Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

“The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning, we cannot begin to see. Unless we see we cannot think.” Thomas Merton.

I want to question our relationship with technology.

With my spouse’s agreement, I chose to generate electricity in my home using solar panels. When the company representative came over, he asked me my reasons for “going solar.” Inauthentically, I gave him the standard instrumental reasons. I mentioned saving the planet, increasing the value of my home, and lowering my electricity bills. He understood these reasons, and he had all kinds of charts and graphs to demonstrate both the long-term increase in my home’s valuation and the savings in my electricity bill. Shockingly, after reviewing our 3rd World-inspired electricity usage and current lower-than-average rate by the kilowatt-hour, he expressed, “You may save about $45 a month. Why have you really chosen solar?” I smiled and didn’t say anything. I was aware of my hidden instrumental reason that I wanted to pay for air conditioning to cope with a climate that I created with each breath. Existential motives are disrespected by reasoning about them. In such a moment, absurdity washes over the whole planet. I was also aware that I was ethically responsible for answering my kids’ inevitable question: “What did you do as the world burned?” After a few minutes, I joked (and perhaps only for my own absurd amusement) “My carbon-based existence is a little excessive.”

I grew up as a Mennonite Brethren kid. Ethnically and culturally, I come from Mennonite stalk, which shuns mechanical energy usage whenever possible. By the standards of that community, I am gluttonous. By my suburban neighborhood’s standards, I am a Luddite. My spouse, who grew up in Thailand (i.e. the developing world), panders to my Luddite roots without knowing it – telling me to shut off the TV if I am not watching it or to turn off the lights when I leave a room.

Mostly, I moved to solar because I recognized I have been living with a death wish. I also have been burning the world. I have been seduced by the central evil of the industrial world – the complete autonomy and emancipation of the technological mind at a time when unlimited possibilities lie open to it and all the resources seem to be at hand. 

In the industrial world, questioning the autonomy of the technological mind is the greatest blasphemy; it is THE unforgivable sin in the eyes of the technocratic society I live in. Each technocratic person’s ultimate faith is this: science can do everything and must be permitted to do everything it likes. Science is infallible and impeccable. An act justified by science, no matter how monstrous, is unassailable. Technology and science are responsible to no power and submit to no control other than their own. We waste the world by filling our cities with traffic congestion that is largely useless – a symptom of the meaningless and futile agitation of our own minds.

The devotion to technology and its mythology could be explored through the invention of AI, the relinquishing of natural ones for online ones, and the radiating light of the microwave. But, quintessentially, it is the car. It has an aggressive design, imperialistic fuel consumption, and advertised supernatural power. It has a symbolic and ritualistic role. But meditation on it may, in fact, lead us to the heart of technocratic mass society, the heart of evil.  Bonhoeffer was right when he said: “The demand for absolute liberty brings men to the depths of slavery.” The master of the machine becomes its slave.”

If technology were really reasonable, there would be much less regret about our current situation. If you think about it, technology represents quantity rather than quality. Technology quantifies the human being. In other words, technology transforms an individual human into a mass person, whose only function is to enter anonymously into production and consumption. On the one side, she is the biological link between machines. On the other side, she is the digestive system through which the products of the technological world pass. Any sense of enjoyment or fulfillment experienced in this role is transient and meaningless. The result of a totally emancipated technology is the regression of persons to moral infancy. We can at least tolerate dependence on “mother nature” since that is at least human. But can we tolerate the pseudo-dependence on closed ecosystems of machines that have no purpose but to perpetuate their own continued existences?

If technology remained in the service of what is higher than itself – humanity, nature, God, or reason, it might indeed fulfill some of its mythical functions. But by becoming autonomous, existing only for itself, it imposes upon humanity its own irrational demands and threatens destruction.

At least I didn’t buy solar because it was my only option. At least, for now, solar power is in service of something higher.

I have purchased a technological solution to a real problem with technology. The dependence I had on technology to generate the energy I wanted to use was unhealthy. This technology was spoiling the planet. Perhaps solar won’t. But my relationship with this particular technology has now fundamentally changed. Or has it?

How about other technological reliances – my mobile phone coverage, my social media use, my computer operating systems… my dishwasher, my coffee maker, my toaster… my car, my television, my travel mug, a plastic bag? Do I, in fact, have a dependent relationship with any of these technologies? Do I become less than human if I adopt, or fall into, a subservient relationship with these technologies? What is the nature of this relationship?

Are these actually tools for accomplishing certain projects that I, in a major sense, feel ownership over? Or do any or all of these technologies shape my life beyond my own ownership and authorship of it?

Perhaps, a more sinister inquiry: Is the quality of my life – as MY life – even considered by those who make, distribute, and sell the technologies? Or do the tech companies even think about the quality of life? Have those companies, instead of thinking about the quality of life, focused entirely on the quantity of life?

My guess is that the mass person closed off in mass social systems such as Apple ecosystems, Google monopolies of information searching, Facebook feeds that are primarily advertising streams, and urban spaces designed for cars and not persons is not being prepared for her own life. Instead, the mass person is being prepared for something else, by someone else, neither of which the mass person perceives.

Am I that mass person? Neo… wake up Neo! Knock, Knock.