Techno-Moral Crisis

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.
Introduction - Identifying Our Techno-Moral Crisis

One of Schultze's main criticisms of modern techno-society is that we are not particularly discerning with regard to the technologies we allow to creep into and in some cases control our lives. We have not cultivated critical thinking with regard to technology, because we seem to have bought into the notion that technology = progress = good. But as he says, "our tendency to adopt every new information technology uncritically - without discerning the options, setting appropriate limits, and establishing human practices - is simply irresponsible" (16-17).

The two main inspirations for Schultze are Alexis de Tocqueville and Vaclav Havel. "Tocqueville discovered that Americans' individual self-interests are leavened morally by 'habits of the heart.' In his view, these social mores emerge from Americans' commitments to each other and to the general public good. He concluded that voluntary religious associations, in particular, cultivate moral sentiments that soften self-inteest, with an overarching commitment to the common good" (17). I think there's a lesson in this, but I think it's not a lesson so much about religion as it is about a spiritual orientation, again, something akin to an sense of the "collectivity." I think it's dangerous - and probably flawed, given the negative flipside of religion, i.e. tribalism - to give the credit to religion and assume that this is the answer. The answer, I would argue, is a reattunement to the collective, what I would argue is spirituality firstly, and may secondarily be seen in religion.

Havel is a bit of a hero for Schultze because he wrote a series of letters to his wife, published later as Letters to Olga, in which he addressed "the crucial signifiacne of personal and collective responsibility in maintaining democratic freedoms amist increasingly technological and bureaucratic social institutions," and criticized our "uncritical faith in technoogy" (18). He made a fantastic statement at the 1992 World Economic Forum:

We have to abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions for use waiting to be discovered, a body of information to be fed into a computer in the hope that sooner or later it will spit out a universal solution....
[Instead] we have to release from the sphere of private whim and rejuvenate such forces as a natural, unique, and unrepeatable experience of the world, an elementary sense of justice, the ability to see things as others do, a sense of transcendental responsibility, archetypal wisdom, good taste, courage, compassion, and faith in the importance of particular measures that do not aspire to be a universal, thus an objective or technical, key to salvation (21).

Jacques Ellul has made similar critiques, arguing that "this technological-mindedness is essentially a faith in la technique, the means of efficiency and control" (18). I think that this necessarily requires us to talk about technology in Foucauldian terms, i.e. disciplinary power. (See how the problem gets deeper and deeper!?)

Schultze himself is wary of phrases like "digital democracy", which he sees as propagandist in support of this faith in technology; "it socializes [us] in technological values" (18). This has caused me to pause: what does it mean to be a PhD student in a programme funded by the EPSRC's Digital Economy initiative? What is the digital economy? I will explore this in greater detail later.

The very ways in which we speak of technology have the potential to influence our values. For example, what happens when we "replace humane, morally informed wrods such as 'wisdom', 'person', and 'justice' with technological terms such as 'information', 'user', and 'access'" (19)? I think, again, Foucault would be able to shed light on this - it all boils down to power. And it does seem that the Internet is becoming a Goliath: "Instead of intentionally embedding cyber-technology within existing cultures, we let cyber-technology shape our way of life" (20), in part beacuse we have a similarly strong faith in the market to determine what we need. And while religious leaders may weigh in with respect to moral implications of technology, it is not as if these leaders are in a position to design alternative kinds of technology. The people who do have this power seem, on the whole, to have adopted in their designs (if not otherwise politically) the libertarianism which "celebrates technique and promotes strident individualism, affords little respect for moral order" (20).

Schultze sees one of the keys to developing moral technology as being an awareness and consideration of their long-term consequences. "As members of the information society, we are so concerned with divining the near future that we lose some of our historical grounding in moral ways of understanding" (21). He relays an anecdote of Danny Hillis, designer of computer architecture, who took action along these lines by creating the slowest computer in the world, "The Long Now Clock" that will run for 10,000 years. The point of this is to make us slow down a bit and to stop thinking about the immediate needs of the here and now. Schultze interpreted the project thusly: "By calling our attention to an older tool, he hoped to interest us in the future of humanity" (15). See this video.



What's interesting about this is that it forcibly resituates us in time, whereas in recent years, the "Internet largely has released us from the tyranny of space and time" (15). What would it look like if we were to build a cyber analogue to this clock? And if we did, what would the effect be? After all, as Wertheim showed, the spiritual potential of cyberspace lies in the precise fact of its liberation from space-time. Then again, this liberation produces an amoral space precisely because it encourages people to live only in the here and now. Further complicating things, I would argue that many spiritual teachings encourage this similar practice of living in the moment, described as mindfulness; yet somehow in the case of these spiritual practices, perhaps because it is a tradition carried through generations, one is able to do so without shutting oneself off to the future consequences of one's behavior. Thus morality is preserved. But this is a very complicated question that will require a great deal of further thought.

Ultimately, Schultze's aim is fairly modest: "To be virtuous people in a high-tech world is to be neither moralists nor pragmatists but rather sojourners who humbly seek goodness in an eternal adventure that began before we were born and will continue after we die. As sojourners, we realize that this world is not our final destination but only one leg of a journey whose outcome we can neither fully control nor completely envision" (24). Me, I'm more of an activist. I think that what we do on this earth matters, and that the decisions we make can usher in dramatic changes for good or bad. What's ironic about Schultze's statement is that is seems to promote an observationist approach to the world - kick back and watch it, rather than participate actively in it - which he later criticizes as one of the great problems of technological culture; i.e. that it makes observers out of us. But then I recognize my own hypocricy, because while I agree wholeheartedly that we need to be more humble when it comes to technological development, I also think that we may just be clever enough to think our way out of the mess we have created and design technology that fits a more spiritual way of living.