Category Archives: Technology and the Good

Beware the Wrecking of a Child’s Soul

For some years now I’ve been reflecting on a maxim I’ve derived from constantly teaching young people: If you change the stories a people tell, you necessarily change the identity and character of the people.

We frequently remind our girls on the one day a week they usually watch movies to watch out for messages of “Follow Your Heart.”

In this connection, having some time ago watched Wreck It Ralph 2, I decided to watch the first one with my girls. This was the first time they had seen it, so watching it with them, with my critical faculties on and ready to discuss the film with them afterwards, I almost immediately noticed a total difference of message between the two.

In the first Wreck film, Ralph starts out by following his heart because he doesn’t want to be what everyone thinks he is. In the process of trying to show who he “really” is he winds up wrecking many things, even to the point of almost destroying another video game. Trying to prove that he’s not what everyone thinks he is, he ironically only seems to prove they are right.

Ralph’s little friend, Vanellope, meanwhile, who is also following her heart to become what she seemingly isn’t, a racer, turns out to actually be a racer whose code the bad guy has corrupted so that she is something she’s not by nature meant to be. Ralph’s friendship with her ends up restoring her proper nature, and even though he makes some significant blunders in the process, his friendship shines through precisely in his desire to keep her from the harm that he thinks will befall her if she follows her heart.

Flash forward to Wreck-It Ralph 2. While it is an extremely clever movie in its portrayal of the internet and the various foibles of people on it, the moral message is exactly the opposite.

For in this one, Vanellope again decides to follow her heart, but this time her heart takes her out of her natural place in order to make her into something she is not meant to be, a rough-and-tumble racer in a very violent video game. At the high point of the film corresponding to the first one when she gets very angry at Ralph, she tells him that a true friend would let her do whatever her heart desires, and that’s why he’s a bad friend because he’s trying to talk her out of what she wants but is not actually meant to be.

I find this reversal of moral message fascinating, especially in terms of its portrayal of friendship. Clearly the two movies were written by and for two different mindsets, and

How many in our world today believe that true friendship consists in allowing one’s friend to do whatever they want to do – and supporting them (“validating” their choice) while they’re doing it – rather than pointing out to them things that will harm them and trying to dissuade them? Have we really lost the old idea and practice that being a friend means helping our friend seek what is actually True and Good and Beautiful, not just what they happen to feel (with ever-and-always-changing emotions) is right at the moment?

I’ve thought for some years now as a teacher that we adults should never underestimate the catechetical (teaching) power of pop culture. These things are not “just movies” any more than all the old immoral and sophistical myths about the gods were just entertaining bedtime stories. Many of the modes of seemingly “harmless” entertainment to which we allow our children to be exposed on a regular basis possess the power to fundamentally rewrite their moral imaginations – sometimes significantly enough to cause them ultimately to reject the truths we as parents have tried so hard to pass on to them.

As a classics teacher this brings to my mind that it’s no wonder Plato wanted to banish the poets from his ideal society. Stories are incredibly powerful, especially in the fantastically dopamine-stimulating modes (“cool” music, “awesome” movies, “fun” video games) that our current technology wraps them up in.

A jingle I heard growing up: “Oh be careful little eyes what you see.” We who are parents, charged with the nurture and admonition of the next generation, really must take more care to observe the entertainments to which our children are attracted. And we really must take the time to sit and talk with them about that newest action-packed CGI-stuffed superhero movie and that latest trendy video they’ve seen on the Internet.

It’s pretty ominous to realize that these things may eventually, through constant and uncritical exposure, have even more formative power over their minds and hearts than anything we ourselves could ever say or model in their presence.

Sorrowful Abundance

Everybody knows about that C.S. Lewis quote in which he says that you should always read a certain proportion of older books to newer books because the older ones do not share your biases and will thus likely help you see even seemingly familiar things in a different light.

This will be my first installment of a probably irregular series that will illustrate the truth of Lewis’s dictum. For my first outing, I’ve chosen the following quote from the poet Hesiod, a contemporary of the Homer who wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. Hesiod writes:

“It is good to take from what is available, but sorrow to the heart to be wanting what is not available. I suggest you reflect on this.” (Works and Days, 364)

I believe that this is a principle we can’t easily understand, for our technology has created an artificial world in which nearly anything is available just whenever we want it.

Pause and think about that and you’ll see what I mean. Want a certain fruit or vegetable that, in terms of the climate you live in and the present time of year shouldn’t be available? No problem! Just hop in the car and go down to your favorite grocery store and get that thing and bring it back and bon appetit!

What could be simpler? And after all, isn’t the ability to do this sort of thing regarding just about anything you want anytime you want one of the wonderful blessings of our time? I mean, can you imagine living in ancient or medieval times when, as I’ve actually seen some over-enthusiastic advocates of our culture’s superfluity day, everybody wore hair shirts and was always starving to death? No thanks! Progress has liberated us from all that sort of awful stuff, and as both Americans and American Christians, don’t we just have a birthright to this kind of prosperity?

But if we really want to call ourselves practitioners of classical education, shouldn’t we take the classical sources that underlie that mode of education much more seriously on their own terms? Shouldn’t we take C.S. Lewis’ dictum more seriously by reading the old books with an eye towards what we might learn from them rather than only towards what we can criticize them for? Read the short quote from Hesiod again:

“It is good to take from what is available, but sorrow to the heart to be wanting what is not available. I suggest you reflect on this.” (Works and Days, 364)

What might we be missing if we just quickly pass our eyes over these words on the way to checking off the box that says we have “read Hesiod” as efficiently as possible so that we can move on with our real lives? What if we were to read these words a bit more slowly and reflectively, ask what he means by each term, and then compare the total meaning to how we ourselves live?

If we were to do this, I think it would quickly become clear that unlike Hesiod, who lived in the world much more in touch with nature, we don’t readily grasp that there ought to be limits on our desires. It ought not to be the case that no matter what we desire, somebody has figured out a way to provide it for us, conveniently and attractively packaged, easily available in quantity, and cheap enough that we’ll go get it just because we want it.

We might start to see – really see – what is always right in front of us but which we constantly take for granted because we don’t tend to closely, reflectively examine perspectives on the world that are radically different from our own.

That is, we might start to really see that there are serious ethical and spiritual ramifications to the fact that we don’t live in a world where “not available” is a category that typically constrains our desires and actions. We might start to wonder whether there’s a real downside to our unbelievable superfluity of resources and the financial ability to make the most of them. And if we were really ambitious intellectually, we might start to notice some ways that the phenomenon of unmoderated desire, driven by the fantastic superfluity that has banished “not available,” has created a world ethically hostile to Christianity, not to mention the old style pagan concept of Virtue itself.

Unlike Hesiod, we’re not going to have sorrow of heart because we want what is not available. Rather the converse is true: we’re going to wind up with lots of sorrow of heart because we want all kinds of things that are available, but that shouldn’t be – and which wouldn’t be if we lived in the world governed by natural limitations rather than the constant and frantic quest to overcome them by artificial means that only encourage the development of immoderate, and sometimes even unnatural, desires.

We are absolutely and utterly awash in choices, so much so that we’re often paralyzed when trying to make seemingly simple decisions about meals, pens, shoes, cars, and dozens of other things that are just part of ordinary life and which really shouldn’t consume so much of our time and create so much anxiety. And this is even before we get to really important things like who we will associate with, how seriously we will take agreements we have made with other people when they seem to be suddenly inconvenient for us, or even where we will go to church to get our fantastically self-centered concept of our own needs met in the best way possible for our own satisfaction.

In all these ways and many more, our unbelievable plenitude, which in our unreflective moments we think ought to bring us so much joy, are in reality bringers of sorrow. Because our technology has allowed us to practically banish the old kind of want, we have each and every one of us been shaped all of our lives without any significant care for the types, qualities, and needful limitations of the other kind of want.

As Hesiod said, “I suggest [we] reflect on this.” The quote is pretty short. But like most pithy things our classical sources say, it contains a great deal more depth than the few words in which it is said at first seemed to convey.

“Archimedean Trifles”

In this essay, I want to discuss the idea proposed in a graduate course I once took that the Ancient Greeks, who had the basic intellectual cast necessary for developing higher technology, chose to deliberately restrict technological advance to the realm of defense and war, because they recognized that too much technology would lead to a mechanistic, not a humanistic, mode of living. That is, the Greeks didn’t want a high level of technology because it would have created a kind of “humanity” that for them wasn’t humanity at all.

A key passage that proves this is from Plutarch’s Life of Marcellus. In describing the Roman siege of Syracuse in 212 B.C., Plutarch relates the details of how Archimedes, the famed Greek geometer and inventor, attempted to save the city with technological wizardry:

…The land forces were conducted by Appius: Marcellus with sixty galleys, each with five rows of oars, furnished with all sorts of arms and missiles, and a huge bridge of planks laid upon eight ships chained together, upon which was carried the engine to cast stones and darts, assaulted the walls, relying on the abundance and magnificence of his preparations, and on his own previous glory; all which, however, were, it would seem, but trifles for Archimedes and his machines.

These machines he had designed and contrived, not as matters of any importance, but as mere amusements in geometry; in compliance with King Hiero’s desire and request, some little time before, that he should reduce to practice some part of his admirable speculation in science, and by accommodating the theoretic truth to sensation and ordinary use, bring it more within the appreciation of the people in general.

According to Plutarch, Archimedes was preceded in this activity by Eudoxus and Archytas, who originated “the art of mechanics, which they employed as an elegant illustration of geometrical truths, and as a means of sustaining experimentally, to the satisfaction of the senses, conclusions too intricate for proof by words and diagrams.” Archimedes himself, who was ordinarily too busy with his abstract contemplations of disembodied geometrical formulas, was induced by his patron, King Hiero of Syracuse, to put his math to work in the real world, for the defense of the city. As Plutarch describes it, the results were nothing less than astounding:

When, therefore, the Romans assaulted the walls in two places at once, fear and consternation stupefied the Syracusans, believing that nothing was able to resist that violence and those forces. But when Archimedes began to ply his engines, he at once shot against the land forces all sorts of missile weapons, and immense masses of stone that came down with incredible noise and violence; against which no man could stand; for they knocked down those upon whom they fell in heaps, breaking all their ranks and files. In the meantime, huge poles thrust out from the walls over the ships sunk some by the great weights which they let down from on high upon them; others they lifted up into the air by an iron hand or beak like a crane’s beak and, when they had drawn them up by the prow, and set them on end upon the poop, they plunged them to the bottom of the sea; or else the ships, drawn by engines within, and whirled about, were dashed against steep rocks that stood jutting out under the walls, with great destruction of the soldiers that were aboard them. A ship was frequently lifted up to a great height in the air (a dreadful thing to behold), and was rolled to and fro, and kept swinging, until the mariners were all thrown out, when at length it was dashed against the rocks, or let fall….

Yet, these astounding mechanical contrivances were worth less than nothing to Archimedes himself, who “would not deign to leave behind him any commentary or writing on such subjects; but, repudiating as sordid and ignoble the whole trade of engineering, and every sort of art that lends itself to mere use and profit, he placed his whole affection and ambition in those purer speculations where there can be no reference to the vulgar needs of life…”.

The perspective described here should be of interest to us. A bit earlier in his narrative, Plutarch had mentioned Plato’s “indignation” against the mechanical arts, calling them “the mere corruption and annihilation of the one good of geometry,” namely, contemplation of “the unembodied objects of pure intelligence.” In the basic Platonic view of reality that predominated after Plato himself, we do not need “help” from mere matter to know the truth – indeed, mere matter can often lead us astray from the truth. Hence, to use geometry, or any kind of contemplation of unembodied truth, as an adjunct to the manipulation of physical reality is to fundamentally betray the soul’s quest for true Good. The pursuit of material things gets in the way of the pursuit of unembodied truth, and so it follows by inexorable logic that unrestricted progress in mechanical manipulation (technology) will divert the soul from the Good.

As Christians, we do not denigrate matter in this way, and so we do not want to denigrate per se the scientific enterprise or the technological tools that it produces. But at the same time, we live in a world that, unlike the world Plutarch inhabited, is the product of centuries of systematic inquiry into the physical causes of things. This systematic inquiry has generated enormous progress in terms of our ability to manipulate the conditions of the physical world with our technological devices. For us, technological devices are not “Archimedean Trifles,” but the very warp and woof of our lives.

But, I ask, is our attitude toward technology just the mirror image of the radical denigration of matter and technological progress found in Plutarch’s portrayal of Archimedes? If Plutarch was on one extreme, are we on the other? And if the answer to a question is not one extreme, how could it be the other?

At its root, the question of technology that I am asking in this column concerns its very nature. What kind of thing is technology, and what are (should be) its limits?
In the movie Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm, a quasi-philosopher of exotic mathematical models of the world, asks of the achievement of cloning dinosaurs, “Just because we can do a thing doesn’t mean we should.” It was perhaps in this connection that the Roman author Ovid makes the interesting point in Book I of his Metamorphoses that the “Golden Age” of man on earth was a time in which, among other things, no ships had been built, allowing men to travel to other lands and start wars with each other. Farming had also not been invented, because the earth brought forth all things naturally. Technology arose in the “Silver Age,” as a result of a change in cosmic governance and accompanying alterations in the operations of the earth. Men were forced to build houses to protect them from the weather, and to invent plows to produce food from the land.

In his Physics, Aristotle makes the remark that “art imitates nature” (194a21). The Greek word for “art” here is techne, from which we get our word “technology.” Later, he draws an analogy between art and nature such that in the same way that nature acts with a goal or purpose (telos) in mind, so too should art. If, he says, a house could have been made by nature, it would have been made in the same way that it now is by human art, and if things actually made by nature could be made by art, they would be made in the same way as nature makes them. The focal point of both nature and art is the goal, and questions about the goal of any activity are essential ones for anyone interested in living rightly.

Interestingly, Aristotle goes on to qualify his earlier remark that “art imitates nature” by saying rather that art can only “partly complete” what nature cannot do herself, and so art only “partly imitates” nature. In his Politics, Aristotle says that “nature makes nothing in vain” (1253a8; 1256b20), and he connects this with man’s endowment by nature with speech, a sense of good and evil, and his desire to be in society, to build cities, with other men.  In other words, technology is a means to an end, simultaneously a natural pursuit of man and a sort of necessary evil that man uses to relieve himself of harsh conditions in the world. Technology is oriented toward “filling the gaps” that nature leaves, so that man can live in nature with fewer troubles than he otherwise would have. Yet, at the same time, technology has brought conflict, as with the fact that the invention of ships let men travel to other lands and begin to covet – and so to fight over – the possessions of others.

Thus, the thing that Archimedes considered mere “trifles” is both a necessary good and a temptation to evil. Platonic idealists may imagine that life can be lived in pure contemplation of abstract truths, decrying the “mechanical arts” which care for the “vulgar needs” of embodied life, but even Archimedes found that the sword can be more persuasive than the pen when a Roman soldier, frustrated with the scientist’s preoccupation with an equation rather than heeding the command to surrender, simply ran him through at Syracuse. Aristotle, who also denigrated manual labor and its products as the work of slaves, was forced to admit that someone has to grow the food that the philosophers eat, make the clothes that they wear, and build the houses that they live in.

But there is something deeper that we ought to consider in this Ancient preference for a contemplative, philosophical life over a life buried in the pursuit of the “mechanical arts” and the “vulgar needs” of the embodied condition. Ancient philosophers may have been extreme in the specific ways they stated their critique, but their goal was not extreme, for it was nothing less than living “the good life,” or, a life of self-governed, responsible, virtuous behavior in community with other human beings. Part of the reason they were against vulgar mechanical standards of living was because they believed that such things dehumanized men and women. By focusing attention on gaining proficiency in things that are worthwhile only with respect to other things (e.g., learning the art of medicine solely to increase lifespan, regardless of the moral quality of the life itself), the “mechanical arts” took away from them the ability and desire to pursue things which are worthwhile in themselves (e.g., Truth, Beauty, and Goodness).

To return to the other side of the inquiry, then: have we, in our comfortable technology-soaked Modern age, just swung the pendulum in the opposite direction from Archimedes? Rather than see technology as “trifles,” do we see it as the only truly substantive thing about our lives? We are, after all, surrounded by blinking, flashing, whirring, artificial gizmos from daybreak to sundown. We can hardly imagine life without electric light switches and outlets on every wall, coffee machines, wristwatches, indoor plumbing, the rapid transit triad of “trains, planes, and automobiles,” and laptop computers (on which, somewhat ironically, I am typing this very essay about the dangers of technology!).

Our lives are regimented by mechanisms: alarm clocks, work schedules based on efficiency and productivity quotas per hour, precisely timed “periods” at school, numerical evaluation systems (grades, polls, units of electricity or natural gas used per month, etc.). In other words, our lives are fundamentally technical and mechanical, and from day to day, unless we are the sorts of people who consciously reflect on things that most people just take for granted, we do not see much wrong with it. I have had people look at me like I had a third eye in the middle of my head merely because I asked whether the phenomenon of a grocery store rigidly tracking the number of items that go into each plastic bag each hour on each register – and then penalizing the cashiers for not meeting a predefined number – is a fundamentally dehumanizing activity.

As a culture we endlessly debate amongst ourselves whether our schools can or ought to teach morality, and its linchpin, religion. As a whole culture, the cultivation of virtue is not very important to us, having been eclipsed by our utter fascination with increasing technological sophistication. Virtue, or morality, is, in fact widely considered to be relative to what makes a given individual “happy” – and no one outside of that individual has any right to question his or her concept of “happiness.”

Happiness, furthermore, is in our culture frequently confused with the mere possession of mass quantities of technological stuff. I recently saw an ad at Wal-Mart for the latest 52” High Definition flatscreen television, which quoted a customer (real or imagined, it does not matter) claiming, “This was such a good price, I bought five of them!” Lost in the glamor and glitz of the bright color ad and the logically fallacious appeal known as “bandwagon” (“everyone is doing it; so should you!”) was, of course, the deeper ethical question of whether anyone truly needs a 52” flatscreen television (regardless of the “always low price”) – let alone needs five of them. And we must not forget, Wal-Mart goes on to tell us, that with that new 52” High Definition flatscreen television, we must also get a new Blu-Ray DVD player and a 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound system (each also “always low price”), so that we can be entertained in style right in our own living rooms. We deserve it, after all.

To contemplate such examples as these and still claim that technology is morally neutral is, I think, to miss the forest of transcendent ethical truth for the trees of individual behavior. It is true enough that the greed expressed in “This was such a good price that I bought five of them!” originates in an individual’s warped heart, not with the mere existence of a 52” High Definition flatscreen television. Evil is not in the stuff, but in our hearts – which is why the Archimedean solution of simply debasing the “vulgarity” of embodied life in favor of abstract speculation is no answer, but another side of the same problem.

Nevertheless, to remain on the level of evaluation that says “technology is not evil, people are evil,” is to fail to ask larger questions such as how the existence of this whole massive interlocked complex of entertainment technology facilitates the expression of, not the repression of, the twisted desires of our hearts. If it was not televisions, our greed would focus on something else, this is true. But the specific manner in which the televisions encourage our greed is very much a question worth asking. The technological things with which we are obsessed are not at all “Archimedean trifles.”

We must learn to ask the deeper questions if we are to be wise and culturally virtuous Christians.