Technology and Virtue (Or... on something else other than the Coronavirus) - Issue #17
The last several weeks, I’ve been tumbling down a rabbit trail of thoughts on technology and I thought I’d talk about some of them with you. Alan Jacobs recently shared a course he will be teaching called “Beyond Disenchantment”. Here’s how he described it:
Max Weber famously wrote about “the disenchantment of the world,” but historians and theorists from Charles Taylor to Jason Josephson-Storm have shown that the world never stays disenchanted, that we oscillate between a world drained of magic and a world full of it. Is there a way out of this oscillation? There are perhaps three: the “technological sublime” (when technology becomes “magical”); a reabsorption of the human into “Nature”; and what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls “this-worldly Christianity.” The purpose of this course is to explore these three alternatives for our future. We will explore the possibilities through reading fiction, theology, and philosophy.
While Jacobs describes these three options as a way out of oscillation between the world feeling enchanted and disenchanted, I think it’s interesting that the 2nd option “a reabsorption of the human into ‘Nature’” is really a reaction to “the technological sublime"— the 1st option.
The two books from his syllabus investigating "the technological sublime” option are:
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, MIT annotated edition
Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines
(Just for a second, read that last title again — The Age of Spiritual Machines—it’s almost breathtaking. Someone told me recently that Kurzweil has an unshakable faith in the coming IA messiah.)
Then Jacobs lists the reading for the second option, “a reabsorption of the human into 'Nature,’” which, as I said, I think is in some ways a response to the first:
Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk
Ursula K. Le Guin, Always Coming Home
Many have become uncomfortable with not just technology advancing, but how it has advanced and how it has advanced upon us! Dark Mountain Manifesto is a response to societal collapse. It refuses to believe the narrative that technological advancement will solve our problems when it has been the cause of so much damage:
It is, it seems, our civilization’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of Conrad’s Victorian twilight – Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis.
In a recent RadioLab episode, they were exploring the new technology, Adobe Audio Manipulator which manipulated the words of Jordan Peele to say words he never said. Adobe is not just able to manipulate images, but our very words in video. The hosts of RadioLab were concerned about the potential of this new technology, so one of the journalists, Simon Adler, reached out to one of the creators and asks if they were concerned at all about the ethical consequences:
SIMON ADLER: But like, maybe it was the timing more than anything, but I saw this video and it really felt like, “Oh my God! Like, America can’t handle this right now.” Like, we’re in a moment where – where truth seems to be sort of a – an open disc – what is true is – has become an open discussion. And this seems to be adding fuel on the fire of sort of competing narratives in a way that I find troubling. And I’m just curious that you don’t.
IRA KEMELMACHER-SHLIZERMAN: I think that – I think that people – if people know that such technology exists, then they will be more skeptical. My guess, I don’t know. But if people know that fake news exists, if they know that fake texts exists, fake videos exist, fake photos exist, then everyone is more skeptical in what they read and see.
SIMON: But like, a man in North – I think he was from North Carolina, believed from a fake print article that Hillary Clinton was running a sex ring out of a pizza parlor in DC, which is, like, insane. This man believed it and showed up with a gun. And if people are at a moment where they are willing to believe stories as ludicrous as that, like, I don’t expect them to wonder if this video is real or not.
IRA KEMELMACHER-SHLIZERMAN: So what are you asking?
SIMON: I’m asking – well, I’m asking, do you – are you afraid of the power of this? And if not, why?
IRA KEMELMACHER-SHLIZERMAN: Just – I’m just giving my – I don’t know. It just – I’m answering your questions, but I’m a technologist, I’m a computer scientist. So not really, because I know how to – and I know that – because I know that this technology’s reversible. I mean, nobody – well, there is not – not worried too much.
———
It’s not only that the technology is now doing things that makes us feel uneasy, it’s that the designers do not care about where the technology might take us. In the last answer, Ira almost seemed to say, “I’m a computer scientist, not an ethicist.”
Which gets at a deeper issue of where we’ve gotten ourselves: when our society imagines “advancement,” it imagines advancement through technological advancements rather than (and apart from) virtue formation and moral goodness. We’ve separated technology from ethics. We’ve tried to imagine the good life apart form being good people.
A friend once said to me, I’m just waiting for Elon Musk to figure out some technology that’s gonna either delay or reverse global warming. And my pushback isn’t that humans do not have the capacity to do that sort of thing. We are image bearers, so we constantly surprise ourselves with our capacities. But our global crisis isn’t from a lack of technology. Wendell Berry describes the problem as human beings having infinite desires in a world with limited resources. Our problem isn’t a technological problem, but a desire problem. We’ve technologically advanced thinking only about our desires without thinking about the harm. We are all like the Photoshop designer, unable to see the harm in our advances. Looking to the “Elon Musk option” to fix our deepest problems might not be what we really want.
The third option that Jacobs provides for reenchantment is what Bonhoeffer calls “this-worldly Christianity.” Both the technological sublime and a push back to nature are looking for glory and exaltation—to become what we were meant or have the potential to become, whether through technological advancement or the retreat to our basic elements (maybe a third option is minimalism). “This worldly Christianity” teaches us that technology is not our hope, though neither is a retreat from it. Rather, we are called to be image bearers, using our gifts to steward the world, often times through technology, while embracing God-given limitations on our desires and ambitions. We also have hope in a newness of creation—a redemption. We are only stewards of our world, not sustainers of it. We are participating with God, not replacing him.
By John Starke
John Starke
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Pastor of Apostles Church Uptown, New York City