In his essay, Waste, Wendell Berry analyzes and compares our evolved society as to something that is so grotesque and disgusting that is mostly similar to a plain old dump. Berry sees us to be "lazy, passive, and self-indulgent" not only in the workforce but in every aspect of our lives. We've become so immune to what we have done for so many years that this trashy way of life has seeped into the seams of what we do day in and day out. After reading his essay, I find myself in agreement with Berry and begin to worry what really will become of our society not only in good time, but in the near future due to the ever-growing technological field.
Evolution is a topic so broad and open to interpretation, that many people stray away from it and don't want to make the effort to think about it. The truth is, there is no escaping evolution; it's an on-going process that we don't even realize makes its way into our lives whether we like it or not. We've seen evolution in animals, plants, technology, language, and even the way we think. Since the day Earth was made and life was put on it, evolution has occurred, and it will continue to occur until the final days life is here. What does that mean for us?
Take the telephone into basic terms and think about what we use today. Can you even call an iPhone a phone? It does everything under the sun and more, meanwhile the inventors of the first telephone were just trying to figure out a way to tell a friend "Hey" without sending a messenger pigeon 30 minutes away from you and having it end up flying to China for some reason. There's no denying the fact that we live in a world that is obsessed with the "gadgets that we have become addicted to" (Berry). When trying to determine what will happen for our species in the future, it is hard to say if we will keep excelling or eventually reach a stopping point; we eventually have to be unable to think any longer, right? In our modern society, we are so wrapped up with the technology that we use and the ways that we use it have allowed us to introduce even more technology. It's an ever-going process that never seems to end. I think that since we are so caught up in this technological revolution, that it will soon consume us completely and throw off the evolution process right off the Earth.
When thinking about it in a deeper way, will evolution only exist in technology? Berry explains how we have become so lazy in our ways of working that we now live in "a desecrated, ugly, and dangerous country in which to live until we are in some manner poisoned by it..." The problem we face now is that natural selection and Darwin's theory will no longer apply to society. We've already run it down so much that we have only one mindset anymore: to make the world easier. In reality, that answer is not how easy we can make living, but how complicated can we make it so it comes to the point where we actually have to work for it to be happy. The views of evolution have changed and it has now left us in a deeper hole than we were before.
Ultimately, evolution needs to stay on the track it's been on for the past 4.6 billion years and continue to work in a way that helps society, not hurt it. The only way we can really see what we are doing to ourselves, is if we realize that we are the ones who have been putting "the trash on our streets and roadsides, in our rivers, and in our woods and fields..." and it isn't just nature taking its course (Berry). Together, we need to come back down to reality and think about our true morals, rather than what we want them to be.
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