Are Technologies Weakening Our Species?

I’m not anti-technology, or primitivist, or whatever other negative labels might be cast on someone who’s critical of certain trappings of modernity. I’ve got the iPhone, and the MacBook, and I rent a fairly large house in suburbia, and all that. But at the same time, I’m also kind of a long-term thinker and, despite my complicities, I’m concerned about the effects that our technologies are having on both local and global ecologies, and on our species physiologically. The latter notion always comes to mind for me when I’m going through a period where I have to wear glasses instead of contacts, as I have been for the past couple months, due to a keratitis condition. I’m reminded immediately of how awkward the apparatus are, and simultaneously of how impossible it would be for me to function in a world where corrective lenses were not available. In the past, someone with my eyes would probably not live long, nor reproduce. But now, there are many like myself, and every dog has his day. Usually, we can even hide our deficiency, wearing contacts or undergoing radial keratotomy. All the same, it’s there, and I think it’s becoming ever more common, because we have the technology to support it. How long will it be before all human beings are born with the need for technological or surgical visual correction?

The martial arts are another trigger toward these kinds of thoughts for me, or expressions of the potentialities of the human body in general. Movement… we’ve lost a lot, as a species. And I’m at the age when it starts becoming obvious (hence, in part, my enthusiasm for the rest-of-my-lifetime project at hand). Still, I wonder what our ancestors were like, in their physical abilities, before the technologies began weakening us. Some of those ‘superhuman’ characteristics we imagine in comic books and movies, did we once have similar abilities? Is that why we’re entertained by and attracted to those depictions?

I decided to sit down and make a quick video on the subject this evening. Nothing amazing, just a talking head and some thoughts…

On a more active but not unrelated note, my training has been fairly house-bound the past few days, as a result of freezing rain that has made even casual walking outside fairly dangerous. Nothing can keep me away from the birds at dawn though. And while I was out there, I managed to improve on my horse stance hold, increasing my time to 1min 42sec…

I also got in a bit of CLF form practice, despite the slippery conditions (even on the grass)…

However, most of my training moved down into the basement. I decided to go ahead and try seeing how many of each of the four basic kicks I could deliver in a minute, to set an initial mark for others to best in the Kwoon Records. These stand as follows:

Front Kick 74R 67L

Side Kick 64R 59L

Hook Kick 60R 59L

Reverse Hook 39R 43L

The reason the reverse hook count was so low was that they came at the end of my workout for that day, when my legs were already pretty wiped out, and I didn’t even complete the full minute. Earlier that day, I managed to increase my front kick hold to 32 seconds each leg (up from 20 seconds timed during my fitness test in September). I also increased my leg raises to 12 (from 9), and my max decline push-ups to 52 (from 50). My L-hold pull-ups are remaining steady at 10. Here’s the video demonstrating all the kicks per minute (note that I didn’t have a stopwatch, so had to count how many were delivered in the first minute of each sequence afterward)…