What Would Aristotle Do? Buy An iPad and Forget the World Of Course!

This past Tuesday the class discussion on Aristotle's Nichomechian Ethics happened to ask a very interesting question: What would Aristotle think of our society? My initial reaction was that "he would be hard pressed to write a book of manageable length in which he includes all the faults he finds in our way of life." But was Aristotle's society really that different from ours? Maybe he would see a lot of the same things that he saw during his own lifetime. I get the feeling that human society never really changes. We may become more advanced technologically, but I'm not even sure that we become better or worse. If Aristotle was alive today and in the process of writing the Nichomachean Ethics, I don't think that he would change it one bit. The virtues would not change, their means would not change, and their excess and deficiency would be just as pronounced to him now as they were in 350 B.C.E. Perhaps the most important thing is that the "means" of the virtues remains unchanged. Furthermore we still strive for virtue by striving for these means. Also, I think that the majority of our society would tend to err on the same side as Aristotle's society did. In conclusion, I don't see why my initial reaction to the big question was so bleak. It just felt at the moment like we have so ruined philosophy that Aristotle couldn't spend a day in our world. There's no reason that I find for thinking that Aristotle would despise us all and find nothing good about our society, except for iPads, iPods, and pretty much everything else made by Apple.