Technology is About Power

Francis Bacon said science produces knowledge and knowledge is power. A more common view is that science produces knowledge and when that knowledge is applied it is technology. Sometimes
that technology is harnessed for good. At other times it is oppressive. But whether harnessed or totalitarian, technology is all about power.

I was trapped in L.A. traffic. The freeway was packed solid. Our van was overheating, the air conditioning didn’t work, my leg was aching from working the heavy four-speed manual transmission, and my ears throbbed from the hissing noise of tires on pavement pounding in the open window. In the BMW three feet away, my neighboring traveler sat in his suit, behind tinted glass, talking on his cell phone while heavy bass boomed from his car stereo. I felt envious, inferior, and even a little powerless until I remembered the Mozambican families I had seen sitting stunned and stark naked in the refugee camp that summer of ‘88. They had walked for months through bandit-ridden bush often at the cost of family death and personal mutilation at the hands of bandits. My thoughts of those refugees were interrupted as President Reagan’s helicopter convoy beat through the air over our virtual parking lot, enroute from Pt. Magu Naval Air Station north to the "ranch" above Santa Barbara. As we both sat and watched, I wondered if my freeway "neighbor" shared my sense of how technology shapes our lives.

Technology is both product and process. As product, its most familiar face is the "stuff" of 20th century North American suburbia. It is laptop computers, cell phones, GPS receivers connected to digital maps, aerodynamic cars equipped with hi-powered stereos racing across 12 layers of stacked freeway overpasses. It is Web shopping, e-mail, VCRs, satellite TV, CAT scans, shrink-wrapped processed food, weekend trips to adjacent states or even adjacent continents, personal collections of all the greatest books and perhaps even all the greatest music, digitally preserved in error-free versions and accessible in one’s own home. It is skyscrapers with express elevators, "pin drop quiet" conversations with mom on that special day, wrinkle-free clothing, cash-free and check-free banking, cinematographic magic, and million dollar bodies created through combinations of medical and photographic "surgeries" that leave us to conclude with Esquire, that "What Michelle Pfeiffer Needs is Absolutely Nothing."

But process technology runs much deeper. It is what Jacques Ellul calls "technique," a way of systematizing human production, relationship, and even inquiry to make it mechanical. Even before Newton and his fellow 17th century geniuses immortalized technique in the modern world view, people have leveraged knowledge into power in order to control. Though it may be true we have moved beyond the age of machine to one of organization or even of information, technology as process, has devoured us all. Technology as process assimilates everything we do to the model of the machine; it mechanizes everything it encounters. It operates according to a particular method in order to attain a particular end. And the chief "gods" of that method are the never-ending search for greater efficiency, the penchant for precision, and the preference for objectivity.

"Essentially, [technique] takes what was previously tentative, unconscious, even spontaneous, and brings it into the realm of clear, voluntary, and reasoned concepts." Scientific method is swallowed. Government, public policy, and organizational management too. In this sense, there can be even a technique of swimming and a technique of friendship. Language itself is perhaps the deepest technique of all. By it we extend ourselves into other places and other times. With language we command, we inform, we query, and we express ourselves.

So both as product and process, technology is chiefly a tool. A tool to exercise power; a tool people use to control play, work, suffering, pleasure, perceptions, time, survival, and even to define reality. In effect, technology is the set of all tools humans use to control our world.

There is no need to chronicle the impact of technology in enhancing survival through medicine. The miracles of modern pharmacology, surgery, and diagnosis have extended life spans more than our grandparents could have imagined. Likewise, the revolution in work from nomadic, to agrarian, to industrial, and now to informational is a story written in the grammar of technological advance. And we are daily bombarded in print, on air, and on line by thousands of "fascist fantasies" which not only shape our perceptions but create our realities. The perfect body, the perfect family, the perfect car, the perfect dress, the perfect performance, and the list goes on.

But consider time. It is hard to imagine anything more basic to human experience, yet more elusive to our understanding. Still, technology shapes even our view of time. The Swiss or the North American is annoyed when the train or plane is five minutes late. The Zimbabwean is pleased when the bus arrives as promised "sometime in the morning." For us, to wait is a form of slavery. Freedom, technology promises seductively, is to control your schedule yourself. The VCR lets us ingest our favorite daily diet of images when WE want to see them. The cell phone lets us call when WE want to talk. Our microwave lets us eat when WE want to eat. Our refrigerator/freezer lets us shop when WE want to shop. Our car lets us come and go when WE want to move. Our western view of time is that it should be controlled efficiently, and that is what technology does best.

If technology is a tool of power, capable of dramatically affecting our world and our lives, Christians must ask how we should respond. In particular, I want to focus on just two questions. What kind of a tool is it? Does Scripture—our guide for all matters of faith and practice—give us direction for the appropriate exercise of power?

IS THE TOOL OF TECHNOLOGY POSITIVE, NEGATIVE, OR NEUTRAL?

Whenever I find myself in a discussion about technology three positions seem to emerge. First there are those who love it. Their critics might say they even worship it. Although the "First Church of Technology" fell on some hard times during the ecological and environmental heydays of the 70s and 80s, the arrival of billionaire Prophet Gates and the success of his congregation in Bellevue have braced these technophiles to "come out of their closet" if they were ever there at all. They range from those who have at least learned to program their VCRs to those whose endorphin levels surge as much during a walk down the Craftsman aisles at Sears or at the arrival of a new Better Housekeeping or PC Magazine as they do during sex.

Second, there are those who despise technology. Some of these technophobes, like the legendary Mr. Ludlum, actually want to "toss wrenches into the looms" and halt the whole affair. Others want to cover their unwillingness or inability to change by digging in their heels. Still others, self righteous prophets of doom, go on record just enough to be able to say they told us so.

Finally, there are those who believe technology is neutral. That tools by themselves are neither good nor bad; it is the people who use them that put them to good or bad purposes. The dangers which exist in allowing technology to pervade our lives are not to be found in the technology, but in the hearts and minds of the users.

The diplomatic answer is to say they are all right. But a more thought-provoking response is to argue they are all wrong. Technology is neither GOOD nor BAD nor NEUTRAL. Let us consider this claim in four areas: knowledge, relationships, quality of life, and what we count as real.

1. Technology is NOT BAD and is NOT GOOD

Knowledge - On the one hand, there is little question that the access technology provides to knowledge is of great benefit. Libraries are testimonies to the technologies of language and printing. Information about weather at a distant landing site and about threatening storms saves lives. Radio communication among law enforcement officers preserves peace. Educational television boosts self-esteem and opens windows of the mind. Internet access can improve the breadth if not the depth of educational and business research. Data storage makes possible human welfare programs, criminal justice, and a host of other social projects.

On the other hand, since Eden, too much knowledge has been a curse. In his book, Technopoly, Neil Postman says that when technology comes to pervade a culture it entails that knowledge reduces to information and "information is an unmixed blessing." We are certainly barraged with plenty. In the U.S. we are each presented with thousands of images each day, deliberately contrived to capture our attention, our mind, our heart, and probably our pocketbook. Printed and visual information floods our homes far beyond what any of us could ever use. Billboards, newspapers, periodicals, video outlets, movie theaters, radios, TVs, 300,000 new books each year, 41 million pictures taken each day in the U.S. alone, 60 billion pieces of junk mail each year, and thousands of new Internet Web sites each day. In such a society, just as waiting blasphemes the "god" of efficiency, ever more information appeases the "god" of objectivity.

The problem Postman says, is that we are overwhelmed. Not only can we not use it all, we cannot even begin to sort out the useful from the useless. Our mental defense mechanisms break down. The processes for putting information into the appropriate contexts cannot keep up. As Postman puts it, "When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown occurs in psychic tranquility and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures."

Postman likens the situation to the breakdown of the body’s immune system which prevents the uncontrolled growth of cells. Cell growth is normal, but if left unchecked, it becomes disordered and breaks the interconnections around it. The healthy immune system destroys unwanted cells. When the system fails, cancer or AIDS results.

By analogy, when technology foists uncontrolled disconnected information upon us, the institutions in society which normally serve to filter and sort that information break down. The churches, political structures, social groupings, and even editorial boards fail. No information is destroyed, as it must be for meaning to emerge. While there will always be differences about which information should be eliminated and which valued, there is little disagreement that some such control must occur. When technology pervades our culture, we overdose on information. It is like a court of law where rules of evidence are overwhelmed and cease to function. To respond that in our day and age "anything goes" means only that "everything stays." And to affirm the legitimacy of everything is, as Postman puts it, to "call the disease the cure."

Consider a school curriculum which includes all points of view equally weighted. Or consider the family which does not shelter its children. What about the church which abandons Biblical authority? In each case the effort to avoid the pitfalls of too much discrimination have led to the trap of too little discrimination. It is as if, technology’s glut of information has broken down our defenses and left us with an even more sinister form of AIDS (anti information-discrimination syndrome). The irony in all this is that few really serious problems actually arise from the lack of information.

In short, the technology of "knowledge" is not BAD but also not GOOD.

Relationships - On the one hand, technology is surely good in its effects on relationships. Students stay connected with their families by e-mail and telephone. Handicapped children "talk" to others using an array of miraculous devices. Grown children dislocated in a mobile society remain available to elderly parents. Friendships forged in person can be sustained at a distance. Missionaries in the field are encouraged through communication systems unheard of only a few years ago. Language itself, that chief human technology, shares our deepest and most noble experiences, binding hearts and broadening our minds, thereby building community.

On the other hand, when technology pervades culture, people often become commodities. Instead of children of God, or even citizens, they are consumers. This brings with it standardization and homogeneity. For example, trademarks and advertising jingos are nationwide. Everyone on the plane is reading the same book…..often Oprah’s selection for the week. Once you find the fast food strip, all cities look alike? Have you noticed that you know your way around in your favorite discount store—regardless of what city you are in—because the floor plan is usually the same? The effect is the loss of particularity, often to the detriment of local community. Social prophets from DeTocqueville to Bellah and Berry have warned of this danger.

Local institutions and the particularity of person to person interaction build trust and respect. In distinction from both the private life of the individual and the public life of abstract commitments and
obligations, the life of community weaves together the particular and the abstract in ways generally absent from our lives otherwise. For too many, technology has provided the self-sufficiency which allows them to isolate themselves even from neighbors next door. With phone, heat, electric, information, transportation, entertainment, even electronic church available to the individual, the reasons to know the person next door are largely abstract and often passionless. It’s easier to help your neighbors pull their car out of the snow bank on Christmas eve when they housed and fed your entire family in their home for three weeks when you first moved to town. To do it merely because it’s the Christian or neighborly thing to do sounds more noble but is much less likely.

A community of diversity, not homogeneity and standardization, is more likely to promote our growth in understanding and compassion. It requires little for us to extend ourselves to those already like ourselves. Where some common bonds tie people together however, diversity enriches and enhances the relationships.

Unfortunately, technology often redefines relationships, substituting virtual communities for the real thing. These "communities of shared interest" or "lifestyle enclaves" replace talking to the person next door, whose name you may not even know. Instead, you go online to "chat" every night with other philatelists, genealogists, Civil War buffs, radio control modellers, or even process metaphysicians. There are vacation groups, retirement communities, jogging groups, Weight Watchers, cycling clubs, and probably even vegetarian swimmer associations. The ease with which such groups can now form enhances their appeal and growth. One doesn’t have to bother with those different from oneself. Even churches are affected. For all their value in promoting the efficiencies of numerical success, church growth principles adopt the same technological principles of homogeneity. Independent churches of every imaginable flavor and style spring up on every street corner. And what self respecting church today is without separate youth ministers, youth choirs, and multiple services for those of differing worship styles. Nationwide conferences promote the standardization of programs for leadership, evangelism, fathering, and even marriage building.

In short, technology affects relationships in ways that are often not BAD but often not GOOD.

Quality of Life - On the one hand, technology has clearly enhanced the quality of our lives. Whether it’s as simple as running water and central heating or as complex as quadruple bypass surgery, we have all benefited. One of my colleagues has had his life changed by the development of the glucose monitor which much more effectively controls his diabetes. In his words, he is now "tentatively scheduled to die much later than expected." Another acquaintance developed the pace-maker synchronizing the heart beats of thousands of people around the world today. Many of the most obvious benefits to quality of life are in medicine. But the list which includes improved working conditions, access to recreation and the out of doors, safer means of transportation, and so on, can be extended almost indefinitely.

On the other hand, probably every one of us could also document from our own experience the negative impact of technology on quality of life. Machines have eliminated many jobs. And for those unable to retrain, the result has been the growing disparity of income between the rich and the poor. The tools of violence have been perfected through technology to enable the smallest country or the loneliest terrorist to extend the scope of their destruction. Automatic weapons lay waste in the street, the post office, and the McDonalds. Easily manufactured bombs destroy government buildings, subways, and airplanes. Easy communication, porous arms controls, and cheap weapons markets give every tin pot dictator access to weapons of mass destruction. The heart of violence is not new, but technology dramatically expands its potential for expression.

In pursuit of efficiency we have not actually saved ourselves any time or money. What has happened instead is that we expect to accomplish even more. Productivity surges but the effect in our personal lives is often disastrous. To afford those new devices and services for instance, two incomes are necessary. Our schedules are full, so two cars and the cell phone are necessary. Instead of just daily paper mail, we now have voice mail and e-mail demanding more and more of our time. The fact is that we capitulate to the assumption that if we can do one more thing we should do one more thing.

And then there is the noise. For some it’s the constant honking of horns or the wail of sirens. For others it’s the ever present serpentine hiss of rubber on freeway pavement. For still others it is the drone of non-stop air conditioners. It’s no coincidence that peace is so often paired with quiet. Yet technology is often noisy.

We are like the Sorcerer’s apprentice….awash in the detritus of our own magic run amuck. In short, technology’s effect on the quality of life is often not BAD but perhaps equally often not GOOD.

What is Real - On the one hand, technology has reshaped our understanding of what is real in wonderful ways. We don’t believe the sun moves around the earth and the heavens are not multiple two dimensional concentric spheres. We don’t search for the ether. We don’t imagine the world is built from only four elements. We understand that mind and body are more closely tied than ever imagined. Virtually the whole of science is indebted to technology, laying to rest the myth that technology is merely the application of science. They are inseparable with one aiding the other as much as the reverse. But even apart from science, technology makes it easier for all of us to understand the world around us. Pictures, models, simulations all help us comprehend the complexity of objects around us both natural and constructed as well as the complex processes of interaction in nature and in society. Who has not benefited from the technology of a bar graph or pie chart? How sensitive to racial and gender discrimination would we be without the benefits of statistical analysis and their dissemination in the media? In short, technology clearly contributes positively to our understanding of what is real.

On the other hand, the impact of technology on our understanding of what is real can also be negative. I have already described the substitution of virtual communities for real relationships. But this is just a case of a more general effect when technology pervades our culture. Our very definition of what counts as real begins to change. The line between the virtual and the real blurs. More than just the modern notion that knowledge is a matter of differing perspectives, this effect calls into question the very metaphor of perspective, replacing it with one of construction. What is real is not known, it is built.

This confusion of real and virtual is not new. So long as there have been addictions, they have been blurred. For many (of all ages!) the world literally turns around their bottle. It has been said that to someone with a hammer everything looks like a nail. But as the tools of technology proliferate, the effect is multiplied. Our very world is shaped by our tools.

"To a man with a pencil everything looks like a list. To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image. To a man with a computer everything looks like data. And to a man with a grade sheet, everything looks like a number."

While few of us are yet convinced we are brains in a vat or confused Schwarznegger’s in Total Recall, for some the whole world is found in the characters and categories of a sitcom. While video gaming has not approached the quality of the "holodeck" there are young people who live for their daily fix. Virtual relationships between pseudo persons constructed in cyberspace consume more and more of some people’s lives. You can be anyone you like! Computer models dominate the thinking of those holding the reigns of economic power. Worldwide dissemination of narrow ideologies shape the worlds of guerrillas and comet worshippers.

Managers become virtual managers. The task of production is reduced to flow charts, the personnel reduced to functionaries, and the communication is strictly electronic, with fewer face-to-face encounters in the hallways, on the shop floor, or even in the parking lot. The other day I reflected on how the time I had allocated this year to "leaning on doorjams" in the flesh without an agenda had been progressively eaten away by three hours daily of attention to mail alone.

And leaders become virtual leaders. Their "vision" is expressed in print or video or electronic mail, not in person. The "image" is carefully constructed and even more carefully projected. When conflict arises it is often the "spinmeister," not the leader who responds. The separation between personal character and professional performance is split so thoroughly that the public persona becomes the new
"real person." And what is more, the culture recognizes and accepts the shift. A presidential candidate is measured more by their charisma on talk shows than by their moral integrity or private sexual behavior.

Colleges become virtual universities with virtual classrooms and perhaps virtual education. Information delivery replaces apprenticeship and even role-modeling as real education. Churches broadcast their worship, package their curriculum, and program their fellowship. Activity replaces reflection as real faith. The tools of technology make this all so much easier; and the real world is redefined.

And of course, to the extent that technology worships objectivity and precision, if it cannot be measured, it is not real. Equipped only with the "net" of five senses, technology dramatically limits the kind of "fish" which can be "caught" and called real. Values and obligations are reduced to no more than expressions of personal preferences and in the extreme, unreal; empty of all cognitive meaning. God isn’t just dead, He’s a fairy tale, constructed like all products of technology to suit human ends; to embody human virtues or oppress the proletariat. In the words of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, "I looked outside and could see no God." Even the human spirit is reduced to chemistry of the brain and human behavior to that of other animals. This is not to deny the value and power of technological measurement in modeling reality. Without it the many positive benefits would not be possible. These models may be our sole windows on what is real and it is part of the human condition that we "see through a glass darkly." But the danger lies in concluding that that any model exhausts what is real and therefore becomes what is real. There is then no window at all, only scribbling on the inside walls of our minds.

In short, the impact of technology on our understanding of what is real is not always positive.

1.Technology is NOT NEUTRAL

It is tempting to suppose that if technology is a tool, it must be neutral in value. That is, it can be used well or used poorly but, by itself, the tool is not inherently good or bad. That is certainly the view that we commonly adopt with regard to our tools. Guns can feed families or destroy families. Manufactured alcohol can heal sickness and cause sickness. Fire can warm and burn. Printing can inform and deceive. Rockets can explore and they can obliterate. Dynamite can open up a mine and likewise it can take down a building. Surely it’s obvious tools are themselves neutral in value.

However, the fact is that in every technology certain uses or functions follow almost inevitably from the form of the technology itself. Once the technology is admitted, it is almost impossible to prevent it from playing out its hand. It is hard to imagine having hammers around without any pounding going on, or cars around without any mobility. Of course there are exceptions, but they are usually found in museums or junk-cluttered tool sheds and backyards. So the truth is that tools are "ideological." They bring with them a propensity toward behaviors which in many cases are not value neutral. That’s not to say their use cannot be controlled—more on that below. But it means we cannot escape the inevitability that our tools shape us as much as we use them to shape other things.

Writing affects our ability to remember, making memory into mere recollection. It enables the transfer of information altering what we mean by wisdom from something acquired by years of personal experience to something as often acquired by copious reading. Calculators reduce our native computational skills as surely as other machines reduced our native physical strength. Computers change the way we "chat." Genetic engineering brings an almost inevitable change in our perceptions of human nature. Like the man with a hammer, it’s much easier to see a human as a machine when the tools you work with are those also used in working on machines. The tools of management and accepted organizational structures will significantly alter the attitudes in the workplace. If the tools are
authoritarian and the structures hierarchical, a different view of human value will more likely emerge than if teamwork and consultation are stressed. To some extent, authoritarian tools can be used in consultation but then meat cleavers can be used in surgery. Physiological psychology can be used to assess character but then spoons can be used to bail boats. I.Q. tests can be used to measure intelligence but then polygraph tests can be used to judge truth. Churches can treat adherents as members and measure their commitment by rules or they can treat them as followers of Christ and avoid measurement as much as possible. Cars which carry few people at once inevitably shape a culture differently than buses which group many at a time. Housing designed around "commons" produces different social values than single dwellings with easy isolation. Computers which allow easy modification at the paragraph level may be more likely to produce technically polished but disjointed essays. Television programs which by their nature must be rehearsed, alter our expectations for appearance and good performance in daily interactions often in ways simply unattainable. The fantasies such programs encourage almost unavoidably make real what is only virtual, disconnecting us all from our own experience, alienating us for ourselves, and often setting us up for failure.

I have often heard it said that our use of masculine words to cover both genders is actually done without prejudice. I have said the same myself. I have also insisted myself that without intention, there can be no harassment of another. But now I am not convinced. Like all technologies, language is not neutral. Its form creates, at the very least, dispositions to certain functions, attitudes, and behaviors. My impression is that the same is true of much racial language; it too is almost inevitably ideological.

As a final illustration, I am reminded of my studies of physics. The "answers" nature provides the physicist are often as much a function of the questions she asks as they are a neutral self report. If we test light using wave-like "questions" nature often responds affirmatively. But if you test light using particle-like "questions" nature also responds affirmatively. The "technique" prejudices the answer. If we probe a microscopic physical system with certain information gathering "tools" like light or other particles, the system "replies" with answers that are quite different because of the probing tool used. And in fact sometimes the answers are mutually exclusive, leaving us unsure what the real answer is or whether there even is a real answer. The technological tool changes the answer.

In short, the effects of technology are not merely the result of how people use it. Technology is not neutral.

A SCRIPTURAL MODEL OF POWER

Scripture tells us we are made in the image of God. The incarnation is the chief example of God’s image in humanity. So as we try to understand what Scripture teaches us about the appropriate exercise of power, we must inevitably look to Christ himself. When we do, three things stand out. In Christ, God’s power is made plain (logos), is poured out (kenosis), and under control (prautees). Perhaps these can frame the Christian’s response to the power of technology.

In the first place, Christ was the Word (Logos). In Christ, the power of God was made plain. Through the Logos everything that was made came to be. In the Logos we live and move and have our being. The Logos is the chief revelation of God Himself. He is, as it were, the means by which we best come to understand what God is like and what He has done for us.

Second, Christ is characterized by humility (kenosis). By this we understand that his power was freely and self-sacrificially poured out in service to others. It was not used to claim His prerogative as equal with the Father. But He emptied Himself of this power, took on the form of humanity, and became a servant….even a servant willing to die for others. The principle at issue seems to be that power is to be used.

Finally, Christ and His message are characterized by meekness (prautees). Closely tied to humility, this concept of meekness describes not weakness but rather power under control. Moses was said to be the meekest man on earth. But our picture of Moses is hardly that of passivity or impotence or even self-effacement. On the contrary, Moses was a well-trained, forceful, passionate, persistent leader. He killed in anger, at least twice stood in the very presence of God, defied the world’s mightiest ruler, parted the Red Sea, and led more than a million people through a wilderness for 40 years. It is clearly a picture of power. Yet this same man was the meekest man on earth. So meekness must mean power under control. In two of the more familiar passages on meekness, there are even connections to what might be called technology. In Psalm 37:11, the writer tells us, "But the meek shall possess the land, and delight themselves in abundant prosperity." And in Matthew 5:5, Jesus himself promises that, the meek shall "inherit the earth."

I am reminded of the Zambezi River on the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia. At the foot of Victoria Falls in the west, it tumbles wildly and precipitously through 1000-foot gorges, producing some of the most spectacular scenery and adrenalin-pumping rafting in the world. Yet only 100 miles further on, that same powerful river is harnessed by Kariba Dam to provide recreation and electric power for two nations. It is power under control.

But there is a terrible tension in each of these three characteristics of the incarnation, and even in creation’s central purpose of showing God’s image in us. The tension in prautees is to remain powerful but also controlled. The tension in kenosis is to be useful but not proudly selfish. The tension in logos is to be revealed but not intimidated. In His central purpose, God made us in His own image, yet it was the root of humanity’s fall to want to become like God, and to take power. And now under his new covenant, our purpose in following Christ to become like Him, yet our perennial struggle with sin is to give up power. If the heart of the gospel is the revelation, pouring out, and control of power, then at the very heart of our sin is the human desire to be like God and in fact to gain power. And so, the dilemma of technology, so aptly captured in that familiar story of Babel, is that what could be humanity’s greatest glory is also our greatest curse.

HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?

What then does this scriptural model of power offer by way of guidance to Christians in their response to technology? If technology consists of tools intended for the exercise of power, then perhaps each of the characteristics of Christ’s own exercise of power can guide our use of technology.

1. Technology should be Revealed

By this I mean to say that each of us who lives in a technological age must work very hard to reveal the effects of technology in our lives. Like God’s own power, that of technology cannot be used either for good or for ill until it is revealed.

So remembering that technology is not neutral, that it brings with it an inevitable disposition to particular attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs, we must discern these effects. We must come to see the ideological—half-conscious—assumptions which give technology its totalitarian potential. Recognizing the awful power technology can hold over us, we must not be apathetic to this task, nor intimidated by the complexity or enormity of what must be revealed. To reveal the technology in everything around us is in my judgment the most difficult but also the most important part of the Christian’s response.

What is needed is education both in the content of the technologies and in the skills required to recognize the technological products and processes for what they are. This education is not mere training. For training does not usually examine its own assumptions. In practice this means reflecting on how our habitual use of technology is changing us. We must think about how our use of television, video, automobiles, computers, medical resources, organizational "techniques," language, and so on are subtly but surely extending their power over us.

2. Technology should be Used

Like God’s own power, that of technology should be poured out and used; not for selfish gain, but rather for the benefit of others. Recognizing its potential for both good and bad, Christians must be careful to channel technology for the benefit of others. This assumes that we have reflected first on technology’s effect on us and on others. We may not ever completely understand all those effects. But we must try.

Let us use technology to RE-humanize our relations with others, rejecting the commodity or consumer view of people technology often engenders. Let us for example increase the spoken word over printed or electronic in our dealings in school, at home, at work, or in church. Let us use technology to provide personal attention to others. For example, let us promote interactive methods which customize the learning process to the individual, while releasing more time from the mere delivery of content for the interaction of teacher and student. Let us use technology to provide wider access to the best of music, art, preaching, instruction, without substituting for personal contact. Let us use technology to stay in touch with loved ones and to support those who labor alone. Let us use
technology to improve the public health of those less fortunate than ourselves, without falling victim to the abuse of medical procedures which scandalizes our north American culture. Let us use technology to empower and revitalize the imaginations of those whose lives have been dulled by the oppression of poverty or sickness or even narrow-mindedness.

3. Technology should be Limited

Finally, like God’s own call to meekness, technology should be power under control. It’s not enough to reveal the technology around us and throughout our culture. We must limit it. Because technology itself is the collection of our tools for control, it will easily control us instead. Like Moses, the potential is there for great evil as well as great good. Like Babel, the potential is there for unbridled power rather than glory to God. The difference in the life of Moses and in the life of Christ himself is whether the power available is submitted to the channeling, shaping, transforming will of God.

When did we last turn off the TV or walk out of a movie on principle? When did we last walk and not drive in order to have human contact? When did we last work on changing our language to avoid stereotyping someone or some group? In fact, when did we last even think about whether we should take these steps to reveal the technology which threatens to overpower us? Let us limit the information available to our children. Let us limit our own lives as well. Let us limit our commitments of time even if technology makes it possible for us to be more efficient. Let us avoid false precision in drawing conclusions too hastily. Let us limit our application of "technique" in our lives and organizations, focusing on character development instead. Remember that life’s complexities
usually require more good judgment than precise and extensive information. And the most important decisions we make are rarely clear cut. Let us not lose confidence in human judgment and subjectivity. As Postman says,

" We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional, and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation…Our most serious problems are not technical, nor do they arise from inadequate information.. Where people are dying of starvation, it does not occur because of inadequate information. If families break up, children are mistreated, crime terrorizes a city, education is impotent, it does not happen because of inadequate information."

What we need is virtue: brokenness and courage. Brokenness allows us to submit ourselves and then technology in our lives to the will of God. It means following the example of meekness like Moses, and even Christ himself. It is a revolutionary step. But then it takes courage to carry on and resist. Even if it’s only courage to speak up to our friends, our own children, or our own parents about the effects technology is having on our lives and theirs. And it’s all the more difficult when we are alone. Let us band together to encourage one another in applying this last principle of scripture in our response to the power of technology.

CONCLUSION

Technology is product and process. It is the collection of tools we use to CHANGE our lives. In the end it is all about the exercise of power. Technology is neither good, nor bad, nor neutral. But it is surely pervasive and like all power, potentially totalitarian. God Himself models the appropriate responses to power. He reveals it, pours it out, and limits it. He is logos, kenosis, and prautees. As His creation perhaps we too can respond to technology by revealing its influence in our lives, pouring it out in usefulness to others not ourselves, and always limiting it by submitting it in brokenness to God and resisting it with courage.

Jim Mannoia
May 15, 1997