtly simplified history
of sociology we learn how we arrived at the
present and extrapolate where we might be going.
In the earliest social groups, hunting and gathering societies, we lived in small nomadic tribes,
ate what we could find, and moved when we
couldn’t find anything.
The
Agricultural Revolution transformed
hunting and gathering societies by the
domestication of plants and animals for food
production. We
couldn’t keep moving around looking for food, so
we found a nice spot to settle and grew our own.
For the first time in the history of the
world people built houses, had neighbors, and
formed cities.
One astonishing thing: you only had what
you could cultivate with your own two hands.
However, some of these farmers were better
than others, and some grew more than others.
Some were great with wheat, but couldn’t
tell corn from Cornish hens. They quickly realized the guys good at wheat should just do
wheat and trade it with the corn guys.
Now here’s another astonishing thing: for
the first time in the history of our world there
needed to be some standard by which the worth of
all goods could be equally measured.
Currency was invented.
Currency, an incredible, terrible thing, allows individuals
to specialize in their trade and thus do vastly
more with expertise, but it creates a thing that
represents worth separate from the actual work.
As it follows, with the creation of
currency came the creation of usury, larceny, and
levy. Now
there is money, and money buys things. And money buys things for many monarchs and aristocrats for
many years.
The division of inequality greatly increased through the
early eighteenth century.
Previously the wealthy owned things -
chairs, mirrors, windows, etc. - and everyone else
sat on stumps and combed their hair looking in a
puddle of water.
But everyone wanted chairs and thus The
Industrial Revolution burst forth.
For the first time in the history of the
world the common person could own almost anything
they could conceive.
Factories made things cheaper and faster
and brought them to the masses.
The printing press educated people, and the
automobile allowed cities to spread. There was only one issue with making anything a person could
want…getting it to them.
To make a chair you need a chair factory.
To make a car you need an altogether
different factory.
You can’t put a chair factory in every
city so you need a way to get chairs out to
people. Out
of the need to acquire the manufactured goods,
fueled by the push of competitive markets, in
about mid-twentieth century The Information Revolution began. The Information Revolution, sparked by the transistor, grew
into a network of phone lines, movie theatres, and
computer chips.
Now it really gets interesting.
Formerly, how hard you worked in the fields
or the factories determined what you owned; but
now, because of the Information Revolution, you
could get anything you wanted.
This was the issue, indeed it is the issue
today: “What do I want to get?” For
the first time in the history of the world we have
a choice. We choose to
own a station wagon or an SUV.
We choose to go to school to learn
engineering or art.
We choose to go to church or synagogue.
For the first time, and very recently, we
must wade through information the world has piled
up since the dawn of civilization, and all the
goods and services therein, and make a decision
about what is best.
How do we decide? Is
it best for us, or our loved ones, or the whole of
our society?
Is it best if it doesn’t let someone
down, or if it makes us feel enlightened?
Is best winning or losing gracefully?
My friends, welcome to the dawn of The
Moral Revolution.
Very soon our society will be confused with options and
disenchanted with opportunities, and instead look
for someone to make enough sense to help them make
decisions that won’t waste their life.
No wonder we are questioning everything, no
wonder absolute truths have given way to
relativism. No wonder there’s no choice you can make that doesn’t
make you wonder what choices you haven’t made.
This isn’t a history lesson; it’s a
call to action.
Are we to let our brothers and sisters be
misdirected by obscure thoughts and obtuse
philosophies, or are we going to stand up and
shout louder than ever that we know the way out of
the cave- “come, take my hand, let’s climb out
together!”
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