Habits of the High-Tech Heart

A summary of:
Schultze, Q. J. (2002). Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age. Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
Foreward and Preface

Jean Bethke Elshtain writes in the forward that to the extent that there is a religion of technology, this religion is built upon the quicksand of libertarian individualism and bound together by consumerism. This means, then, that "In this vision, we are not bound to one another in substantive and constitutive ways in families, churches, or politics" (9). The substance of it lacks what religions ostensibly serve to provide, i.e. the "moral fabric of our lives" (9). Furthermore, it weakens what Durkheim identified as a key feature of religous experience, i.e. the "collective effervescence" as he called it, because indeed "Cyberculture disconnects us from human communities in a particular termporal location... even as it connects us in thin ways to strangers" (10). The community is important - and we engage with it - only in as much as it is useful to us, such that "Human relations take on a quality of temporariness and proceed on strictly cost-benefit lines" (10).

Elshtain emphasizes Schultze's point that our abandoment of religion has left us morally confused (Schultze might even say bereft), particularly as it relates to our engagement with technology. This forced me to ask myself, Why am I not talking about designing "moral technology"? There are probably several reasons, but one is because if I am to speak about morality without first grounding this morality in spirituality, I'm afraid that the morality I speak about, too, will be tainted by the values that underpin technology. In other words, I think it's best to begin from spiritual practice, then get to morals, then use that to inform the design of technology; rather than to (seemingly as Schultze does in this book, in fact) critique technology for its lack of certain presumed morals. Where do these morals come from? How did they function in society in the past?

Another reason is that in my mind (perhaps wrongly), morality implies dogma, whereas spirituality implies guidance. I do not wish to impose my morality on anyone else, no matter how much I like to think I'm right. But what I am interested in is exploring new ways in which technology can accommodate alternative value sets. It's a bit more passive, so I prefer the softer terminology.

Elshtain uses the phrase "responsible stewardship" to evoke a moral imperative to behave differently than we are currently and to recognize our important role in the creation of our future. She writes, "it is responsible stewardship alone that will determine whether the future is one in which we are all wired as millions of isolates or whether we are connected as creatures of the flesh who can be lifted up in spirit and nurtured in hope only through community" (11). Again, the emphasis is on community. I'm only now beginning to realize that the progression of my academic career makes a bit of sense: it's always been about communities. So when I wrote previously about fostering social capital through digital technologies, this was another way of describing what I see as a lack of a community spirit that in some way technology needs to address. Fostering social capital is an attempt to harness the collectivity, which in many ways relates to the heart of spiritual or religious practice (again, Durkheim's “collective effervescence”). My hope (and what I will explore in my PhD) is that we can create more spiritual technology, something that imbues a moral consciousness into our engagements with it and with our communities through it, and in turn reinforce our experience of a collective responsibility to one another, all of which may very well later be couched in social capital terms.

There is, however, a personal experience of technology and the technological world, and this too is very disturbed (say I, and Schultze). Schultze begins, "This book is partly a personal journey to find my way in an era when many human beings seem, like me, to have wandered off the trail that leads to what Socrates called the 'good life'" (13). Bizarrely, as I'm reading Schultze's book, ostensibly about religious morality in the high-tech age, I am constantly reminded of Karl Marx's warnings about the way capitalism destroys what is so great about being a human.

Right off the bat, Schultze echoes what I have identified as a critical flaw with technology - and potentially its eventual downfall if it becomes redundant for us: "they [technologies] do not satisfy my need for moral coherence and spiritual direction" (13). Quite the contrary, Schultze argues that they distract and confuse, actively preventing the achievement of these goals.

While I think Schultze and I are essentially concerned with the problem, our solutions are possibly very different. His stated goal is as follows: "My goal is not so much to discard database and messaging technologies as much as to adapt them to venerable ways of life anchored in age-old virtues" (13). This implies minor tweaking. I'm suggesting major overhauling, revisioning of the foundations of technological development. For example, this would not mean changing how we message, but imagining up entirely new possibilities for communication not yet explored in technology. The reason this radical approach is necessary is because, I fear, the technology we are familiar with is built upon a foundation that reinforces values anathema to the religious or spiritual (something Wertheim's book exposed).