Technology and Humanity

I'm a huge technology fan (duh - the blog), and I count myself happy to live in the age of the internet. It's wonderful, and the opportunities of daily exploration are nothing short of miraculous. So I wonder if it's ironic that I resinate so much with Bob Herbert's beautiful column in today's New York Times.

"Tweet Less, Kiss More" caught my attention the day after I opened my first Twitter account, mostly to actually experience how it works. Mr. Herbert reminds us that:

We need to reduce the speed limits of our lives. We need to savor the trip. Leave the cellphone at home every once in awhile. Try kissing more and tweeting less. And stop talking so much.

Listen.

Other people have something to say, too. And when they don’t, that glorious silence that you hear will have more to say to you than you ever imagined. That is when you will begin to hear your song. That’s when your best thoughts take hold, and you become really you.

Of course, Mr. Herbert is not the first to to point out the dehumanizing effects of technology. Wendell Berry is my favorite critic of blind technological advancement (famous for his essay, "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer," yes, more irony, read it on your computer. This link includes the letters to Harpers, I believe, where it was first published, and Mr. Berry's witty response). Bob Herbert's column calls to mind a passage from Jayber Crow, which I read last fall, in which Jayber buys a an automobile (I wanted to quote directly, but I forgot that I had lent my book to a friend). Mr. Berry describes Jayber's growing impatience with anything moving slower than he was, particularly on the road, as he drives the car in post-war rural Kentucky, and this attitude eats away at his moral character. Knowing he does not truly need the car, he eventually gets rid of it. I believe somewhere in Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis is less moralistic, but nonetheless on the same train of thought, where he notes that, being born before the invention of the automobile he could better appreciate the nature in his own limited space.

Of course, this question of technological advancement and morals was around well-before the modern era. The Economist describes this story:

IN 1492, the same year that Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, a Benedictine abbot named Trithemius, living in western Germany, wrote a spirited defence of scribes who tried to impress God’s word most firmly on their minds by copying out texts by hand. To disseminate his own books, though, Trithemius used the revolutionary technology of the day, the printing press.

I can imagine that the scribes of old had a sort of patient, devotional and spiritual experience lost on many of us today by daily copying scripture. But, as we all know, the printing press put eventually put them out of business and brought God's word to everyone else.

The Economist article I linked to reviews a book about troubles with modern technology (social media), and suggests that the answer to troubles with technology is moderation, or "old-fashioned self-restraint." Bob Herbert suggests the same.

One of the essential problems of our society is that we have a tendency, amid all the craziness that surrounds us, to lose sight of what is truly human in ourselves, and that includes our own individual needs — those very special, mostly nonmaterial things that would fulfill us, give meaning to our lives, enlarge us, and enable us to more easily embrace those around us.

One caveat with this sentence. Whenever we talk about "what is truly human in ourselves," we can forget that the opposite of whatever we're talking about may be just as human. Technology enables and is enabled by our drive to achieve, our joy in production, our escapism, our fear that we are missing something, our anxiety that we are not keeping up, our need for connection, our appetite for information. Whatever is positive or negative about these traits, they are fully human, keeping phones and computers within arms reach, wherever we go.

Old-fashioned self-restraint means restraining a very human part of us. If it means closing the laptop to pay attention to my wife or my daughter (more irony: as I write this, they are sitting behind me), it means suffocating a very human part me to allow them (or my friends, or my job, or my church, or a piece of art, or ultimately God Himself) to shape me, and make me a better human.