I've been amazed at the interest in Apple's new I Phone 6.  You have doubtless seen or heard some of the news reports about it, the thousands of people lined up at Apple stores around the world; the millions upon millions of product that Apple has shipped in a little less than a month; and, perhaps most significantly, the furor erupting over the phone's capacity to encrypt itself against even the most sophisticated governmental scrutiny of its contents.
    This leaves us with an intriguing dichotomy.  On the one hand, we have, in the I Phone 6, the continuing and unrequited promise of technology's ability to bring us ever increasing communicative facility and access to information.  Most of us appreciate this. On the other hand, we have the specter of this ability generating new waves of, alternately, governmental skepticism or governmental embrace.  Governments enjoy informational access as much as anyone, and yet governments, just as many people do, also enjoy, if they need to, abusing such access.  It cuts both ways.
     Therein is the problem.  In a world in which morality is largely construed in relative terms, finding the real good becomes highly difficult.  What is good often becomes what works best for the most people.  It's utilitarian.  But this fails to tell us what real good is. Most of us would agree that, on balance, technology, including the I Phone 6, has been tremendously beneficial.  And most of us would agree that, on balance, governments have some degree of responsibility to maintain order in a given country.  Yet this still doesn't tell us what the greatest good really is.  Technology isn't an absolute, nor is the way we use it, either.
     As we continue to enjoy technology, we need to remind ourselves that the good we see in it is almost always relative to our station in life. When it's all about us, it's rarely the final good.  More than anything else, we need a transcendent lens, a lens in which everything can be set, a lens in which morality is more than the sum of our felt destiny and purpose:  a lens invested in the metaphysical.