About the death of Osama bin Laden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “Justice has been served.” Hillary made a nice speech defending this scene of death and destruction. But, I think a blogger, Jimmy Spencer Jr., asks a question that deserves consideration: “Whose Death Does God Cheer?” He writes:
Watching my Facebook friends, pastors and Christians strike their own chorus of revelry and revenge that somehow God’s will has been done and He has acted for us. He has delivered justice for us. He has delivered revenge for us. He has delivered our enemies to us because He is good and just—and God is on our side. …
Whose bullets carry the blessings of God?
Whose death does God cheer?A wise man once turned the religious and social world upside down when He said: “love your enemies.” Will I be brave enough to follow in His Way?
If this same wise man actually struggled and broke the cycle of death then God forgive me when I participate in the ancient lineage of the crowds who cheer not for the love of Jesus … God forgive me when I cheer the death of my enemies and thereby perpetuate the cycle of death—the very thing Jesus came to abolish.
The only hope for the future is that humanity, somehow, becomes transformed so that virtue becomes at the center of human attention and human progress.
There is a huge gap between man’s knowledge and man’s capacity to use that knowledge wisely. The coming explosion of technology will make that gap even more dramatic, and will make our response to decisions of life and death even more desensitized. When humanity has the power and tools to do anything it wishes, the question is, what will humanity wish to do? What are the values and virtues that guide our thinking and actions?
Even now, humanity has the capacity to produce all of the material wealth the world needs so that every human in the world could have a decent life — with a bounty of food, water, shelter — and where a culture of excellence could continually raise up humanity to new levels of accomplishment and enlightenment. Even now, we have the capacity to transform the planet, if we would only wish to do so. In the near future this capacity will be enormously larger, and the gap between what humanity is and what it should be will call out ever louder for an intelligent response.
The explosion of machine intelligence will force humans to define human intelligence much more profoundly than it is currently defined. What do humans wish for? Deepak Chopra writes about The Difference Between Wealth and Money. When we can have anything we wish for, signs seem to point to the conclusion that education, eventually, will become centered helping individuals acquire true wealth, centered on the development of what is called “virtue.”
Why virtue? Virtue leads to happiness and harmony — within the individual, the family, the community. Individual virtue leads to societal virtue. When computers are billions of times more intelligent than humans, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) work will be out of the human sphere. Future societies will want an educational system that will empower the development of virtue within every citizen.
Virtue leads to personal happiness because it is the development and fulfillment of personal potential, the fruition of individual purpose. Defining what is meant by a “whole person,” defining what is meant by virtue, will be at the center of schools in the future. This short contemplation is part of my writing project I am madly working on, “Kettering Public Education In 2030.”
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