“The uncontrolled growth of technology destroys the vital sources of humanity…” - Neil Postman
Gardening is the grounded art of taking what needs attention and cultivating something fresh from something inert. It is a beautiful expression of so many metaphors and allusions to the human heart and spirit. The patience, care, and knowledge required for this task represents what many have recognized in the struggle for meaning. The cardinal virtues are those qualities that theologians and philosophers have told us we must guard, prune, and nourish to produce fruit. These parts of us are essential to right living.
Technology’s growth can be described in two ways. A cancerous growth finds weakened areas of the body to attach to as it sucks away at life, slowly atrophying what was once vibrant and clean. A plant’s growth, absent a gardener, rewilds a space to create an ecosphere of life fit for all kinds of other plants and animals to thrive within. The parallel between these two metaphors is that they are both biomes unfit for human life.
Today, we find ourselves in a world of technological progress that has planted deep roots and sprouted weeds. Social media has inadvertently effected more than just our social lives. It has been a detriment to our reasoning and sense-making, political struggles and unity, and our lifestyles and health. We collectively witness our time slip from the hourglass never to return. We know the dangers of investing too much of ourselves to an online mirage that hides from the fact that our growth as a species is stunted. Yet we persist.
Neither a gardener nor a surgeon has appeared to prune the overgrowth. Every technology brings with it a new set of privileges, laws, and social norms that should be interrogated and pruned as needed.
We should be conscious of this fact: the platforms we use everyday have been linked directly to the mental health crisis we are facing in the west today, and frighteningly little has been done to curtail these harms.
We are playing in a toxic environment, pretending our gas mask doesn’t have a leak. We are hoping the smoke won’t kill our lungs while taking a bigger draught.