Does technological development bring more sorrow or happiness?
“’Look, I am better educated than any of the kings before me in Jerusalem. I have greater wisdom and knowledge.’ So I worked hard to be wise instead of foolish—but now I realize that even this was like chasing the wind. For the more my wisdom, the more my grief; to increase knowledge only increases distress.” Ecclesiastes 1:17-18 Living Bible (TLB)
In the movie version of the novel, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein was a young boy who was curious to know about the secrets of nature by studying the works of ancient alchemists. This newly acquired technology made him knowledgeable about the human body, ‘creation’ and a desire to be a prosthetic god in such a way that he created a ‘creature’ from stolen bodies from mortuaries, graves, and animal body parts. To complete his creature, he sparked the body with electricity and ultraviolet light to give it life. Victor said excitedly while jumping up and down, “It is alive”, celebrating the fact that his creation had come to life.
However, that is not all about the story whose ending was not as I expected: ‘Then they [the monster and Frankenstein] all lived happily ever after.’ His acquired knowledge and technological advancement caused him a loss which no one could endure. It ended up killing his loved friends, parents, wife and other innocent people. What a loss due to technological development! This is because the creation could not fit into the society it inhabited. It turned into a monster, a murderer, an ugly creature and any other bad names you can think of.
Technological advancements have increased human’s desire to be a prosthetic god. This can be evidenced by an increase in a number of very sophisticated and humanlike tools, which ancient people never imagined could have even existed. For instance, modern people can make fast-moving machines like spaceships, fast-acting machines such as computers, and, surprisingly, humanoid robots made of steel instead of carbon. In addition, apart from medicinal applications to cure diseases, genetic engineering has helped people to modify human beings. This technology is employed in cloning, which is a replication of a dead or living organism from its available genetic material.
Generally, the application of technology in our daily life can be viewed as a daily struggle to attain happiness by trying to have godlike characteristics, especially the ability to create. Sigmund Freud says “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god.” This means that men always had and still have a desire to be like God. Nevertheless, this desire to be like god usually produces bad results. For example, in Paradise Lost, Satan acted as a prosthetic god by creating cannon to win the heavenly battle against the good angels. But still he lost and he was cast out of heaven. Also, when Adam and Eve wanted to be godlike by knowing right from wrong by eating a fruit from the forbidden tree, they were chased out of garden of Eden and were punished to labor so as to live.
The same negative consequences are observed in the Frankenstein movie due to the desire to be a ‘prosthetic god’. Victor was very excited for his own creation when he realized that the creature was alive—as he screamed, “it is alive … I created you.” Nonetheless, like in the case of Satan and Adam in the Paradise Lost, Frankenstein’s desire to have godlike characteristics, in his case the ability to create, did not yield good results.
This desire to be a prosthetic god is more about engineering and repairing biological systems, like in the case of mechanical ones, rather than creating, since creation involves making something from nothing. Even though, in the movie, Frankenstein agrees with a remark from a colleague that “[he] created life out of nothing”, his ‘creation’ is actually not creation. This is because he made the monster from dead bodies and a stolen brain—things which were already created.
Technology usually sparks the human desire to create things in order to gain happiness from them. As a result, Freud suggests that humans end up having technological enjoyments, which he calls ‘cheap enjoyments’ because they bring us happiness at an expense of more sorrow. This implies that even though it may seem that technology has simplified many tasks, and hence offers us joyous life, in our daily life; when viewed in a big picture, technology brings big problems as it solves the small ones. For example, in the case of Frankenstein, he was trying to find a way to conquer death by using technology so as to cope with the loss of his mother. At the beginning, he was very happy to be able to give life to his creature. However, what he believed to be a solution to death brought more deaths by killing his wife and other innocent people.
Does technological development bring us happiness or sorrow? Frankly speaking, I do not have the right answer to that question—neither do I believe there is one. However, one thing I am sure of is that happiness is eternal. It is something which we are born with. We don’t need material wealth like robots, phones, and computers—which are all technological creations. All we need to do to be happy is to learn how to tap into that happiness from within ourselves.