Thursday, January 17, 2013
Technical Progression and Us
I read a talk by Elder Dallin H. Oaks titled "Focus and Priorities." One can find the talk in the LDS May 2001 Ensign. There was a part of the talk that stood out to me. He told the story of two men who were in a business partnership selling melons. They would purchase a truck load of melons for one dollar a melon and then sell those melons for one dollar a melon. Obviously they are not making any profit this way. They soon noticed this. The story ends with one of the men proposing that they buy a bigger truck. I immediately thought of how the world has progressed in technology. However, no matter how much the world progresses in technology, if one is using it to idle away time, there is not much of progression for that one. There can be times that technology can be used for entertainment purposes. If the use ends there, what was the point of progression? It ends up being a time-waster. One must be careful of how progression is used.
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"...technology can be used for entertainment purposes. If the use ends there, what was the point of progression?"
ReplyDeleteWhat is the purpose of the arts? We praise great musicians such as Mozart and Tchaikovsky; we praise the ways they progressed their genre, but they are (in some sense) ultimately entertainers. You might say that classical music is a time-waster, but I would propose that we cannot have one, brittle, measuring standard of "progression".