I came across The Giver in middle school, though my memory of exactly when is fuzzy. Sadly, what follows is recollection of what the book intends to impart was also quite fuzzy. For those which have not read The Giver, I pray you do.
I recently read it -- truly read it -- for the first time. I'll carry the book in my heart until my last breath. I am sure of it.
There is much conveyed by The Giver, the most lasting one does not seem to be a fact or conveyed information. It seems to be a place imparted and made meaningful by its inverse. A place in which looks beyond mechanistic processes and existence. A very human place. Nay, a living place.
Strikingly, modernity -- at least since the mid-eighteenth century -- seems to embody and value the precepts held by The Community in The Giver. To not give much away, The Community values "Sameness". What follows is a mechanistic life, serving only the continuation of The Community, having only shallow referents to a deeper experience.
The cost of such an existence is unknowable suffering. Community Members are unaware and unseeing to the hell in which they exist. Hell has been designed and passed down for generations, but by a different name.
I have a notion, a feeling, hell is not inevitable. The seemingly endless moments of chaos, with the West's delusion of technological advancement as progress put the society that I am a part of in a strange spot. In tension, seemingly in conflict, are the best of times and the worst of times. We have so much, yet not enough. But it doesn't have to be so.
Hell is only inevitable, when hell is said to not exist.
P.S. It pains me that I feel compelled to write this post-script, and that my thoughts are bent toward software, however, I want to make a concrete point. Part of my day-to-day hell is our current moment with respect to the software business. Much of the mind-share is about stochastic, mechanistic processes. The latter is nothing new. The former is another tool, albeit a different shape.
To some the tool is augmentation. To others a power struggle. To some a grift. But the thread of tacit uncertainty and uneasiness, at least which I perceive, is a seemingly broad degradation of human value by proxy of people anthropomorphizing a computer. The loom was of course not anthropomorphized, it could be seen, touched, worked with, left behind. We see it as the machine it is, bar what implications it has.
Friends, just as we cannot give the loom a heart -- or soul -- we will never be able to impart the very basis of our humanity: our love, our joy, our pain, our pride, our suffering, our frustrations, our doubts, our wonder, our curiosity, our understanding, our perceptions... I can go on. None of it we can impart, or will ever, to a machine.