Surf's up! Reflections on play, technology and life

Went to the LA Filmfest and saw a great documentry about surfing called, Step into Liquid at the John Ford Theatre in Hollywood, a great outdoor venue just across from that other great outdoor venue the Hollywood Bowl.

See Step into Liquid for the great cinematography, the gorgeous locales and the sheer joy of the craziness of surfers. The director was at the LA FilmFest showing and told us that his film has been picked up for wider distribution. So watch for it at the local film festival near you and in general release in August.

So enjoy the film for the fun of it.

However, I want to make a leap into the waters and see if I can springboard into some "deeper" notions. So ride with me in this intellectual surfing!

As I watched the film, I couldn't help but think of Virginia Postrel's book "The Future and Its Enemies."
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Excert from pp. 171-172
Beach volleyball is a technocrat's nightmare. Like personal computers, chaos theory, and the motion picture industry, it was created by people fooling around in the California sun. It grew spontaneously, through the cooperative efforts of its players and fans. It had no goal, no final purpose, no plan. Beach volleyball was an end in itself. Its developers weren't even pretending to work....... Fifty years after its first match, beach volleyball is a big business drawing millions of dollars in corporate sponsorships and media deals....... Despite its iron discipline, beach volleyball is fun.... Every now and then, (Newt) Gingrich's dynamist impulses peek out from his technocratic determination to mold American civilization to his carefully numbered plans..... (in the 1996 Republican convention) He sang the praises of a civilization that could create such a sport. He celebrated the process, impossible to predict, that had given the world beach volleyball.
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I think the same could be said of surfing!

We sometimes deride the American tendancy to be "frivolous" but it is in our freedom to innovate and to play unashamedly that provides a societal context that results in many of the world's medical and technological advances. We may sometimes long for an idealized simpler agricultural society but how many of us would really want to live with all the illnesses and hardships that cut life short just a mere 100 years ago?

Technology is here for good and ill. But technology isn't our enemy. Rather what I believe is that we must see it in the proper perspective as Robert Kennedy so eloquantly said (University of Kansas, March 18, 1968):
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GNP does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
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In short, technology is NOT the end all and be all of life.

Remember the story Jesus told:
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A certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, "What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops". Then he said, "This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I'll say to myself, You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry." But God said to him, "You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself." This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but in not rich toward God.
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Celebrate freedom. Celebrate the technology and innovation that can come from a free society. However, we must not worship the technology and become a slave to it. That is like worshipping the creation rather than the Creator. Rather we must strive to have technology be at the service of the advancement of virtue. There must be an "exchange" of the transient physical tangible technology put into the service and advancement of invisible spiritual eternal virtues.