by Gary Griffin
Internet usage and the way that it is used (or not) by various socioeconomic groups are important for theories on lifestyle in the information society. That is, not all sociodemographic characteristics of Internet users are useful for classifying and understanding the informatizationalized lifestyle as suggested by the current theories. Lifestyles are not random behaviors unrelated to structure but are typically deliberate choices influenced by life chances. Remember Weber’s pertinent observation that lifestyles are based on what one consumes and not on what one produces.
Internet access presents individuals with opportunities to realize certain choices. Products and services that are available for consumption via the Internet provide individuals who have Internet access with a wide array of choices and a particular lifestyle based on those choices. However, consumption of these products and services is not independent of production. Socioeconomic status sets the basic parameters by which consumption can occur. The ability to make choices that result in consumption of the products and services that are available on the Internet is constrained by social structures that define an individual’s social situation such as socioeconomic status, gender, ethnicity, age, race, marital status, and residential location.
Members of the same status group share a similar lifestyle, for example, middle class in America. One main distinguishing factor between groups is lifestyle. That is to say, that one’s lifestyle is a reflection of the types and amounts of goods and services one consumes. The types and amounts of goods and services one consumes in the information society reflect their informatizationalized lifestyle. But consumption is not independent of production and cannot occur without income. The income arises from performance of intellectual work that is based on the new owners of the means of production—the information worker of the twenty-first century information society. When the work product, i.e., the information commodity, is exchanged in the marketplace, the exchange must result in capital that can pay for the basic necessities of life and also other commodities that represent a specific information society lifestyle.
These social changes hold a number of important questions that will be explored in the chapters throughout the remainder of this book. More specifically, if individual workers now own the means of production, how do members of a society contribute to the production process in the information society? That is, how are human beings to become more productive if the main mode of production relies on intellectual capital? Moreover, how is money made? Is this a new form of entrepreneurship? It’s easy to see that such intellectual production processes rely on human capital and the development of brainpower.
The development of human capital—the human mind—is a lengthy process that requires ongoing educational endeavor beginning almost at birth and continuing throughout an entire career. What then is the role of education in this new information society system? It would seem that there’s now even more of a need to provide a continuous flow from elementary to secondary and post-secondary educational endeavors while connecting the education process to the demands of the intellectual work production processes within the information society. How does this affect education in the information society? Do current education institutions provide this continuity?
What is the role of government in policy development to drive this new betterment of its citizens within the information society? Given the bureaucratization of the current government, it would seem at odds with the streamlined informatization lifestyle of the information society. Do government institutions need to be reformed to become representative of a democratic information society? Given the government’s role as representatives of the people within the information society, for the economic well-being of the populace as a whole, we can’t decouple politics from economics. How then does the intersection of business and government, and their relationship change within the information society to meet the demands of the new political economy of the information society?
Given the impact of globalization and a global economy on jobs and capital within the United States, how does the information commodity influence this situation? That is, if what America now has to export is intellectual capital, how do we exchange this value for money in the world marketplace? Do models of globalization need to change to reflect the different phases of development of a particular society? That is, societies would be classified as information producers, industrial producers, and agricultural producers.
The big final question is What if? What if America does not change? What if institutions do not reform? What if government doesn’t change its current practices? There are specific indicators that are examined based on that scenario in chapter 8. This is then followed by a synthesis and presentation of the major challenges facing America in the twenty-first century. How well we meet those challenges will determine our future in America.
The thoughts a society thinks have profound repercussions on what it does.
Author Unknown
THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
Figure 1: A Belief System
Ideas are like seeds; when planted in the fertile soil of a human mind, they grow. The extent to which they grow, persist, or survive is dependent on how well they take root and the soil in which they’ve been planted.56 Some ideas never take root; some take root and grow or persist for a little while; still others fall on fertile ground and multiply. When these ideas are based on false beliefs, the results can be disastrous. When an idea is strong and is on fertile ground, it can persist across many people, their lives, and even across many nations. Such ideas are strong, and they have strong roots systems, but they also have an expiration date. However, ideas that are so strong as to have persisted for a long time die a quite painful death. The main reason for this is that people just can’t seem to let them go. Even in the face of insurmountable evidence that it’s time for the ideas to die, human beings often have trouble with letting go. The death of an idea can be quite a painful experience; especially to the person or persons who are faced with the death.
Ideas originate in the mind of a human being, and as these ideas are transmitted from one person to another, from one generation to another, from one society to another, they collectively form the basis of a belief system. It is important to understand the connection between ideas and belief systems because belief systems form the basis of human action. The very social structures that support and enable civilization arise from actions based on collectively held belief systems. In sum, to make changes to the social, political, economic, and philosophical systems, we must first inform our belief system with new knowledge thereby destroying old ideas that are false and no longer apply to our everyday reality.57 When we start to make changes to these structures, we disrupt reality. It would seem that once it’s proven that these ideas should be changed and those changes reflected in the social structures of America, it should be a simple matter to make the changes. It’s not. We must realize that these structures have vested interests of millions of people.
Some of these ideas are hundreds and even thousands of years old. Some go as far back as the beginning of human civilization when God first created Adam and Eve.58 Some go back 2,400 years ago when Greek philosophers such as Aristotle sat around and pontificated about the meaning of everything.59
Realize that Aristotle never read the Bible; for that matter, none of the famous Greek philosophers had ever even heard of the Bible.60 However, many of the ideas that were used to create America were heavily influenced by Aristotle, if not directly then indirectly through others who were Aristotelian thinkers. Many of these early thinkers read both Aristotle and the Bible. How then did they reconcile the thoughts and ideas of Aristotle to the teachings of the Bible? St. Thomas Aquinas was one of the first to attempt this resolution of the two bodies of the Judeo-Christian belief system with that of the Greek philosophy of Aristotle.61 He was not the only one. Other thinkers such as John Locke, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau were influenced by both Greek philosophy of Aristotle and Ju
deo-Christian theology. In fact, many of these thinkers used ideas that dated back to Aristotle to formulate the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
To modern ears, Aristotle’s view of universe may seem mythical. However, if we follow his reasoning, which lead him to affirm that there must be an immaterial, perfect being he would’ve called God, we can see how his reasoning provided a model for later thinkers to prove the existence of a God. This was not the same as Aristotle’s God, but the God of Genesis; the God who created the world out of nothing.62 But there remains one fundamental question, even to this day. Is there a God? Did this same God create all that there is or ever will be? Did he create human beings?
PHILOSOPHY AND GOD
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning subjects such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. There are at least two senses in which the term philosophy is used. In the more formal sense, philosophy is an academic discipline focusing on the fields of metaphysics, logic, ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics. In the more informal sense, a philosophy is an attitude to life or way or principle of living whose focus is on resolving the most basic existential questions about the human condition.63 Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing fundamental questions (such as mysticism or mythology) by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on reasoned argument. Philosophy comes from the Greek term philosophia, which translates to love of wisdom.
Aristotle, a student of Plato, was an early influential philosopher who argued that ethical knowledge is not certain knowledge (like metaphysics and epistemology) but is general knowledge. Because it is not a theoretical discipline, a person had to study and practice in order to become good; thus if the person were to become virtuous, he could not simply study what virtue is, he had to be virtuous by undertaking virtuous activities
Rationalism is any view emphasizing the role or importance of human reason. Extreme rationalism tries to base all knowledge on reason alone. In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification. In more technical terms it is a method or a theory in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive. Rationalism typically starts from premises that cannot coherently be denied, then attempts by logical steps to deduce every possible object of knowledge. This type of knowledge gained is said to be a priori because it is knowledge gained independent of experience.
Modern rationalism begins with Rene Descartes.64 Reflection on the nature of perceptual experience, as well as scientific discoveries in physiology and optics, led Descartes to the view that we are directly aware of ideas rather than objects. This view gave rise to three questions:
Is an idea a true copy of the real thing that it represents? Sensation is not a direct interaction between bodily objects and our sense but is a physiological process involving representation.
How can physical objects such as chairs and tables or even physiological processes in the brain give rise to mental items such as ideas? This is part of what became known as the mind-body problem.65
If all the contents of awareness are ideas, how can we know that anything exists apart from ideas?
Descartes tried to address the last problem by reason. He began, echoing Parmenides, with a principle that he thought could not coherently be denied: I think, therefore I am (often given in his original Latin: Cogito ergo sum).66 From this principle, Descartes went on to construct a complete system of knowledge (which involves proving the existence of God, using, among other means, a version of the ontological argument). His view that reason alone could yield substantial truths about reality strongly influenced those philosophers usually considered modern rationalists (such as Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Christian Wolff), while provoking criticism from other philosophers who have retrospectively come to be grouped together as empiricists.
IS THERE A GOD?
In Western philosophy, the basic philosophical positions on the problem of free will can be divided in accordance with the answers they provide to two questions:
Is determinism true?
Does free will exist?
Determinism is roughly defined as the view that all current and future events are causally necessitated by past events combined with the laws of nature. Neither determinism nor its opposite, indeterminism, are positions in the debate about free will.
The standard argument against the existence of free will is very simple. Either determinism is true or indeterminism is true. These exhaust the logical possibilities. If determinism is true, we are not free. If indeterminism is true, our actions are random and our will lacks the control to be morally responsible.
Theological determinism is the thesis that there is a God who determines all that humans will do, either by knowing their actions in advance through some form of omniscience or by decreeing their actions in advance. The problem of free will, in this context, is the problem of how our actions can be free, if there is a being who has determined them for us ahead of time.67
Jewish philosophy stresses that free will is a product of the intrinsic human soul, using the word neshama [breath], but the ability to make a free choice is through Yechida [singular], the part of the soul that is united with God, the only being that is not hindered by or dependent on cause and effect. Thus, freedom of choice does not belong to the realm of the physical reality, and the inability of natural philosophy to account for it is expected.
In the American context, historians use the term Judeo—Christian to refer to the influence of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament on Protestant thought and values, most especially the Puritan, Presbyterian, and Evangelical heritage.68 The founding generations of Americans saw themselves as heirs to the Hebrew Bible, and its teachings on liberty, responsibility, hard work, ethics, justice, and equality. They took from the Bible a sense of being chosen and an ethical mission to the world, which became key components of the American character—the American Creed. These ideas from the Hebrew Bible, brought into American history by Protestants, are seen as underpinning the American Revolution, Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution. Other authors are interested in tracing the religious beliefs of America’s founding fathers, emphasizing both Jewish and Christian influence in their personal beliefs and how this was translated into the creation of American institutions and character.69
To these historians, the interest in the concept Judeo—Christian lies not in theology but in actual culture and history as it evolved in America. These authors discern a melding of Jewish thought into Protestant teachings that, in combination with the heritage of English history and common law, as well as Enlightenment thinking, resulted in the birth of American democracy.
Nineteenth-century historians wrote extensively on the United States of America having a distinctively Protestant character in its outlook and founding political philosophy. It is only since the 1950s that the term Judeo—Christian has been applied to this philosophy, reflecting the growing use of that term in American political life. Some use the term casually as an inclusive synonym for the religious. Others argue the term is appropriate in its own right, capturing a distinctively Old Testament dimension (though not necessarily that of Judaism) in the Puritan character of early American Protestantism especially the work ethic.70
The notion of a distinctive religious basis for American democracy and culture was first described and popularized by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1840s, in his influential book, Democracy in America. In chapter 2, De Tocqueville describes America’s unique religious heritage from the Puritans. His analysis showed the Puritans as providing the foundational values of America, based on their strong Hebrew Bible view of the world, which included fighting for earthly political justice, an emphasis on laws and education, and a belief in the Jews as a chosen people that the Puritans identified with, giving them a sense of moral mission in founding America. As de Tocqueville observed, the pur
itan’s biblical outlook gave America a moral dimension that the Old World lacked. De Tocqueville believed these biblical values led to America’s unique institutions of religious tolerance, public education, egalitarianism, and democracy.
How are we like God? It is our ability to create. Human beings are the only living thing on the planet with the ability to come up with an idea and then transform that idea through the use of natural resources into something real, a tangible finished product. People use their labor to make ideas a part of the physical world that surrounds us.
God had an idea. He created man from that idea. In this way we are not only like the Creator, but we are creators ourselves.
Our ability to use our mind to create is innate in human beings.71 It is as much a part of who we are as the necessity to breathe air and eat food. All of creation is but the transfer of energy through the application of power to work. Focused power upon labor gives a physical shape to our ideas. It transforms our thoughts into a shape others can see, feel, and experience. The American dream is such an idea. Ideas are but theories that have yet to be tested. The scientific method says that theories have to be tested in order to accumulate knowledge. The way that works is to use those ideas/theories to formulate social policies.