On one hand, modern technology has enabled people to live in cleaner, less disease-ridden environments, freed up time for many people; enabling children to spend their time learning, and relieving the pressure on families to be financially responsible for their sick and disabled. It has made a standard education available to all, and through the welfare state eliminated a great deal of extreme poverty, and brought advanced healthcare to save and prolong millions of lives.
However, the question there is, how much of this is really as good as it looks?
(If you’re in a hurry or don’t fancy a long read, skip to the last section now.)
Our Cleaner Environment
Our cleaner environment exposes our children to disease to a lesser degree as they are growing up, which combined with our advanced healthcare means the child mortality rate is a great deal lower. However, this also means children do not develop natural resistance to disease in the same way they previously would have done, providing they survived childhood. Some people also argue the lack of challenges to a child’s developing immune system may also be responsible for many allergies. Whether this is true or not… We will probably find out as time goes on. The other thing modern medicine and cleanliness does, is mess with natural selection. This is a sad thing to have to say, as no one wants a child to die, but as the children being saved by modern medicine would not have survived previously, their vulnerabilities would not have been passed on. Saving children’s lives is a wonderful thing for parents, but for the human race as a whole, this may not be such a good thing. However, time will tell, and nature will generally take care of itself.
Yes, this aspect of modern living has probably made us weaker. This is a trade off for our quality of life.
The Welfare State
Lack of pressure on families to care for their sick, disabled and elderly financially (and practically, due to the acceptable nature of abandonment in care homes etc.) has caused a culture where people who are no longer productive in societies are deposited and put into a separate category where they are no longer in control of any aspect of their own lives, and no longer respected as human beings. This is a psychological strain on both these people and their families, and therefore a potential hazard to health.
Modern Medicine
Modern medicine saves lives, cures and prevents illness to enable people to gain back full and productive lives. However, it also grasps at prolonging life as long as possible, often at the cost of quality of life. The financial aspects of drug companies in many countries also contribute to an approach often no closer to scientific fact-based medicine than that of a witch doctor. Segments of the population are marked out as mentally ill (e.g. Creative/right-brained types diagnosed as ADD/ADHD in the USA,) or even physically ill (e.g. Podiatrists recommending further support to people whose problems caused by a lifetime of unnatural gait (shoe wearing) and who would often be cured by taking their shoes *off*.) Modern medicine does a great deal to improve life in the right hands, providing its practitioners are not misguided, however it also does a great deal of harm when used to further profit-orientated or practical/political agendas, thereby contributing to ill-health.
Modern Lifestyle – Excesses and Sedentary Activity Levels
The modern lifestyle encourages sedentary behaviour, not only through bad habits, but directly through its culture and practicality. Long working hours at desk jobs and lack of natural movement mean most people not only become “unfit” but see a state of real natural human fitness as exceptional. People are designed to have a lot more fitness, flexibility, and natural control and use of their bodies than the average person would dream of. Gyms are a poor substitute for the rigours of natural movement, and the result is a population struggling to keep themselves in healthy condition.
Not only pizza and burgers are a hazard to health, but most fine dining, if indulged in regularly does exactly the same thing. (despite the more natural content, these meals are still high in fat and calories.) Heart disease, obesity, diabetes, are all results of our lifestyle, but even without these, many people who would consider themselves healthy, are in fact in very poor condition simply due to their lack of appropriate movement.
Alcohol on the other hand, has been around for much longer than modern technology.
Modern society supports our wants, but is negligent towards our needs.
Standardised Availability of Education
Due to the demands of modern society’s structure, education needs to be widespread to produce the necessary number of specialists to fill the required jobs. This education is therefore necessary and beneficial to society, and to maintaining the standard of living supported by modern society. However, to make this work, the school system is more of a socialization process than an education process, which channels people into appropriate fields of speciality and strongly enforces conformity in individuals. Although there are rewards; prestige, increased access to material rewards, for those who do well at this, this cog-in-wheel mentality fails to treat students as individuals or recognise individual needs and differences, and can put heavy demands on students’ personal welfare. Psychological problems are widespread.
University students are also culturally subjected to extremes of an unhealthy lifestyle as they are introduced to this by their peers, risking long-term health problems including liver damage and alcoholism. Education as we manage it is beneficial to society, and therefore to supporting the individual’s modern living standard, but detrimental to the personal development of the individual.
Anti-work attitudes towards children have protected them from exploitation and dangerous environments, however, this has also meant a strong work ethic and sense of independence and capability has not been forged in the current generation of many westernised countries. People often have little self-discipline and remain innocent and childlike later in life. The individual has an easy and protected life, however, this naivety could prove potentially damaging to the development of society as a whole.
Psychological problems.
Modern society has created both a high-pressure living environment and a value system which appears to be prone to resulting mental illness. People, as thinking, feeling beings have probably always experienced psychological distress in some shape or form. However, in addition to the usual experiences of violence and bereavement, modern society adds values which define worth in terms such as thinness for example, causing anorexia, and pressures to conform leading to the invention of psychiatric disorders. (bear in mind, psychiatric disorders are not simple cut and dry facts like a broken leg, but are classifications invented by professionals in an attempt to treat psychologically distressed individuals.) Many aspects of modern society are potentially damaging psychologically.
To wrap things up…
In general, our society has developed to favour protection over proficiency or practicality, and wants over needs. Diseases wiped out by modern living and technology have been replaced in prevalence by those often caused and contributed to by it. In a practical sense, people are no more disease prone, because modern technology and living standards protect them from it, though less well-trained immune systems may well mean that in actual terms, people are more disease-prone, and therefore weaker. Our value systems often mean people are self-conscious and psychologically vulnerable.
So I can quite clearly come down on the side of Yes; Modern Living has made the people weak, unhealthy and disease-prone. So what can/do we do about it? Should we all go back to living without modern society? This isn’t of course, entirely feasible; the earth is massively overpopulated and the society, (and therefore the lifestyle) we have today, is a reaction to solve this overpopulation problem; a society which has developed to function living as we do today. There are clear advantages to modern living, and clear disadvantages. We need to question how we can evaluate the positives and negatives whilst being open enough to restructure not only our lifestyle and policies, but even our morals, objectives, and values, to emphasise and capitalise on the positives whilst eliminating as many of the negatives as possible. After all, what are we kidding ourselves that we as a race are trying to achieve, if not the best possible for ourselves?
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