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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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