Home for the Have-nots

Heidegger wishes for a free relationship with technology; an open understanding between the human and the technological. As well we should be ever vigil in our efforts to avoid being charmed by the easy seductions of technologies - elevating the technological to some form of salvational expedient. But if reality is an illusion constructed for and by humans then I guess Mankind is truley estranged from his essence - blinded to any revealing of true essences of anything. Heidegger looks to poetry and art as a way to unconcealing the concealed and alleviating the danger of technological enframing by becoming stuck between the possibilities and the impossibilities of knowing and unknowing, of representation and misrepresentation, of the living and the dead. Of course the danger is that there is no universal interpretation of reality, therefore there will always be the danger that the revealed essences will be misconstrued and misrepresented. Szersynski points out the reality of our global society: "This is not a society made infinite, sublime, guided perfectly by reason. It is a society without an outside, but it is still finite; its members can still only know and act from within the world, not as God from outside." Therefore our visions of ourselves in the world are "still multiple, partial and divided, and problems such as poverty and environmental degradation will never wholly be overcome." That's not to say that we shouldn't try. I just read an article about a Toronto architect who has put together a project for sustainable housing for the homeless in the Philippines; keeping in mind the materials at hand, in this case discards and junk from the wealthier sectors of the city; the land available, in this instance land was donated by the church and the University that it runs. His design maximizes ventilation and reduces claustrophobia and is self-sufficient in that the roofs are designed to catch and store rainwater. His mission is to design the best possible homes for the city's most marginalized people. This low-tech approach to ameliorating the unfortunate circumstances of migrants in Third World countries is a testement not only to our ability to work with nature but as well to our ability to work in global harmony, achieving positive change. Suffering is a reality in this new age of technology, global business, climatic change and natural disasters that work to dislodge and dislocate peoples from home and family. I just worry that technology will become the new religion - in fact I read somewhere that the reason we're not moving fast enough on such dire global issues of peak oil, environmental degradation and air pollution is that we have too much faith in science to absolve us from our destructive habits.