Although the horse bolted long ago, I’d always dispute the idea that Technology can ever be ‘neutral’. The moment we interact with any technology it similarly interacts with us. Take my ‘go to’ example of an axe. Neuro research shows how we become integrated with the simplest of tools. I become ‘man with an axe’. This changes me and Therefore my relating to the world. Trees, once my friends now shudder at my approach . . .
Lots of things to ponder as I said but it occurred to me that screen activities particularly scatter us, precisely because of their disembodied nature. In the same way thoughts wander into the strangest places as our bodies go to sleep, for our minds have nothing to hold them in place, so the lack of physical interaction means we are - most ironically - powerless to be taken somewhere else. We are less than physically disconnected in our multiple connections.
Eric- This is exactly my concern. I think of being just out of college working for the National Park Service building boardwalk. At first I was embarrassingly terrible at swinging a hammer. I was a guitarist! But slowly I became far more adept at it, taken great pleasure in driving nails. There is a sweet spot where the nail goes in effortlessly. A small but beautiful thing. The hammer is a fairly basic piece of technology, but in its use I became stronger, more attuned to the necessary skill it took to wield it well. This is even more true in the process of learning a musical instrument but the principle is the same. These are technologies that enhance us.
I can't say the same is true for what the smartphone does to us.
Are there useful distinctions possible in all of this? I hope so. Are there tools of enhancement and connection versus those of isolation and diminishment? The latter may give us great power (or rather we allow others to have power over us) but is it worth the trade? It is easy to cite the benefits of a smartphone, surely there are many, but it is in the overall effect on us and on our way of relating to the world and to each other that we must be attentive to in order to judge rightly. It seems we are losing the real world, and its myriad relations, by our monomaniacal focus on virtual reality.
Perhaps that is too simple, but I don't think entirely misguided.
All is well. The sun is shining at the moment and the air is brisk. A beautiful day. I hope all is well on your side of the earth.
Another way of saying this, perhaps, is to ask: what would our tools look like if we had a better balance between RH and LH? There is surely a feedback between our LH-dominated technologies and the further lurch into the emissary ruling the master, as it were.
Contemplation, music and poetry are the correctives. What kind of tools might that produce? I think of Ch. 80 of the Tao Te Ching, in this regard.
What comes to mind is 'simplicity' - Tools which don't as it were pretend to be other than what they are. So for example the 'smart' phone . . . does little by way of being a phone, and its 'smarts' are in the OS designed to draw you in. Its deception goes as far as its name! The hammer - different matter altogether, but again we need to heed the warning that use it too often and eevrything looks like a nail! :-)
I'm not sure about 'technologies that enhance us . . .' after all isn't that the posthuman utopian view? Do we need enhancing? I don't think they can help us grow in Love (?)
And to step back from the anthropocentric focus, how do technologies enhance the Creation? Or better 'heal'?
Any conversation I think need to begin with the sense of the core human problem, which is alientation. not knowing who or where we are we blunder around in blind desire - Sin.
As Christians we tend to think of alienation primarily in terms of 'from God and one another', but the Creation account finds us alienated from Creation itself. We see but do not See. Interestingly, Abel's 'farming' doesn't require a technological approach, he offers from the flock. Cain, the fruit of the ground. Then Cain becomes the father of the technological Tubal Cain (Grandfather if my memory serves . . . but being one myself it sometimes fails me :-) )
Technologies have a life of their own, an embedded story about our place in the world. Cell phones tell us we can get on perfectly well in separation - which of course is alienation . . . Another starting point might be to ask, 'what story is this technology unearthing about humanity? Is it True and Good, and of course Beautiful?' The story that is, not the technology :-)
I think rather like Science - taking aim at technology seems mad, after all it is the air that we breathe . . .
Ch 80 of the Tao? I'm aware of the Tao Te Ching, but don't have a copy :-)
Some thoughts from my study desk, at present in darkness as its being used as a sleeping place for one of my grandchildren!
I meant enhance in the the most mundane sense. In that certain tools can make one physically stronger, or more attuned to reality. The hammer or a shovel in the first instance, or say, fine woodworking tools on the other.
I've had to ponder this one long and hard as I realised that there was a significant flaw in my own thinking which effectively banished all simple tools as Technologies. I think that the answer to your question is in part those things which enhance our sense of connection to the Creation. Your examples exemplify this. They are small enough that we note how what we do affects the Creation. They have of course 'powered' 'equivalents', the use of which has no sensation of connection, just sheer power. So a Mechanical digger alienates and allows us to destroy, so also a power saw, indeed the use of the latter causes wood to scream so loud we have to use ear defenders.
Put another way, they must be simple enough not to deceive; their action be explicable to a child; and their maintenance an art in itself. As in a good knife.
I may not have expressed it well. But you capture the point beautifully. It makes me wonder why there isn't a Theology of Tools and technology. Or is there? We certainly need one. We tend to see all tools as neutral, it's all in how you use it. Which is true, up to a point. But tools encapsulate a worldview and as such, a tendency to remake our relation to the world. And since we are beings-in-relation, tools remake us. We are the tool-making animal that is changed by the tools we make. Even to the point of allowing us to destroy ourselves and everything with it. Which is were we've gotten ourselves to. I don't see how we turn away from it.
What would tools of proper relationship look like?
All is well in this little remote canyon. I hope all is well with you. -Jack
Very worthwhile chat. It would be very interesting to hear more about Father's transition from being a ceremonial magician to being the abbot of a monastery. That must have been one fascinating journey.
Jim- It is, in fact, an interesting story to the degree I know of it. Perhaps that can be a future conversation. And just for the record he is a fully professed monk, but not the abbot.-Jack
Peter- Father J-M is the cook and one of my duties here is to do dishes and set the table for the noon meal. So we often have conversations such as these. It has been interesting to discuss the overlap and metaphysical similarities between technology and magic. That both are primarily about self-power and the enactment of the human will as sole measure of "the good".
In that sense it ties in with your latest post. I think what you are saying needs to be more widespread. I have long suspected that when certain rhetoric is so powerfully resonant in me--particularly if coming from unknown sources--I should pause and take a breath. I know, sadly, how effective such manipulation can be and is, and has been in my life. I know I can and have gotten caught up in it as much as anyone. The really terrifying part is how powerful and can be and that I am unable to know it. A difficult problem to circumvent.
“Powerful resonance” is a really interesting thing. It is today the hallmark of something being right, good, or true. It even goes back to Freud and the method of psychoanalysis where (if I am recalling correctly), the evidence that a therapist has made a correct interpretation of the patient’s difficulty is whether or not it “tallies” with something inside the patient. This therapeutic model has been imported into our society, using the same subjective tallying method (i.e., if you feel hurt, you must have been objectively harmed in proportion to the hurt, etc.). It is incredibly difficult to refute, because it is a form of (seeming) knowledge that inhabits the body.
For me, it gets even more interesting in people’s spiritual journeys, in which miraculous and subjectively resonant events are, by default, always assumed to be positive—without, for example, reflecting on them in a wider context of other information, relationships, experiences, etc.
All this is to say, resonant experiences are lovely and tricky things. Perhaps that is part of why we need some abstract language? It may be static and bland, yet it is stable; correct abstract language may be a useful “filter” spiritually and otherwise…although I am not sure McGilchrist would agree with that.
Hi Jack
Thank you for that, and Good to Hear you!
Much to ponder
Although the horse bolted long ago, I’d always dispute the idea that Technology can ever be ‘neutral’. The moment we interact with any technology it similarly interacts with us. Take my ‘go to’ example of an axe. Neuro research shows how we become integrated with the simplest of tools. I become ‘man with an axe’. This changes me and Therefore my relating to the world. Trees, once my friends now shudder at my approach . . .
Lots of things to ponder as I said but it occurred to me that screen activities particularly scatter us, precisely because of their disembodied nature. In the same way thoughts wander into the strangest places as our bodies go to sleep, for our minds have nothing to hold them in place, so the lack of physical interaction means we are - most ironically - powerless to be taken somewhere else. We are less than physically disconnected in our multiple connections.
Trust you are well
Blessings
Eric
Eric- This is exactly my concern. I think of being just out of college working for the National Park Service building boardwalk. At first I was embarrassingly terrible at swinging a hammer. I was a guitarist! But slowly I became far more adept at it, taken great pleasure in driving nails. There is a sweet spot where the nail goes in effortlessly. A small but beautiful thing. The hammer is a fairly basic piece of technology, but in its use I became stronger, more attuned to the necessary skill it took to wield it well. This is even more true in the process of learning a musical instrument but the principle is the same. These are technologies that enhance us.
I can't say the same is true for what the smartphone does to us.
Are there useful distinctions possible in all of this? I hope so. Are there tools of enhancement and connection versus those of isolation and diminishment? The latter may give us great power (or rather we allow others to have power over us) but is it worth the trade? It is easy to cite the benefits of a smartphone, surely there are many, but it is in the overall effect on us and on our way of relating to the world and to each other that we must be attentive to in order to judge rightly. It seems we are losing the real world, and its myriad relations, by our monomaniacal focus on virtual reality.
Perhaps that is too simple, but I don't think entirely misguided.
All is well. The sun is shining at the moment and the air is brisk. A beautiful day. I hope all is well on your side of the earth.
-Jack
Another way of saying this, perhaps, is to ask: what would our tools look like if we had a better balance between RH and LH? There is surely a feedback between our LH-dominated technologies and the further lurch into the emissary ruling the master, as it were.
Contemplation, music and poetry are the correctives. What kind of tools might that produce? I think of Ch. 80 of the Tao Te Ching, in this regard.
HI Jack
Good questions!
What comes to mind is 'simplicity' - Tools which don't as it were pretend to be other than what they are. So for example the 'smart' phone . . . does little by way of being a phone, and its 'smarts' are in the OS designed to draw you in. Its deception goes as far as its name! The hammer - different matter altogether, but again we need to heed the warning that use it too often and eevrything looks like a nail! :-)
I'm not sure about 'technologies that enhance us . . .' after all isn't that the posthuman utopian view? Do we need enhancing? I don't think they can help us grow in Love (?)
And to step back from the anthropocentric focus, how do technologies enhance the Creation? Or better 'heal'?
Any conversation I think need to begin with the sense of the core human problem, which is alientation. not knowing who or where we are we blunder around in blind desire - Sin.
As Christians we tend to think of alienation primarily in terms of 'from God and one another', but the Creation account finds us alienated from Creation itself. We see but do not See. Interestingly, Abel's 'farming' doesn't require a technological approach, he offers from the flock. Cain, the fruit of the ground. Then Cain becomes the father of the technological Tubal Cain (Grandfather if my memory serves . . . but being one myself it sometimes fails me :-) )
Technologies have a life of their own, an embedded story about our place in the world. Cell phones tell us we can get on perfectly well in separation - which of course is alienation . . . Another starting point might be to ask, 'what story is this technology unearthing about humanity? Is it True and Good, and of course Beautiful?' The story that is, not the technology :-)
I think rather like Science - taking aim at technology seems mad, after all it is the air that we breathe . . .
Ch 80 of the Tao? I'm aware of the Tao Te Ching, but don't have a copy :-)
Some thoughts from my study desk, at present in darkness as its being used as a sleeping place for one of my grandchildren!
Blessings
Eric
I meant enhance in the the most mundane sense. In that certain tools can make one physically stronger, or more attuned to reality. The hammer or a shovel in the first instance, or say, fine woodworking tools on the other.
Thank you, Jack
I've had to ponder this one long and hard as I realised that there was a significant flaw in my own thinking which effectively banished all simple tools as Technologies. I think that the answer to your question is in part those things which enhance our sense of connection to the Creation. Your examples exemplify this. They are small enough that we note how what we do affects the Creation. They have of course 'powered' 'equivalents', the use of which has no sensation of connection, just sheer power. So a Mechanical digger alienates and allows us to destroy, so also a power saw, indeed the use of the latter causes wood to scream so loud we have to use ear defenders.
Put another way, they must be simple enough not to deceive; their action be explicable to a child; and their maintenance an art in itself. As in a good knife.
My apologies for missing your point!
I trust you are well
Eric-
I may not have expressed it well. But you capture the point beautifully. It makes me wonder why there isn't a Theology of Tools and technology. Or is there? We certainly need one. We tend to see all tools as neutral, it's all in how you use it. Which is true, up to a point. But tools encapsulate a worldview and as such, a tendency to remake our relation to the world. And since we are beings-in-relation, tools remake us. We are the tool-making animal that is changed by the tools we make. Even to the point of allowing us to destroy ourselves and everything with it. Which is were we've gotten ourselves to. I don't see how we turn away from it.
What would tools of proper relationship look like?
All is well in this little remote canyon. I hope all is well with you. -Jack
Very worthwhile chat. It would be very interesting to hear more about Father's transition from being a ceremonial magician to being the abbot of a monastery. That must have been one fascinating journey.
Jim- It is, in fact, an interesting story to the degree I know of it. Perhaps that can be a future conversation. And just for the record he is a fully professed monk, but not the abbot.-Jack
This was a fascinating conversation, Jack. Thanks. I have thought about tech as magic, but not as much about magic as tech.
Peter- Father J-M is the cook and one of my duties here is to do dishes and set the table for the noon meal. So we often have conversations such as these. It has been interesting to discuss the overlap and metaphysical similarities between technology and magic. That both are primarily about self-power and the enactment of the human will as sole measure of "the good".
In that sense it ties in with your latest post. I think what you are saying needs to be more widespread. I have long suspected that when certain rhetoric is so powerfully resonant in me--particularly if coming from unknown sources--I should pause and take a breath. I know, sadly, how effective such manipulation can be and is, and has been in my life. I know I can and have gotten caught up in it as much as anyone. The really terrifying part is how powerful and can be and that I am unable to know it. A difficult problem to circumvent.
Anyway, I hope you are well. -Jack
“Powerful resonance” is a really interesting thing. It is today the hallmark of something being right, good, or true. It even goes back to Freud and the method of psychoanalysis where (if I am recalling correctly), the evidence that a therapist has made a correct interpretation of the patient’s difficulty is whether or not it “tallies” with something inside the patient. This therapeutic model has been imported into our society, using the same subjective tallying method (i.e., if you feel hurt, you must have been objectively harmed in proportion to the hurt, etc.). It is incredibly difficult to refute, because it is a form of (seeming) knowledge that inhabits the body.
For me, it gets even more interesting in people’s spiritual journeys, in which miraculous and subjectively resonant events are, by default, always assumed to be positive—without, for example, reflecting on them in a wider context of other information, relationships, experiences, etc.
All this is to say, resonant experiences are lovely and tricky things. Perhaps that is part of why we need some abstract language? It may be static and bland, yet it is stable; correct abstract language may be a useful “filter” spiritually and otherwise…although I am not sure McGilchrist would agree with that.
It might have been interesting to ask how priestly ministrations at the Eucharist weren’t also about power? :)