There is a great article on nytimes right now about technology, 'liking', and how they are erasing the proper education to 'loving', self-realization, and being human in general. Of the strands in the article (there are many), there is one about pain:
“And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill...pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived.”
I can't decide if he is saying something fundamentally true or just short-sighted. Why can't we, armed with technology, create an absolutely resistance-free world, where there is no natural disasters, no murder, no pain? And to mirror such a world, maybe we will also transform from the imperfect, good-evil, yin-yang creatures that we are, to purely content ones, not so ecstatic nor fantastic, but perfectly 'good' nonetheless. We are taught by novels like Brave New World that such utopias are to be rejected and treated with contempt, but might that just be the author's bias for masochism? Might it be simply his own secret addiction to pain that he is imposing on our Old World? If the world can be so changed that Nature no longer bequeaths any misfortunes on humans, isn't it plausible that within such a revolution, humans will evolve as well? Perhaps we will find meaningful ways to live without pain. Let us not bet, prematurely, on our inability to be rid of our evils. As we are eradicating the pain the outside world causes us, perhaps we can eradicate our need for it as well.
The writer of nytimes and Aldous Huxley might call me a coward for attempting to run away from evil altogether. Their arguments are eloquent and convincing, until we consider their underlying assumption that we could not succeed, but what if, in spite of their insistence on the fixed, unevolving nature of humans, we could?
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