Sunday May 7, 2023

Motivations ae not always obvious. Someone takes an irrational position on some issue – irrational to you, that is – for no discernable reason. It’s not even clear to them why they react the way they do.
It could be about government spending. Or about education systems. Or about religion, sex, or politics -- the big three no-no’s for polite conversation.
But when you probe, you find a deeper agenda.
That’s what writer David Byrne realized at his preferred grocery supermarket.
There used to be a dozen checkouts, he wrote, each with a human at each register. Instead there were now a dozen automated, self-service checkouts. And just three human cashiers.
I haven’t had that experience at my own grocery store. Not yet, anyway. But I certainly see it at, say, Canadian Tire.
And at banks and credit unions. Where customers use ATMs instead of human tellers.
And don’t get me started about voice menus where a soothing but synthetic voice advises me to push buttons to choose from a variety of service options.
Have you noticed, by the way, that “Press zero to speak to an operator” is now more likely to get you “That was an invalid response”?
It’s all done in the name of efficiency. Or cost reduction, which amounts to the same thing.

Hidden agenda
David Byrne suggested, in an article in The Rotarian magazine, that in reality this process has a long-term goal of reducing human interactions.
I doubt if anyone would ever admit to having that goal. They would cite increased speed, fewer mistakes, greater choice, improved productivity.
But as the saying goes, if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If the only tool you have is electronic technology, every problem looks like a software solution.
Humans, Byrne admitted, can be “capricious, erratic, emotional, irrational and biased in what sometimes seem like unproductive ways.” The obvious solution? Write them out of the equation. Stick to lines of code, which never suffer from mood swings.
If that seems too damning an indictment, the proof is in the pudding, my mother used to say. You judge recipes and ingredients by their outcome. And the outcome of this automation is social isolation.
I’ll go out on a limb and say that there is no computer program that draws people together face to face. The mere fact that you’re using a computer means that you’re working alone.
Amazon serves as a prime example (pun intended) You can investigate products, compare them, choose them, order them, pay for them, and have them delivered to your door – without ever interacting with any human being.

Obsession with individuals
The effect is to turn us into a mass of individuals. And to some extent, that IS intentional. The late Maggie Thatcher declared, “There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals.”
Byrne traces belief in individualism to a small group of German intellectuals, around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The uprooting from people’s traditions, their homes, their families, enabled this new philosophy to establish its own roots.
Thatcher was wrong. She was wrong about many things, in my view, but certainly this one. Because if we have learned anything from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that isolation is not good for us. Indeed, it’s harmful.
We are social beings.
The pandemic shot down schools, churches, social clubs. Isolation resulted in increased domestic abuse. Increased addiction – to alcohol and to other drugs. Increased violence – gun violence in the U.S. particularly, but also stabbings and muggings in Canada.
Mental health declined. Homelessness soared.
University studies have shown that “chronic social isolation increases the risk of mental health issues like depression, anxiety and substance abuse, as well as chronic conditions like high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes. It also raises the risk of dementia in older adults.”
Now we’re reaping the harvest of people who’ve forgotten how to get along together. We’re throwing dollars at social agencies that offer counselling, therapy, stress reduction, anger management, hoping to undo some of the damage done by solitary confinement.
At the same time, corporations take advantage of computer technologies to isolate us further from each other.
I’ll give the final words to David Byrne: “Much tech development and innovation over the last decades has had an unspoken overarching agenda. The agenda has been about creating a world with less human interaction. This tendency is not, I suspect, a bug. It’s not an unintended side effect; it’s a desired feature.”
Alas.
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Copyright © 2023 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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Your turn

June Tink added her personal experience t0o my column last week about immunization in general, polio prevention in particular: “ I contracted Polio as a nine-year-old in 1947 in Britain before the vaccine was available. I was paralyzed and in an iron lung for about a week, followed by four months in an isolation hospital where I learned to walk again. I left the hospital with an iron calliper on my left leg which I soon discarded.
“For years, all seemed well, apart from a limp, until middle age when I started suffering from what is now known as Post-Polio Syndrome. The enormous fatigue and other symptoms involved were presumed, at the time, to be all in my head. It wasn’t until much later that PPS was identified as a very real condition.
“Approaching 85 later this month, I occasionally attend a Zoom Polio Support Group and know, from the state of some of the group members, that I was one of the lucky ones, but I still suffer from the effects of that disabling disease. It seems that Polio is the gift that keeps on giving! Unable to walk very far, I now rely on a Walker and a Mobility Scooter to get me around.
“My daughter uses my story to explain her reasons for having her children vaccinated and encourages others to do the same. I am so proud of her.”

Ruth Buzzard: “Excellent article on the value of vaccination. I am fed up with the arguments of anti-vaxxers. I have an American friend who caught Covid, lost her voice, and still cannot speak two years later.”

Fran Ota: questioned some of my assertions: “I think if you check you will find that there are now cases of polio in the US and possibly elsewhere. Not just from children who have not been vaccinated, but from the vaccine itself. Certain strains of the vaccine have developed the ability to revert to the ‘wild’ state, and children have got polio from being immunized. Of course it has still saved countless lives -- I remember those days before immunization. But we also don’t know what can happen in the future.
“The current push for Covid immunization is an example. While I support immunization in general, there are particular cases where I don’t. This is one. It should always be a person’s choice, without any kind of penalty for not doing it. Why? Because the general public became stage 3 testing. Stages 1 and 2 were minimal groups. More current research demonstrates that the mRNA spike protein does indeed invade cellular structures and cause changes, weakening the overall immune system. This research is still beginning, but it happens ‘in vitro’. And as far as I’m concerned it then also happens ‘in vivo’. Some governments have started recognizing ‘vaccine injury’ and putting it on their websites, as well as vaccine death.
“I’ll leave this with a couple of statistics. In the UK the number of deaths from Covid in people with comorbidities was around 800,000. Deaths in those with no underlying issues, about 80,000.”

Sandy Hayes: “I enjoyed your column on immunization -- particularly that you reminded people of how severe polio was. and also how religion played into so many untruths re vaccines. Unfortunately our latest thing to try to wipe out is NOT the same as those previous vaccinattions.
“The vaccine for Covid and its many varieties, does not protect you from getting it. ’They’ say it makes it less severe -- but how would anyone know as we all seem to respond differently to it. So, despite being vaccinated one can still get Covid and a vaccinated person can still be a ‘carrier’. I think the mess created by vaccinating for what many see as a flu (we get vaccinated for that too!) made things worse than if we had treated Covid as a type of flu and ‘accepted’ it.”

Richard Best endorsed Rotary’s anti-polio effort too: “I was a Rotarian, in 5 different clubs, over about 33 or 34 years, until health and age caused me to choose between that and another endeavor. One of the reasons I joined Rotary was its emphasis upon service at a local level, but I soon bought in to the idea of Polio Plus as a way of doing global service.
“I give short shrift to those who decry or demonize any kind of scientifically-verifiable immunizations, be they polio, TB, COVID-19, or whatever. You mentioned TB; one of my uncles died in a TB sanitarium a few decades back. At least two friends of mine died of adult polio relapses.
“You look forward to a total elimination of polio, as does Rotary. Given its causes, I'm not sure that will ever happen, but that is no reason to fail to make its existence affect the fewest persons possible.”
The subject of spanking refuses to go away. Richard added his comments on that: ”I'm not sure what discipline I received as a child. My kids were spanked. I doubt it ever had the result I desired. I disagree with parents who allow their children to run wild and do whatever. There are, however, better and more positive ways to deal with children.”

Doug Giles also had some late comments on spanking: “I'm a retired Lutheran pastor. Thank you for your insightful essay on violence against children (April 23, 2023). I was spanked as a child in the late 1950s and early ‘60s with a belt. I'm 76 now yet I still bare some emotional scars. Dad fought in WWII and was severely wounded in Italy. I will never claim to understand the kind of violence our men experienced overseas but in a small way it helps me understand the kind of violence I lived in at home with a war veteran. As well, PTSD was not dealt with or understood until during the Vietnam war {but understanding it] has helped me come to grips with the kind of milieu my father lived through when he was growing up.”