GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: MercatorNet: The Somme and the culture of death. New baby, new wonders.

viernes, 1 de julio de 2016

MercatorNet: The Somme and the culture of death. New baby, new wonders. | MercatorNet

First the good news. The great news! The MercatorNet family was extended recently by the arrival of Emma Maria El-Rahi, the new little daughter of Tamara and Nadim whom Tamara introduces to us today in a post on Family Edge. Congratulations both, and thanks Tamara for sharing your joy with us. And thank you Emma for your sweet baby smile – the world needs it so much.

There are certainly reasons for gloom as, a hundred years after the Battle of the Somme, we are still in a kind of world war, now driven by religious fanaticism and terrorism.

Michael Cook suggests that the Somme can be seen as “the opening salvo in the culture of death” – that is, the war we wage against ourselves with technology for lack of a moral framework that would make it serve only humane ends. His reflections introduce the reminiscences of a German soldier who fought in the front lines on July 1, 1916, and which vividly illustrate what was new and shocking about the First World War – the industrial scale of the thing that swept away the lives of 38 million people.

Technology is neither good nor bad in itself, but it’s not always easy to work out when we are putting it to good use or bad. That seems to be the case with handing over human work to robots – a subject visited by Marcus Roberts. Of course, we have lived with automation for a long time, but we could still take a wrong turn with it, don’t you think?