A modern day ritual
Where is ritual in our modern lives? Where has this major part of human life for millennia gone? When I asked myself these questions I began to wonder has it actually vanished? Have I been using too narrow a definition of ritual? I had been defining ritual in a purely religious/spiritual sense. A set of actions that the ritualist believes will invoke some kind of response in the physical realm. A dance to make it rain. A sacrifice to make it rain. A prayer to make it rain.
How has science altered the nature of ritual? How is a prayer different from pushing a button? The ritualist sacrificing a guinea pig expects a response just as much as the person pressing a button. You might respond with the observation that the difference is that we understand the mechanism behind the button. It is a human construction. I would respond that this is no different to a religious ritual. It is again a human construction involving an interaction with the physical realm. It has a mechanism that is understood by the ritualist. Back to the button. We no longer live in a world of simple mechanical buttons. A device such as a mobile phone can contain millions of transistors, endless lines of code and can react to interaction in an infinite number of ways. Do you understand what happens when you push a button on your phone or computer? It has stopped being a mechanical process that can be understood by any one individual and has become an act of faith. I press the space bar on my computer in the hope that it will add a space to my document.
We have come from a world of scientific understanding and we are heading for a world of mystical ignorance. Does any one individual understand how the phone in your pocket in its entirety works? Its microchips contain billions of transistors designed by teams of people. It software contains tens of thousands of lines of code written by different teams of people. It contains minerals sourced from all over the world chosen for their physical properties. How could any one individual comprehend this system in its entirety? Even if there are people who can understand it then we are just talking about a phone of today. Technological systems are steadily moving beyond human comprehensibility. Moore’s law suggests that the complexity of technological devices will continue to increase but the human mind does not increase in its ability comprehend complex systems. The use of computers to aid design and manufacturing is well established. The next step, if current trends are to continue, will be technical systems designed by computers. Technology becomes the intermediary for understanding technology and the human moves further away from comprehension of their world and their technological means of survival. This is not just the average individual not being able to understand the technological world around them. This would be a future where no one understands the technological world around us.
In the past a person could hope to understand their environment and how they could interact with it and how it would behave. The future looks different. With scientific and technological advance our everyday environment will move steadily beyond our comprehension. We will once again be like our ancestors sacrificing a goat to the mighty sky god.
Don’t worry. Everything will be fine as long as you keep pushing those buttons.
