Religion and Theology

Technology and Magic

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 1 Comment

As counterintuitive as it may now seem, there are links between the ethos and the history of technology and magic. A few weeks ago, I posted some observations by Lewis Mumford and C. S. Lewis to that effect (although Lewis speaks more generally of science rather than technology). In The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul makes a series of similar observations regarding magic and technique. Technique, for Ellul, encompasses not only material technology, but also the extension of machine logic into social and personal spheres. “Technique,” Ellul explains, “integrates the machine into society.” It amounts to the conditioning of man for a world of machines. More generally, it is a mentality that privileges efficiency and rationalization.

According to Ellul, “technique has evolved along two distinct paths.” The “concrete technique of homo faber [man the maker]” and “the technique, of a more or less spiritual order, which we call magic.”

Citing the work of sociologist Marcel Mauss, Ellul describes the affinities between magic and technique:

“Magic developed along with other techniques as an expression of man’s will to obtain certain results of a spiritual order. To attain them, man made use of an aggregate of rites, formulas, and procedures which, once established, do not vary. Strict adherence to form is one of he characteristics of magic: forms and rituals, masks whichever vary, the same kind of prayer wheels, the same ingredients for mystical drugs, for formulae for divination, and so on.”

And a little later on he writes,

“Every magical means, in the eyes of the person who uses it, is the most efficient one. In the spiritual realm, magic displays all the characteristics of a technique. It is a mediator between man and ‘the higher powers,’ just as other techniques mediate between man and matter. It leads to efficacy because it subordinates the power of the gods to men, and it secures a predetermined result. It affirms human power in that it seeks to subordinate the gods to men, just as technique serves to cause nature to obey.”

This latter observation also recalls Walter Benjamin’s observation that “technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relations between nature and man.”

Regarding magic’s relationship to technology, Mumford explained that “magic was the bridge that united fantasy with technology: the dream of power with the engines of fulfillment.”

What technology and magic, then, have in common is the effort to manipulate relationships through techniques that are an extension and empowerment of the human will. Manipulate tends to have rather pejorative connotations, but I use it nonetheless because of its suggestive etymology which is linked to a method for mining iron ore, a pharmacist’s measure, and, of course, the hand. This etymology felicitously evokes both technology and the body.  The pejorative connotations, however, are not entirely misplaced.

Historians of science have linked the rise of modern science in the West with theological and philosophical developments in the late medieval period. During this time, Aristotelianism was displaced by a voluntarist account of God’s action. The voluntarists so emphasized God’s power and freedom, they concluded there was nothing at all necessary, and thus subject to rational deduction, about the world as it exists. It could have been otherwise in every detail. It would not do, then, to merely reason about the way the world must necessarily be assuming certain rational propositions, rather the world must be investigated in order to arrive at an accurate understanding of its nature.

Magic, science, and technology all initially flourished in this cultural climate oriented toward the will, and this orientation became a part of their DNA as it were. The freedom of the divine will imagined by the voluntarists appears eventually to have become the freedom of the human will. Unfettered from the constraints of either Aristotelian form or telos, and later from notions of a normative moral and natural order, the human will is liberated to manipulate reality as it sees fit.

Technology, in Western contexts, was anchored in this emphasis on the unfettered will and the activist vision of Francis Bacon, who did more than any other individual to shape Western attitudes toward technology in the early modern period. It is little wonder then that we are generally unwilling to abide non-technological constraints on technology. We are generally unwilling to abide such constraints on our own will and we have long since understood technology, as we once did magic, as an accouterment of the will.

Opaque Surfaces and the Worlds They Hide

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 6 Comments

Thinking about the opacity of life.

All around us our devices present us with surfaces below which lie complexities few understand. Our technologies are increasingly opaque to us. But this is, from a certain perspective, not very different from much of the rest of our experience.

As I look up at the sky, it presents me with a surface which, during the day, hides from my view the vastness of the space that lies beyond it. Even at night, the starlit sky discloses only a glimmer of the magnitude of the universe.

As I look at the blade of grass and my hand that holds it, a surface presents itself beyond which lies another, atomic and sub-amtomic, universe whose infinitesimal scale is entirely concealed to my unaided senses.

How much of reality lies beyond these surfaces that present themselves to us as the perceived limits of lived experience? And yet there is one other surface that veils a world from view.

As I look into the eyes of the persons I encounter day in and day out, a surface once again presents itself in seemingly uncomplicated fashion. But beyond this surface too lies a complex and unfathomable universe. The mind, dare I say soul of every person is another world — vast, complex, mysterious, wondrous, and beyond the reach of my ordinary perception.

In the end, I suspect that of all these, it is my own consciousness that is most opaque to my perception and the most challenging to penetrate.

All our learning is finally an effort to see beyond these surfaces.

Gratitude as a Measure of Technology

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

Last Thanksgiving I posted a few lines from G. K. Chesterton on gratitude. Chesterton carries some weight around here; you’ll notice that another of his memorable observations serves as the tag line for this blog. Chesterton had his flaws, of course, but we would all do well to cultivate the kind of gratitude that pervaded his posture toward existence. His conversion, for example, was famously occasioned by an overwhelming sense of sheer gratitude for the resplendent gratuity of being and the realization that there must be some Being to which such gratitude should properly be directed. And Chesterton’s gratitude and mirth also infiltrated the thinking of another individual who looms large on this blog’s tag cloud, Marshall McLuhan.

And so, perhaps establishing something of a tradition, here again is Chesterton on gratitude:

  • “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
  • “You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”

Last year I paired Chesterton with a poem by Wendell Berry, this year I want to tie gratitude more directly to the question which lies at the heart of much of what I write here: How do we live well with technology?

Chesterton, as the latter quotation suggests, recognized that there was much more to be thankful for than the food on our table. He recognized that God’s gifts encompassed the whole of lived experience.  This led me to wonder what else we might add to that list of activities before which we ought to, and would gleefully, acknowledge a debt of gratitude; and more to the point, I wondered what technologies we might include in such a list. This in turn suggested the following thought: Might we measure the value of a technology by the degree to which we were grateful for it? Could gratitude, in other words, be the measure by which we evaluate our technologies?

Evaluating our technologies, placing them on the dock as the Brits might say, interrogating them (although perhaps not under “enhanced” techniques), these are necessary if we are to live well with our technologies. They are part of the work of attaining a critical distance from our technologies so that we may learn to use our tools toward human ends, rather than find ourselves being conformed to the logic of our technologies. But how do we do this? By what standard or measure do we evaluate our tools and what do we have to know about them in order apply whatever standard or measure we arrive at? Well, it’s complicated, but here is one way to approach the matter.

Gratitude — unlike, say, the “Like” button — is a complex response, and yet one that is not difficult to formulate. As a response it is deeper, more layered than mere approval or even enjoyment. Some of that for which I am grateful, I would scarcely label pleasant; and some of what I might not call unpleasant, would yet fail to trigger gratitude. In this way gratitude becomes a telling measure of what we value, what is meaningful, and what adds genuine value to our lives.

Chesterton’s point, of course, is that there is for most of us very much indeed for which we ought to be grateful. One might be tempted to say that finally there is very little for which we ought not be grateful. Gratitude was for Chesterton more a way of experiencing life than a discreet response to a list of items and experiences. But gratitude does admit distinction. We are justified in ranking that for which we are grateful. It is coherent to ask what one is most grateful for even if it makes less sense to ask what one is least grateful for.

So with all of this in mind, then, we might ask two questions of technology: Am I grateful for it? and, In what relationship does it stand to the things for which I am most grateful?

The first of these questions is the most straightforward. But answering it, and following through on the implications of our answers may prove instructive. So, for example, from where I sit I can see my refrigerator. We are so used to its presence in our houses that we take it for granted and we may not immediately think of it when we think of technologies in our lives. But, of course, it is a technology and I find that I am indeed grateful for it. But if this is not to be a superficial exercise, I should also ask why I am grateful for it. In this case, and perhaps most cases relating to particular technologies, it is not necessarily for the thing itself that I am grateful, but for what it enables; namely, the preservation of food that I both need and find enjoyable. This signals something about the value of our tools: it is often derivative. I may be thankful for the presence of a friend whether or not that friend is at that moment “useful” to me. But it is rarely the mere presence of a technology for which we are grateful.

I might also ask if I could do without the technology as a measure of my gratitude for it. As for the refrigerator, I would have to say, not without great difficulty. Now, having affirmed my gratitude for the refrigerator, I should also ask what makes the refrigerator possible? This becomes a lesson in the complexity of technological systems. Refrigerators are not of much use without electricity and so, when I think about my gratitude for the refrigerator, I have to consider all that makes the power grid possible. Taking these connected factors into consideration might temper or complicate my gratitude or it might extend my gratitude further still.

But, staying in the kitchen, what about the microwave? If I ask myself, “Am I grateful for the microwave?” I find that I am hesitant to say “yes.” I realize that the microwave is often very convenient and it has saved me time and effort on countless occasions. Yet, I am not quite grateful for it and this is the thing about gratitude, either you feel it or you don’t. Admittedly, it is possible in principle for someone to lack gratitude when by every objective measure they ought to be grateful. But — narcissists, misanthropes, and teenagers aside — how common is this really? I can’t bring myself to say I am grateful for the microwave even though I can say I am grateful for the refrigerator. That signals something, no?

Why the hesitation? The microwave, for one thing, is not quite necessary in the same way as the refrigerator. It would take a few adjustments, but I could do without the microwave well enough. And what does the microwave secure that is unique to it and not a conventional oven? Efficiency, speed, convenience? For whatever reason, these fail to elicit gratitude from me. Now, let me quickly add, gratitude is sensitive to context. A single mother of four who works throughout the day and then comes home and has to prepare dinner for her tribe may readily profess her deep gratitude for the microwave. No argument here. This reminds us of the complexities of technology, human context is a part of the equation when evaluating a technology and that is a dynamic and unstable variable. Rarely can we take a technology as a discreet object and evaluate it apart from the uses to which it is put in the context of particular lives and concrete realities.

When we consider digital technologies, things get even more difficult to parse since we are no longer dealing with singular items with a narrow range of functions. The Internet and the growing number of devices through which we access it, infiltrate so many dimensions of lived experience that it may be difficult to apply the standard of gratitude meaningfully. When thinking of digital technologies, then, it may be better to examine the sets of practices that gather around particular platforms and applications rather than the devices in themselves.

And since digital technologies diffuse into the fabric of everyday life, this also leads us to the second question, in what relationship does a technology stand to the things for which I am most grateful? In many cases, we might have little cause to be grateful for a technology in itself. It is rather for the role the technology plays within the complex dynamic of everyday experience that we may or may not be grateful for it. The single mother, for example, may be most grateful for time spent with her children. In which case the microwave, which theoretically reduces her time in the kitchen, frees her up to spend more of her precious time with her children. I realize that in real life the distribution of time is rarely quite so simple, but the basic principle seems sound enough — a technology’s value is heightened if it stands in positive relation to that for which we are most grateful. Under different circumstances, the microwave may in fact undermine that for which we are most grateful by, for example, atomizing and dispersing members of the family rather than drawing them around the work of preparing a meal and sharing it together. The question of gratitude then is a context sensitive measure of value.

Altogether, I’m suggesting that the question of gratitude in relation to technology functions as a lens that focuses our perception. When we consider all for which we are most thankful, we are considering those things which make life worth living. Most often these involve health, loving relationships, and meaningful experiences of beauty and joy.  It is these things which ought to structure our life and order our choices. Considering technologies in light of gratitude, then, is a way of disciplining our use of technology for the sake of those things which truly enhance the quality of our lives.

Take a look around you. Ask yourself if you are grateful for the devices and tools that gather around you. Ask yourself whether these devices and tools enhance and augment your relationship to those things for which you are most grateful. And then, in light of how you respond to those two questions, ask yourself if the amount of time, attention, and money you invest in your tools and devices is reasonably proportional to the gratitude they elicit or the manner in which they relate to that for which you are most grateful.

I’m not suggesting this is the only, or even the best, way to go about evaluating our technologies and their place in our lives. But I do think it is a useful way of approaching the issue and I know that it has helped me identify imbalances in need of correction. Ultimately, it is just a way of aligning our practice with our priorities, a simple thing that our technologies have an uncanny way of complicating.

So be grateful and extend that gratitude to technology when it is warranted, but don’t allow any technology to undermine your experience of those things for which you are most grateful.

After Stories (and Poems): The Forgotten Aesthetics of Persuasion

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

In the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible if you prefer, there is a story about a king and his excesses and a prophet who, as we would say today, spoke truth to power. The story is found in the book attributed to Samuel and the king was David, the most famous and revered of ancient Israel’s rulers. As is almost to be expected of men in power, David was infected with the notion that he might, with impunity, take all that his eyes desired, including the wife of another man — a good and loyal man who served David honorably. The king sleeps with Bathsheeba, the man’s wife, and she becomes pregnant. Hoping to cover up his rapaciousness, David recalls the husband, Uriah, from the battlefield and allows him the night with his wife expecting that he will do what all soldiers home from war would do given a night with the woman they love. Uriah would suppose the baby his, and all would be hidden from sight. Unfortunately for David, Uriah cannot bear the unfair advantage he has been granted over his comrades at the front and refuses to sleep with his wife. Getting Uriah drunk made little difference; he was a rock. So David had him killed.

Again, following an all too familiar pattern, David refused to acknowledge his guilt and his power shielded him from consequences and shame. That is until he meets with a prophet named Nathan. Nathan claims to bring news of a great injustice that had been perpetrated in the land. He tells David of a poor shepherd whose lone sheep was seized by a wealthy man in order to feed his guests, and this despite owning a great number of his own sheep. David is outraged; he demands to know who this man is that he may be brought to justice. Nathan, having artfully laid the trap, replies, “You are that man.” With that simple story Nathan bypassed David’s arrogant blindness and brought him to a startled recognition of the vileness of his actions.

I recount this well-known story because I have, in recent conversations, found myself expressing the need to gracefully articulate the virtue and necessity of making what would be very hard and unpopular choices for the sake our own personal well-being and the health of our society. Much of what I write, whether on matters relating to technology or in my occasional ramblings on other diverse topics, is premised on the assumption that human flourishing demands the recognition and acceptance of certain limits. I assume that the highest form of freedom is not the ability to pursue whatever whim or fancy may strike us at any given moment, but rather the freedom to make choices which will promote our well being and the well being of our communities. And such choices often involve sacrifice and the curtailment of our own autonomy. To put this another way, happiness, that elusive state which according to Aristotle is the highest good we all pursue, lies not at the end of a journey at which every turn we have chosen for ourselves, but along the path marked by choices for others and in accord with a moral order that may at times require the reordering rather than immediate satisfaction of our desires.

Put more practically, perhaps, the health of our society may now rest on our learning to live within constraints — economic, political, natural — that we have spent the last few decades ignoring or otherwise refusing. But no sooner do those words cross my lips or appear before my eyes as I type them, than I realize that they are likely to be unwelcome and unappealing words. And concurrently I realize that the language of limits may be misconstrued to mean that we must not pursue legitimate forms of material and social progress. On this point I endorse once more the distinction made by Albert Borgmann between troubles (read limits) that we accept in practice but oppose in principle, and those troubles (limits) we accept both in practice and in principle because we are ultimately better for accepting them. But this is all a hard sell.

On more than one occasion I have referred to an essay by Wendell Berry that appeared in Harper’s three years ago. The essay was titled “Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits.” I refer to it often because I believe there are few writers who articulate the case for limits so well as he. Berry succeeds because he is able not only to criticize the ideology of limitlessness and point to its often disastrous consequences, but also to make a positive case for the possibilities of beauty and flourishing that arise from a life that embraces rather than refuses certain kinds of limits. Berry frames our limits as “inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.” And it is this framing that is essential to the public case for any reorientation of our thinking and living in and with this world.

With her recent essay in The Nation, “Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist,” Marilynne Robinson matches Berry’s gift for speaking hard words with a grace that allows them to be heard, even if they are finally rejected. As I read Robinson’s words I marveled at what was unfolding line by line. Here she was dismantling our idols and stripping our altars, speaking to us with a seriousness and gravity that is wholly absent from our political and cultural discourse, and yet it was all done with mesmerizing artfulness. It was pungent medicine going down with sweet delight.

We need more writers, thinkers, and leaders in the mold of Berry and Robinson. It is a testament to their winsomeness and wisdom that both articulated essentially conservative (although not Republican) and religiously intoned visions which were published in decidedly left-of-center publications. It is, of course, also a testimony to the poverty of our categories.

It occurred to me, then, that it was little wonder they were able to make their case so well since both were novelists and one a poet as well. Little wonder because it seems to me that the case for limits is best shown rather than told. In other words, it is best conveyed by a story rather than a lecture. Like David, we need our prophets to weave their critique of our deeply entrenched disorders into a narrative that would bypass our self-righteous defenses. Moreover, these narratives need also to capture, in the manner that only a story can capture, the beauty and love that attend to lives lived by the counterintuitive logic of restraint, moderation, self-sacrifice, and regard for neighbor and place.

That it is the novelist and the poet that is best positioned to make such a case is also not surprising since their work is a constant affirmation of the inexhaustible beauty that arises from the formal elaboration of endless possibilities within a field of real and imposed limitations. Consider language itself as the primordial model of a limited and bounded but inexhaustible resource. The use of language is bounded by the grammar that allows for intelligibility and poets have since times immemorial bound themselves to structures that have called forth rather than foreclosed boundless creativity. Little wonder then that daily finding and making beauty within the limits of language, novelists and poets are best positioned to articulate the fulfillment and joy that may arise from the refusal to prioritize personal autonomy and the unencumbered life. After all, just as the frictionless life is also a life without traction, the life that refuses all burdens and attachments is, to borrow a phrase, unbearably light.

My hope is that we have not altogether lost our taste for stories and poems, that the sun has not yet set on literary sensibility. It would be tragic if for clarity and simplicity’s sake we sought our answers from technocrats with bullet-points and found that we could not hear or be moved to action by what they had to say. Although, perhaps that would be for the better since the technocratic logic that refuses complexity is more a part of the problem than of any credible solution. Worse still would be to find that our habits of attention, as some of our more pessimistic critics have warned, had become so attenuated that we could not follow an artful plot nor give a poem the loving, patient care that it demands before it will yield its wisdom.

Reviewing Robert Bellah’s “Religion in Human Evolution,” sociologist David Martin summarizes the book’s central message as follows: “‘We’ are inveterate story tellers as well as theoreticians … As ever in Bellah, his rigorous commitment to objectivity emits a normative aura: it is not a matter of putting stories behind us as childish but of telling the best stories to frame our collective existence.”

Indeed, and we might even put the matter more urgently. “It is difficult to get the news from poems,” William Carlos Williams admitted in a line from “Asphodel,” “yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

Alasdair MacIntyre famously concluded his ground breaking After Virtue by leaving us waiting “not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict.” It would seem, however, that we would do better to wait for another, doubtless very different, Nathan to penetrate through our blindness and awaken us to the possibilities offered by St. Benedict.

An Earthy, Festive Life

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

Feeling less than satisfied with life these days? Hilaire Belloc has some advice for you:

“… the most important cause of this feeling of satisfaction is that you are doing what the human race has done for thousands upon thousands of years … Whatever is buried right into our blood from immemorial habit, that we must be certain to do if we are to be fairly happy (of course no grown man or woman can really be very happy for long — but I mean reasonably happy), and, what is more important, decent and secure of our souls. Thus one should from time to time hunt animals, or at the very least shoot at a mark; one should always drink some kind of fermented liquor with one’s food – and especially deeply upon great feast-days; one should go out on the water from time to time; and one should dance on occasions; and one should sing in chorus. For all these things man has done since God put him in a garden and his eyes first became troubled with a soul. Similarly some teacher or ranter or other, whose name I forget, said lately one very wise thing at least, which was that every man should do a little work with his hands.”

I appreciate the allowance for those who are not terribly keen on hunting. Now the only question is what fermented liquor to have with breakfast.