Devices of the Soul (Hardcover)

Introduction

Self-forgetfulness is the reigning temptation of the technological era. This is why we so readily give our assent to the absurd proposition that a computer can add two plus two, despite the fact that it can do nothing of the sort—not if we have in mind anything remotely resembling what we do when we add numbers. In the computer’s case, the mechanics of addition involve no motivation, no consciousness of the task, no mobilization of the will, no metabolic activity, no imagination. And its performance brings neither the satisfaction of accomplishment nor the strengthening of practical skills and cognitive capacities.

How is it, then, that we can so easily think of the computer as doing the same thing we do? Only because nearly the entire content of our own activity has fallen from view. It may seem trivial to forget ourselves in the matter of simple addition. But if we greatly increase the sophistication of the calculation, and if we continue to reduce it to the non-human terms of the machine, eventually we arrive at a computer’s-eye-view of the entire world of industry, commerce, and society at large. From this viewpoint it is wonderfully easy to assume, for example, that the financial spreadsheet of a business provides all the information required for making decisions. But where in the numbers do we find the aims and ideals of the founders, managers, and employees? Where do we read about the qualitative impact of the company’s operations upon the local community, consumers, and the physical environment? And where do we find the passions and motivations, the intentions and moral impulses, through which we can infuse a business with the light of human consciousness and make of it a vocation, a worthy expression of our lives?

The computer’s automatic logic, necessary and valuable though it may be, sucks all these flesh-and-blood concerns into a vortex of wonderfully effective calculation—so wonderful and so effective that only what is calculable may survive in our awareness.

The remarkable thing is not this obvious and even hackneyed truth. Rather, it is the fact that, despite our recognition of the truth, we often find it nearly impossible to alter our course in any meaningful way. And so we move in lockstep with an ever more closely woven web of programmed logic. None of the machines guiding our activity may seem particularly malevolent, yet the meaning of our lives all the while becomes harder to lay hold of.

How hard it is to keep faith with ourselves is painfully evident in education, where everyone disclaims the fact-shoveling model of learning. And yet the unconscious metaphors by which we reveal our real convictions about education revolve more and more around the idea of downloading information or transmitting it from one database to another. And the computer in the classroom makes this idea irresistibly concrete. Transfixed by the efficient data flows all around us, we easily lose sight of the fact that lack of information has not been the bottleneck in education for decades, or even centuries, if it ever was. Rather, the task for the teacher is to take the infinitesimal slice of available information that can actually be used in the classroom and find some way to bring students into living connection with it.

Of course, the computer itself is one of the things we need to find a living connection to. We can take justifiable pride in the fact that we conceived and developed the idea of this nearly miraculous machine. But we should not forget that, in order to do this, we had in some sense to reduce ourselves to the machine’s level—to imagine it and mime it within ourselves—until we achieved such a clear, internal expression of it that we could build it in the world. In particular, we had to enter into our own potentials for programmed, automatic thought and action before we could build automatons of silicon, plastic, and metal.

Not only did the machine originate with us, and not only does it live in us, but now it has a massive external and objective presence in our lives. We can interact with all this machinery only by shaping ourselves to its requirements. In this way the objectified machine can, if we allow it, further strengthen those inner, mimed automatisms from which it first arose. Now repeated in compulsive resonance with the universal computational apparatus of society, these inner gestures threaten to harden into chains of the soul.

The danger of self-forgetfulness, then, is the danger that we will descend to the level of the computational devices we have engineered—not merely imagining ever new and more sophisticated automatons, but reducing ourselves to automatons. So first and most fundamentally, it’s not the objective mechanical entity we should worry about, but rather our own participation in it. There is, however, positive hope in this, because our participation is, or can be, a long way from machine-like. Yes, in one way or another we must adapt ourselves to the machine’s requirements, but how we do so—and when, and in what context—leaves a lot of room for expressing our own purposes.

This is an essentially inner work. It requires a certain spirit of mischief and trickery from us, a willingness to fashion creative inner “devices” that stand opposite the inner automatisms now resonating so powerfully with the external machinery of our lives. These liberating devices, these machinations of the soul, arise only where we can recollect ourselves, find inner quiet and freedom from distraction, and discover the center from which alone we can weave the harmonious tapestry of an entire life. There are no information management tools for this task.

This is not a how-to book. I offer no lists of “things you can do,” no “Ten Steps to Mastery of Technology.” Such advice, in its place, is extremely valuable and I wish there were more of it—even if it sometimes plays to our unhealthy desire for a neat and automatic program that can solve our problems. But often the prerequisite for transforming our situation is to see it in a new and unaccustomed light. This is the most difficult work of all, and if there can be no program guaranteed to achieve it, it is because the task is to raise ourselves above all programs.

To reclaim our Selves in this way means transforming the actor, and not merely the “social machinery,” in every corner of society, in every human endeavor. It means recognizing the contriver, and not merely the contrivance, as the key to our future. And it means taking upon ourselves a work we can rightly experience as ennobling and inspiring. After all, however nearly miraculous the technology we have today, the human spirit from which it stems is surely the real miracle, and how can this spirit be out-shone by the brilliance of its own creations?

On every hand—from nuclear weapons to genetic engineering, from the promise of life-saving technologies to the threat of ecological catastrophe—we confront choices and responsibilities that once lay in the domain of the gods. If we now cannot avoid acting in this unaccustomed domain—if our failure to act in creative renewal of the world is already complicity in the destruction of the world . . . well, then, it’s hardly the time to forget ourselves. We can only hope that something beside global disaster will bring us to self-remembrance. It is in the light of such hope that I have written this book.

What’s Ahead

In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the nations of the West poured many billions of dollars into the now fragmented empire, hoping to midwife a new democracy founded upon a free citizenry. Only with time did we realize that things would not be so easy. After seventy years of oppressive rule, the people themselves were not free, and they could not automatically be liberated by programs of political, economic, and social development, no matter how well funded. The habits and feelings, the ideas and sensitivities, the personal motivations and social forms, the ethical, moral, and religious convictions underlying a tyrannical society—as also a democratic one—are deep-rooted and tenacious. The question being asked in capitals around the world today is whether Russia, despite its own longings, is teetering on the verge of a new sort of tyranny—different, but perhaps no better, than the old one.

This illustrates a deep truth. Fundamental change must be rooted in a transformation of the individual self. Along with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, many other walls partitioning the cultures of the world have been breached by technology, and we, like the citizens of Russia, must become different persons before we can enter the potentials—and avoid the perils—of the new era. In Part I of this book we look at how technical devices—both physical artifacts and machinations of the soul—have played a positive role in essential human transformation, and how today, in a kind of reversal, they can lull us toward unconsciousness. Odysseus, the masterful man of many devices, threatens to become the Silicon Valley man of many gadgets (Chapter 1). The issues become more concretely focused and poignant in the encounter of a “primitive” Amazonian culture with modern technologies (Chapter 2), and more universal in the fateful dialogue between technological humanity and the wild earth (Chapter 3). It turns out that the ideal of open-ended conversation can guide us along paths of individual, cultural, and ecological development that cannot (thankfully) be predicted in advance.

The tension between inner human transformation and the ambiguous promise of external machinery becomes most acute when we consider those who must deal with disabilities. Here the hope for transformation—for the transcending of our own limitations—flares within us most strongly, and at the same time the appeal of technological prostheses is all but irresistible. Simplistic judgments upon the meeting ground of this hope and this appeal often become offensive, and therefore we are invited to probe the human-machine relationship in a more profound and sensitive way. Chapter 4–Chapter 6 juxtapose certain tendencies of technology-based thinking with the inner world and outer exploits of a blind man, with the experience of a Down Syndrome family, and with life in a community for the mentally handicapped. We will find that, amid the most wrenching personal circumstances, there is no hope for right decisions except insofar as we open ourselves to whatever speaks through the highest part of every human being.

If you want the most vivid picture of developing life, you need only look at the child. Day by day and year by year new miracles unfold, both physically and mentally. And here the encounter between the self-transforming human being and the compelling indifference of programmed logic looks most threatening. The child is still soft, close to nature, in need of the warmest and most intimate nurture. He requires stimulation, but stimulation that raises his spirit toward the beautiful, the good, and the true. In Part III we consider the natural world as an educational resource (Chapter 7) and then follow a master teacher as she observes, often in horror, the actual use of computers in classrooms around the country (Chapter 8). Chapter 9 offers a set of intentional provocations as a stimulus for discussion in schools, and Chapter 10 draws some perhaps unexpected conclusions from baby walkers, video games, and sexual content on the Internet. Then, in Chapter 11, we see how the enthronement of information as the distilled essence of educational content may render superfluous not only the university and teachers, but also students—and, in the final resort, knowledge itself.

When we lose sight of our own powers of transformation, we all too naturally shift our hopes for the future onto computers. Their potentials to approach and surpass our own capabilities—Can they learn to speak with us (Chapter 12)? Can they engage with us emotionally (Chapter 14)? Will they, in the end, tolerate us?—have become a thematic staple of popular culture. The irony is that glorified visions of the robotic future are sometimes schizophrenically accompanied by emphatic denigrations of the human being as merely a machine, leading one to ask what psychological state might underlie both the glorification and denigration of mechanism (Chapter 13). In reality, we gain a sound assessment of our technological achievements, and we raise the computer and other devices to their highest place of respect, only when we see them as the human expressions they are. Then we begin to recognize the exalted (and still largely undeveloped) creative powers of both programmer and user, and we also realize that on some occasions we must show our respect for a machine by sabotaging it (Chapter 14).

The dangers I try to illuminate in this book arise, above all, when technology fulfills our fondest expectations. It’s not the maddening glitches and failures of our tools that concern me so much as their smooth-running, alluring efficiency (Chapter 17 and Chapter 21). In the end, forgetting ourselves as we wield these tools can result only in a mechanization of our entire society. The tendency in this direction—and the correlative possibilities for more hopeful change—can be observed in the attraction of the ideal of “ubiquitous technology” (Chapter 18), in the social conditions that make privacy such an urgent yet scarcely addressable concern (Chapter 19), and most strikingly in the kind of faith we place in “market mechanisms,” a faith that counts the mechanisms themselves—but not the personal and ethical choices we bring to them—as the most decisively important thing for society (Chapter 20).

—Steve Talbott

Ghent, New York

February 2007