is the appalling reality of our electronic, computerized society, that pays so much lip service to saving resources and energy. What on earth can our convenient society save? Our convenient and comfortable standard of living has only been achieved by industrial exhaustion of all kinds of resources. We must awaken to this fact. Depending heavily on foreign food, wood, energy, and metal ores, we "advanced" peoples of the world will surely go down as the villains of history if we continue our present patterns of conspicuous consumption and unbridled waste.
We must first instill ethics into our personal lives. Based on a compassion for every being in this world, we must conscientiously avoid wasting things, time, and minds. The first step in this process is to buy only necessary things, to use them gratefully, and to seek a meaningful lifestyle unmoved by fashions and advertising.
If we Japanese could regain such an ethical lifestyle, the world might once again look at Japan with respect and admiration. Other countries will most willingly provide us with the resources necessary to maintain our industrial economy when they believe that providing us with those resources will bring about the true happiness and prosperity of the rest of the world.
Conserving Pure Air and Water
I remember watching a scene on television where desert tribespeople meticulously gathered every drop of evening dew from the leaves of the desert plants and stored it in earthenware pots. Concentrating to save every single drop, their tense countenances were a silent rebuke to us who take water for granted.
When thinking of resources and energy, we are apt to forget air and water, because they seem to be freely given as if from heaven. But without air we could not make fire even if we had fuel, and without water we could not drive the turbines that produce electricity. Without air and water we could neither cook nor process foods nor conduct any of the countless cooling, washing, and processing operations of modern industry. It goes without saying that the most fundamental resources that sustain our bodies are air and water. So these two substances are our ultimate resources. Even though air and water seem almost limitless, when they are polluted they are practically useless.
In addition to consuming a wide range of minerals and fossil fuels in the process of industrialization, we also contaminated our air and water so badly that it is now a tremendous challenge to restore them to their former state. This pollution of air and water poses grave dangers to our physical health in the immediate future. Our thoughtless and continuing pollution of air and water is attributable to our pursuing material wealth rather than contemplating the long-range ethical consequences of our decisions and actions. Such material wealth cannot be termed true prosperity if it deprives us of the basics of clean air and water.
Ever since the industrial revolution we have striven to make our lives richer, more comfortable, and convenient. As a result, we now confront difficult problems we must solve without delay. We can still strive to attain a better life, but our definition of this better life must be rephrased in terms of environmental quality rather than in the past terms of crude acquisition of capital.
Ethics are needed to give a viable answer to this question. An ethics of environmental sustainability will become the requisite standard of human action and save human beings from poverty, exhaustion, and devastation. The more people put ethics into practice, the purer society will be. The action of those who practice an ethically enlightened lifestyle will be reflected upon the world of nature. Then air and water, forests and fields, and all the living beings within the ecosystem will gradually recover. Only a thoroughgoing environmental ethic has the power to restore this endangered planet in the long run. Then nature and ethics will be fundamentally unified and form a universe understood as a spiritual unity. When we appreciate this potential of ethical living, we will understand what a great hope ethics offers for the future of the earth.
CHAPTER 2
Questions of Modernization
Merits and Demerits of Technology
Minds Distracted by Technology
A young boy was playing with the horned goliath beetle that he had bought the week before at a pet shop. A full three inches long, it had six powerful legs, a shiny hard shell, and a horn protruding from its forehead—truly the king of beetles and a proud possession of its young owner. Probably because he had already played with the beetle for many days, it was badly weakened. It crawled slowly across the floor, stopped for a moment, began to walk again, but only made it as far as the middle of the hall. When it suddenly stopped as if dead, the young boy shouted, "Its battery's dead! Gotta change batteries!"
It is hard to imagine that the boy didn't know the difference between his other battery-driven plastic toys and this really living beetle. Yet his first reaction on seeing the beetle in its dying moments was to exclaim, "Its battery's dead! Gotta change batteries!" His overreliance on battery-powered toys destroyed his sensitivity to the life and death of the goliath beetle. This is a depressing example of how young minds can be distorted by technology.
I once read a novel describing the decline of America; its Japanese title means "The Yellow Bus." One of the people in this novel is so out of joint with nature that he walks like a robot, moving his right hand with his right foot, and his left hand with his left foot. The author warns against our blind faith in technology by describing this human being whose very life rhythm becomes unnatural when technology controls it.
The rhythm of life is the supreme creation of nature, a sacred domain where no human consciousness should intervene. It transcends the differences of races, cultures, and histories; it is a secret of life affecting all people in common, in every civilization, no matter how disparate. If this rhythm is disrupted, human beings cease to be human. So when we find symptoms of unnatural disorder in our lives, we must nip them in the bud. The schoolboy's remark "Its battery's dead!" is no longer merely a symptom, but a real indication of damage to the sanctity of nature, not only in the boy's running the beetle to death, but equally in the boy's insensitivity to the sacredness of natural life.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
