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Technology
The Vision |
Dirt amazes me. First, like water, it has three forms in which it comes. All things being equal it is dirt. Add water and now you have mud. Take all the water out, and there you have dust. The dust is my original birthplace—from dust you were formed—and will be my (temporary) end—and to dust you shall return. One of the ways I try to help people understand the science of economics, and how it relates to our charge to exercise dominion, is to remind people that everything we have comes from the ground or from the water. Everything—from the food we eat, to the paper we read, to the computer on which I am writing, if you trace back its physical origins far enough—goes back to the dirt. One nearby church chided passers—by with its sign that read, "Be patient. It takes time for grass to become butter." I needed the patience the sign called for to figure out what it meant. Grass gets eaten by the cow, the cow turns it into milk, the milk is taken out of the cow and churned, and there you have butter. Go back even further and you see that it was the dirt that fed the grass that nourished the cow that gave birth to the cow that gave the milk. Books, pictures, light bulbs, pencils, tires—it all goes back to the dirt. The rockets that scratch the surface of space, they are made from the dirt, and powered by the dirt, as is the metal in the satellite that connects your telephone call. Sooner or later you get back to the dirt. C.S. Lewis touched a bit on the power of dirt when he wrote on the creation of Narnia. In The Magician's Nephew we are given a description of the creation of that world by Aslan. As the Lion sings, the stars appear to dance. Soon light fills the sky, and soon the flat earth begins to bubble like so much toasted cheese. Birthed from the earth, out of those bubbles come the animals that would inhabit the land. A little bubble breaks open and out comes a beaver. A big bubble pops and there stands an elephant. It is the land that is brimming with life. Poor hapless Uncle Andrew, with his mop of unruly hair, is mistaken for a plant, and so is planted, in the dirt, upside down. His pockets empty of their coins, and what should spring up, but a tree of gold and a tree of silver (the story was written back when money was money). The wicked Empress Jadis, who would become the White Witch in later stories, had by mistake dragged the cross piece of a London street lamp with her to this young world. In her flight from Aslan, she drops the piece. It too takes root and—skip the rest of the sentence if you haven't read this great series, and while you're at it, go ahead and give yourself thirty lashes—becomes the lantern made famous in Lantern Waste in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. There was the power of life in the dirt of young Narnia. I venture to guess that such was the power of the ground on which Adam and Eve trod. Their garden was edenic. They were called to dress and to till the garden, but their labor would not strain them; it would be a joy. The fall changed all that. Look at what God tells Adam as He pronounces His curse on him: "Cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3: 7b-19). This ground from which would come plenty had now been made stingy by the hand of God. This ground which had promised to bring forth only goodness and health would now be the source of thorns and thistles. What was once to be a garden of delight was now only burdensome labor. And so it still is. Dirt not only brings us the things we love but the things we despise. Weeds burden our labor, whether they be literal or figurative. The ground feeds the bugs that infest our homes, and the bugs that muddle our computers. As an agrarian wannabe I love the ground. But like all of God's good gifts between now and the consummation, it is a mixed blessing. The same is true of our focus for this issue, technology. Though I desire to live a more simple life, I am not a Luddite. I recognize that I get to live out here in the country with chickens for food and wood for heat because of the complex wonder of the computer on which I am now writing. Without it I'd be stuck still in the old technological paradigm, the big city. If we lived in the time of the Luddites, when technology was looked upon with an unnatural suspicion, as if it came from somewhere other than the earth, no doubt my focus here would be to get people to relax, to embrace the greater tools of dominion. That, however, is not where we are as a culture, or as a church. We live in an age of technological wonders, and have lost the capacity to wonder whether all this technology is actually healthy. We are building skyscrapers whose height boggles our mind, such that we have failed to consider the cost. Technology is indeed a glory, but it can also be a death trap; it has lawful uses and peculiar temptations. It is, as one thinker has called it, "the God who limps." In arguing that technology has elements of blessing and yet still carries with it the curse, I am not therefore arguing that it is therefore neutral. Such is an unwarranted but all too common response. When I raise a red flag, the technophiles jump into technological relativism: "Oh, there's nothing wrong with technology. What matters is the way we use it." Granted, dirt is dirt and technology is technology. I'm not arguing that combines and optical scanners have secret meetings late at night to plan their havoc. Technology is morally neutral if we mean by that that it is not a moral agent. I'm not arguing like a gnostic, that the physical is icky. Rather I'm saying that technology comes with its own thorns and thistles, and as such is not an unqualified good. My concern with the "what matters is the way we use it" crowd is that they miss that it too can sometimes use us. First, its capacity to dazzle can too easily hide its darker side. We ought to be amazed at the feats of dominion that God has graced us with over the last century or so; every time I ride in an airplane and watch the ground recede, I am astonished. But that same amazing machine makes it easier for me to be away from my family, from my local body. I can't get over the cellular phone. I can call Laurence wherever he may be and talk over an article I'm writing. I can be traveling down the road and call down to Orlando and talk to my colleagues down there. It's amazing. But what if I use it to keep in touch—without ever actually touching? On the internet I can search out like-minded people all over the world and visit with them. In the meantime, my thirst for companionship is satisfied—and I never speak to my neighbor. I'm still astounded that on any given day, I can enjoy the sensation of streams of hot water pouring down my back. I do it without thinking twice about the cost; I can do it twice a day without thinking about the cost. But what if this gift turns me into a sissy, unwilling or unable to bear going a day without it, or undoing the magic of the shower by going out and breaking a sweat doing some real work? How might the ease with which I can now write this article change the nature of the article? To put it another way, there are strings attached to technology, hidden costs that might be debited from our own characters. My chickens may not lay eggs like the ones down at the Eggs "R" Us egg factory, but then my chickens lay eggs that taste good. My eggs come from chickens, not from the grocery store. Not only is there a message in the medium, but that message gets through and changes us. Whether I am using this computer to research the wisdom of the Puritan divines, or looking for gossip about the divine Miss M., I'm still hooked into a machine that can give me instant access—which is good and bad, but never neutral. This is why we so desperately need to be deliberate about the very habits of our hearts. With the magic of technology buzzing in the background, it's hard to pay attention to the message. That is perhaps my greatest concern about technology: it can distract us from our first calling. Even though the Harvester 3000 may double the yield of our corn-field, if it helps us forget that we are dependent upon God it is not a tool for dominion but a tool of the devil. If we're humming to the built-in CD player, we may not be enjoying God's gift of musical beauty but distracting ourselves, avoiding thinking about beauty as a gift from God. This is why we want to live simple lives. We're not against technology as such, any more than we are against dirt. We are wary of it, though, and don't want our eyes unable to see through the fairy dust of technological wonder, nor our souls stained by the mud of temptation. We don't want to throw ourselves into the briar patch, the thistles of technology, nor find ourselves unable to let go of that tarbaby, and become addicted to the so-called new and improved. We love to exercise dominion, but we don't want technology exercising dominion over us. Too often we become slaves to our technology by judging our lives against technological standards, and working hard to overcome not the thorns and thistles in the dirt but the mountain of debt we've piled up while buying all the latest gadgets of the day. We want to be free, to be masters and not slaves. And such, of course, makes us weird—set apart from the world around us. While they are busy worshipping this limping God of technology, we are zealous for worshipping the true God of the strong right arm. We are a people who are more concerned with joys of a well-earned nap than the legal conundrums of thieving through Napster. We are a people who know the difference between infusion and imputation, but who couldn't tell an MP3 from a Palm 7. Our values are different and so our lives look different. We neither reject a particular technology because of its birth date as the Amish do, nor do we embrace the latest technology simply because it is the latest. We are set apart because we are deliberate. And we are able to be deliberate because we are simple. Go ahead and throw another log on the fire. Read like reading is supposed to be done, not with a hand on a mouse, not slogging your way through hyperlinks that only serve to make you hyper, but simply. Sit back with the drink of your choice, as long as it is not some industrial sludge, and have a nice read. And then—then—come and visit us. Even Every Thought Captive cannot capture this, as hard as we try: the real change that comes when real people have real conversations about really important things.
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Here's
Mud in Your Eye