I spent nearly five years, several of them in Italy, seriously searching for a religious vocation. One year I trained in a monastery in Umbria and got to know the abbot during my five-day stay. One evening, the abbot found me entering the chapel to “pray.” I had a pile of books under my arm. Ironically, one of the books was a spiritual tome called “The Difficulties of Spiritual Prayer.”
It was nearly midnight when I left the chapel, and I was surprised to see the Abbot pacing up and down the outer colonnade with his hands behind his back and his head covered by the hood of his robe. When he saw me, he covered his head with a sweeping hand, smiled, and said, “Next time, please leave your books in your room.”
Technology has the potential to bring great benefits to humanity, and we should develop more humane technology that can help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, but we shouldn’t copy it.
He explained that during his decades-long term as abbot, he noticed something unusual among the novices training to enter the monastic order, something that he felt was stunting their development. Starting in the mid-2000s, he observed, monks began carrying piles of books into the chapel as prayer aids. He told me he suspected it had something to do with the widespread use of computers and smartphones. People were beginning to think about themselves, or about prayer, in the same way they think about computers. There seemed to be a fear of self-directed thinking; a fear of thinking that something must be “useless” without input, just as a computer cannot work without a program.
This little anecdote haunted me. The next time I sat in the chapel, alone, empty-handed, and endured the painful, cleansing silence. The idea that I was developing a calculating, computer-like mindset that affected the deepest levels of my soul sobered me.
The degree to which we humans imitate the machines we create, which, while necessarily derived from humans, confer demigod-like status because they can perform automatic feats that humans cannot, is the extent to which we lose uniquely human capabilities: we become what we imitate.
Their idols are silver and gold,
Work done by human hands.
They have mouths but they don’t speak.
Though they have eyes, they cannot see.
They have ears but cannot hear.
They have noses, but they cannot smell.
They have hands, but no feeling.
He has legs but he can’t walk.
They make no sound from their throats.
So are they who make them.
So does everyone who trusts them.
—Psalm 115
Technology has the potential to bring great benefits to humanity, and we should develop more humane technology that can help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, but we shouldn’t copy it.
It is an irresistible temptation. As René Girard has shown, humans are highly skilled and complex imitators. We imitate so well and deeply that we can even intuit and imitate the desires of our peers. He called our tendency to do so mimetic desire. “Man is a creature who does not know what to want and who turns to others to make decisions for him,” he writes. These “others” to which we turn are what Girard calls the most important “models” of desire.
Now, instead of just relying on other people as models for our desires, we rely on our devices.
A new way of life
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The models we most naturally imitate are other human beings. Dr. Andrew Meltzoff of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences has developed the “like me” theory of infant imitation. Dr. Meltzoff has found that from the moment children leave the womb, they have the ability to imitate fellow humans; they do not imitate machines that do the same thing. From the earliest moments of life, babies seem to recognize and imitate only those who are “like” them. Perhaps infants have an implicit recognition of their own dignity.
But as a wise abbot I met in Italy pointed out, there is strong evidence that this is changing: Adults are becoming more like what they imitate, and much of the imitation now seems to be of technological devices and frameworks.
General Jim Mattis famously said, “PowerPoint is making us stupid.” Pentagon officials noted that PowerPoint “hinders debate, critical thinking, and thoughtful decision-making.” Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint at Amazon.
Instagram’s in-house researchers found that the social media platform causes “serious deterioration in teen mental health” and exacerbates body image issues for one in three teenage girls. In addition to mental health issues, social media platforms like Instagram make it difficult for dedicated users to stick to reality for more than a few seconds. We’ve all seen people who enter real-world spaces and treat them as something they only use for Instagram-worthy images. Real-world behavior mimics behavior learned from devices.
And a new generation of porn addicts, fueled by the ability to access hardcore porn anywhere, for free, and in the palm of their hands, is now forming a new aesthetic. Aside from the objectification of the human body, the trickle-up effects of porn aesthetics (e.g., grooming norms) remind us that what people consume has far-reaching consequences: it’s not just life imitating “art,” it’s a mediated reality that has been made ubiquitous by devices.
Meltzoff’s “like me” hypothesis is becoming more and more important because the line between real and mediated reality is becoming blurred. If his hypothesis is correct, i.e., if we tend to imitate things that are “like us,” then the nature of imitation is different today, because we live in a world where it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell what is human and what is not. And this is the root cause of our crisis of imitation: what is uniquely human is becoming unclear and increasingly difficult to recognize and identify.
The largely agnostic nature of technological development (characterized by a disregard for its contribution to a healthy human ecosystem) makes it harder to distinguish between the human and the subhuman.
The Digital Politics of Spiritual Warfare
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To understand the new situation we find ourselves in, it is helpful to pause for a moment and look back at some classic philosophical ideas. Aristotle said: Techneor technical. For the philosopher, the carpenter was the quintessential technician, with the greatest skill in his hands. He could make a chair out of a shapeless piece of wood. Once it was finished, there was nothing to do but sit in the chair and enjoy it.
The chair was inanimate and made by human hands. The Greeks marveled at φύσις (physis), or “nature,” which comes from the word φύω (phiō), which means something that is born, grows, and has potential. Take action yourself Following the principle of life, a building takes shape by itself. For example, if a building possesses this property, an architect can envision the finished project while laying the first stone, and the stone will then organize itself and build into the finished design.
Tools and objects have no life principle, initiative or process. They are not like trees, which have their essence within them. That is why technology was not a source of wonder for the Greeks, whereas trees were. Technology is beautiful because it is “other” – it is not something we have created entirely with our own hands.
Loss of sensation Heterogeneity And otherness is at the heart of the predicament we face today. This is exactly what former Google CEO Eric Schmidt meant when he said that the internet will “disappear” as it becomes part of everyday objects and services. “The internet will always be a part of our existence,” he said.
This aspect of the modern technological world is what Martin Heidegger GuestelIt’s a German word that means to impose one thing on another, to frame reality completely.
Much of the world we experience today Techneand that’s all Gestell. of GuestelAs Heidegger predicted, technology is a kind of all-encompassing cage, because our attempts to escape it are themselves technological (think of the features on most smartphones that help monitor usage and ban apps during certain periods).
The notion of otherness fades away as everything collapses into a new entanglement of human and technological. Physics and Techne It is no longer as clear as it once was, leading to a general confusion about human nature itself.
For example, materialist and pop-anthropologist author Yuval Noah Harari (of Sapiens fame) believes that humanity is in the process of upgrading itself into a “god,” evolving into a kind of techno-species that may one day be able to conquer death. For him, the future of nature and technology is nearly complete.
Harari is wrong about human nature, but he’s right that humanity no longer knows what it wants: “The real question we face is not ‘what do we want to be,’ but ‘what do we want to want?'” he poses near the end of the book.
Most people no longer know what they want, because it is harder than ever to find strong models of desire, models of humanity that inspire greatness and show us fully alive.
As Harari believes, humanity will not reach this level by trying to upgrade itself into a higher species. We will achieve it through an anti-mimetic approach, that is, by rejecting the dominant model of mediated, mediocre humanity that is offered to us today and embracing a new model of the best humanity.
We don’t need to manufacture them. All we need is a broader perspective, to look further into the future and into the past, as Petrarch did, and to see beauty that is both very old and very new. Our models are never made by human hands.
