There has been an existential change in basic human interaction. It has affected how people communicate, play, court, and govern themselves. We have gone from being the manipulators of our environment to being manipulated by our environment, from taking an active role in our communications to being passive receivers of information from a distance, from creatively inventing our entertainment to being passively entertained.
I noticed this trend when looking at an advertisement for tops. Yes, tops! You know, the spinning toys we (we who are old enough to remember) used to play with as kids, multi-colored, with push-button activators or strings to pull. The ones being advertised today were one-piece, machined out of one solid piece of pure metal. Elegant, simple, they were just one lump of metal that the buyer would spin by hand, observe, contemplate and imagine to be whatever our minds might conjure up. It was self-entertainment in a modern context. And a stark contrast to what is the mode of our time.
Now, we sit in front of our entertainment as it does the work, while it does what it was manufactured and programmed to do. We become the lump, while the creativity and imagination resides in the object in front of us. We are entertained by the video, movie, TV show, or computer game. Our minds are limited and constrained by the imaginations of those who brought us the entertainment. Where we used to take blocks of wood, sticks and dirt and make of it anything our hands and especially our imaginations could fashion out of it, now we get the product of others’ imaginations. And our minds are constrained by the preconceptions offered up to us by others.
But this is just one facet of the whole phenomenon. The same type of thing is true in our communications. We consider contrived images to be the equivalent of, and substitute for, real, face-to-face communication. Facebook is the replacement of the neighborhood café or pub. The effort, intensity and intimacy of real contact has been (partially) replaced by texting, IM and social media images and brief bursts of thoughts tweeted out in 140 characters or less.
This passivity has permeated our politics as well. We become the objects of manipulation, rather than the manipulators of our environment. We are the ones who are molded by the imaginations of others. In a world of instant gratification, we perceive the world through instant media and are acted upon rather than acting in the world around us. Reading history is too hard. Books? I’ll wait and see the movie. In a world that relegates people to a passive role, is it any wonder that humanity is seen as subject to the outside world, the environment, rather than its master; we become the victims. Humans are considered as only one of many equal (or as lesser, negative) parts in the world they inhabit and should constrain themselves within the dictates and needs of “mother earth.”
Piece by piece, the order and world view that has been the basis for man’s role in the universe has been replaced by passive subjectivity. God’s ultimate creation, man, who was given the charge of subduing and caring for the world around him, is now only a piece in the evolutionary process. We are the passive receivers who are molded and shaped by random forces beyond our control and indeed under no control. Life and living have no absolute rules, yet it is absolutely ruled by evolutionary forces. There is no absolute truth other than there is no absolute truth.
What the outcome of these changes will be is not easy to say. From the Christian worldview, it will result in death, destruction and abandonment of those who have forfeited the hope of and abandoned a purposeful God who created them. From a scientific world view, the imposition of random forces over created order as the basis of the universe will impede the progress of knowledge. It will also unmoor knowledge from its absolute principles and promote competing and untestable assertions to attain the status of fact. It is these forces that have resulted in the idea of gender, unmoored from biology and human rights, unmoored from the definition of human. It has also separated creation from its creator and relegated humanity to an ultimately passive and meaningless role in the universe. Therefore, God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts…(as) they exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator.