Defying The Gods

                                          DEFYING THE GODS

Yesterday, I awakened in the early morning hours with a strong intuition that I needed to return regular postings of my “Dormgrandpop” blog.   I began these postings in 2006.  They dwindled to a single entry in 2018.  What explains this?  My work schedule was intense, but no more so than in previous years.  In part, it was an awareness that Singaporeans do not necessarily welcome public commentaries by foreigners.  Reading over years of postings, beginning in 2006, I was amazed at the quality of some – not all – of the postings.  Today, I want to begin again.  

My setting is idyllic, a generously sized room and bath in a spacious bungalow, situated on a generously sized plot, enveloped by Palm trees, Elm trees and other fauna whose names I have yet to learn. Our location is Safety Harbor, a retirement community of about 18,000, leavened with a significant younger generation. My daughter co-directs the Safety Harbor Arts and Music Center while enriching Safety Harbour and surrounding with murals and mosaic art,  I will have more to say about this environment and my own engagement in subsequent postings.

However today I want to express my concern about the dehumanization of society that I have experienced since my return to the United States.  Surprisingly, individuals seem more wedded to their Smart Phones here in America than they were in Singapore.  At this is just the tip of the iceberg.  I have read forecasts, particularly in publications sponsored by the Wharton School of Business of the massive unemployment in just one area of commerce, truck driving, as a result of robotics.  Another problem area is impact on mail-order concerns, particularly Amazon.com on retailing. Both in Singapore and the US, I have treasured my relationship with face-to-face retailing.  It still thrives in retail establishments such as Publix and Walgreens, plus small retail establishments on Safety Harbor’s main street and periphery.  I see little attention given to the social consequences of these trends.  The worst  is the travel business where airlines are engaged a concerted effort to put travel agents out of business and then delegate “customer relations” to outsourced call centres.  

My musings lead me to return to a book that I read when, as a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics, Norbert Weiner’s The Human Use of Human Beings.  In the concluding pages of this remarkably prescient work Weiner writes this reflection on the field to which he contributed.

The Greeks regarded the act of discovering fire with 

very split emotions. On the one hand, fire was for them 

as for us a great benefit to all humanity. On the other, 

the carrying down of fire from heaven to earth was a 

defiance of the Gods of Olympus, and could not but 

be punished by them as a piece of insolence towards 

their prerogatives. Thus we see the great figure of 

Prometheus, the fire-bearer, the prototype of the sci- 

entist; a hero but a hero damned, chained on the 

Caucasus with vultures gnawing at his liver. We read 

the ringing lines of Aeschylus in which the bound god 

calls on the whole world under the sun to bear witness 

to what torments he suffers at the hands of the gods. 

The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a 

pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast 

and largely hostile environment, in which we can 

achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that 

this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment. It 

is a dangerous world, in which there is no security, save 

the somewhat negative one of humility and restrained 

ambitions. It is a world in which there is a condign 

punishment, not only for him who sins in conscious 

arrogance, but for him whose sole crime is ignorance of 

the gods and the world around him. 

(Free Association Books, London, 1989, pp. 184.