essay on modern technology imprisons the human spirit

Modern Technology’s Impact on Society Essay

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Introduction

Disadvantages and advantages of technology.

Modern technology has changed the world beyond recognition. Thanks to technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, advances have been made that have revolutionized our lives. Modern man can hardly imagine his life without machines. Every day, new devices either appear, or existing ones are improved. Technology has made the world a better place, bringing people additional conveniences and opportunities for healthy living through advances in science. I believe that the changes that technology has brought to our lives are incredibly positive in many areas.

One of the fields where computing and the Web have introduced improvements is education. Machines can keep large volumes of information in a tiny space, reducing entire library shelves of literature to a single CD-ROM of content (Garsten & Wulff, 2020). The Web also acts as a huge learning tool, linking together data sites and enabling inquisitive individuals to seek out just about any subject conceivable. A single personal computer can hold hundreds of instructional programs, visual and audio tutorials, and provide learners with exposure to an immense quantity of content. In the classroom, virtual whiteboards are replacing conventional whiteboards, allowing teachers to provide interactive content for students and play instructional movies without the need for a projector.

Advanced technology has also dramatically and favorably changed the medical care sector. Developments in diagnostic instruments allow doctors to detect hidden diseases, improving the likelihood of successful therapy and saving lives. Advances in drugs and vaccines have been extremely influential, nearly eradicating diseases such as measles, diphtheria, and smallpox, which once caused massive epidemics (Garsten & Wulff, 2020). Modern medicine allows patients to treat chronic diseases that were once debilitating and life-threatening, such as diabetes and hypertension. Technological advances in medicine have helped improve the lives of people around the world. In addition, the latest technology has dramatically increased the productivity of various techniques.

The computers’ capability to resolve complicated mathematical calculations enables them to accelerate any problem that involves metrics or other calculations. Simulating physical processes on a computer can save time and money in any production situation, giving engineers the ability to simulate any design. Modern technology in transportation allows large distances to be traveled quickly. Electric trains, airplanes, cars, and even rockets are used for this purpose (Garsten & Wulff, 2020). In this way, technology brings positive change for people who love to travel.

Despite all the positive changes, there are also disadvantages to the active development of technology. For example, more and more people are becoming dependent on the computer, TV, or cell phone. They ignore their household chores, studies, or work and spend all their time in front of a laptop or TV screen (Garsten & Wulff, 2020). Because of this, people may become inactive and less willing to work, hoping that technology will do everything for them.

In conclusion, I believe that despite some of the disadvantages, the advantages of gadgets are much more significant. Modern technology saves time and allows people to enjoy life. Moreover, new technologies in medicine also contribute to a longer life expectancy of the population and the cure of diseases that were previously beyond the reach of doctors. In addition to medicine, technology has brought significant positive changes to the fields of communication, education, and engineering. Therefore, I believe that the positive impact of technological progress on human lives cannot be denied.

Garsten, C., & Wulff, H. (2020). New technologies at work: People, screens, and social virtuality . Routledge. Web.

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• Open access
• Published: 22 November 2019

Souled out of rights? – predicaments in protecting the human spirit in the age of neuromarketing

• Alexander Sieber   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6889-4029 1  

Life Sciences, Society and Policy volume  15 , Article number:  6 ( 2019 ) Cite this article

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Modern neurotechnologies are rapidly infringing on conventional notions of human dignity and they are challenging what it means to be human. This article is a survey analysis of the future of the digital age, reflecting primarily on the effects of neurotechnology that violate universal human rights to dignity, self-determination, and privacy. In particular, this article focuses on neuromarketing to critically assess potentially negative social ramifications of under-regulated neurotechnological application. Possible solutions are critically evaluated, including the human rights claim to the ‘right to mental privacy’ and the suggestion of a new human right based on spiritual jurisdiction, where the human psyche is a legal space in a substantive legal setting.

Introduction

Humanity is on the precipice of a technological age that looks poised to irreversibly intrude on the basic human capability of self-determination as well as bodily and mental integrity. Today, technologies exist that can strip the mind of mental privacy. Privacy is a human right protected for all humans under Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and elaborated on for the benefit of children in Article 16 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and Article 14 of the International Convention on the Protection of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families for those cited. Yet the unique capacities of these new technologies endanger humans in such a way that new ethical measures must be adopted to protect mental integrity. This article examines the problem, views, and it addresses potential solutions to the challenges posed by digital neurotechnology to human dignity.

A closer look into the Mirror

Since the industrial revolution, humankind in the West has been on a one-way track towards a distinctly Anglo-Saxon vision of development. In the process, untold trillions of US Dollars were invested in capital goods that create even greater wealth by increasing business efficiency. However, today humanity reaps the enormous, compounded detriments known as opportunity cost . Ronald Coase’s proverb of opportunity cost – that every transaction has an inherent cost – has become glaringly apparent to modern society. Images of Pacific sea life trapped in plastic trash do not even begin to capture the enormity of the unsustainable development problem, but still, modern society is now somewhat aware of it.

The United Nations has made sustainable development a core ambition in the form of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Confronted with the stark reality of industrialization’s unsustainability, the anthropocentric worldview is challenged by a progressive green revolution. Modern society has realized that it shares a biosphere with all living beings. Climate change, displacement, genocide, ethnocide, inequality and lower standards of living have resulted from the pursuit of profit. The conscious effort to reverse the negative consequences of modern development illustrates a paradigm shift: Humankind can ideologically backtrack and innovate with ‘humane’ purpose by working against ignorance as well as corrupt legal and political institutions. This article argues that the application of modern neurotechnology such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalogram (EEG), and big data should be discussed with the same caution as hydraulic fracking or mass deforestation because all are examples of modern technology posing a significant threat to humanity and all other ecological systems today and even more so if they develop unrestrained. Although the comparison may be shocking to many readers, this paper provides a glimpse into the existential threat humanity faces from the virtually unregulated field of neuromarketing.

• Neuromarketing

fMRI and the EEG have opened new possibilities in neuroscience. Tracking blood flow in brains and reading brain-cell activity, respectively, has led to significant advancements in psychology, but psychology is not limited to the biological sciences. The corporate business world has hailed the brain as the “newest business frontier” (Pradeep and Patel, 2010 ) In the context of neuromarketing, researchers seek to scrape every bit of information they can from consumers not only to deduce buyer preferences but to decide for the consumer what they shall desire. That is, new media marketing is used to hack and manipulate consumers. Neuromarketers make models based on data collected from, for example, fMRI scans and then market targeted groups based on the likeness to their subjects. It may sound innocent, but deep learning from the marriage between fMRI and big data results in some ominous futures.

For example, Google, LLC has made neuromarketing part of its marketing strategy. Looking to tie its product to the subconscious of its advertisement viewers, Google’s scheme relies on human psychological attachment to its advertisement characters to obtain the attention of the viewer. In such a presentation, neuromarketing is fundamental. Just as fast-food giants use colors that induce hunger in their restaurants for monetary gain, Google uses primal and emotional triggers of the human unconscious to generate business.

Today, companies like Google, Samsung, and Facebook engage in extremely invasive and non-transparent neuromarketing strategies and techniques often in the name of efficiency. For example, Facebook, Inc. is engineering neurotechnology that transfers user thought to text. Allegedly, this technology is to save the consumer’s time. This invasive methodology marks a new rupture in marketing that could have only been made possible with the advancement of technology.

Currently, neuromarketing mines hidden information and even manipulates the consumer’s mind by accessing brain information. The mind was once presumed to be a kind of haven from intrusion from the outside world. This is no longer true in modern capitalist society. The mind has been tapped, but what if a line is not drawn at the consumer; what if neuromarketing becomes the method by which a state controls groups? Philosopher Michel Foucault feared this. In his writings on biopolitics , Foucault provided a genealogy of and predictions for the application of power over living bodies and whole populations. Before dying in 1984, Foucault critiqued neoliberalism. Today, Neo-Foucauldians continue his analysis of neoliberalism as a manifestation that has given rise to greater exploitation, inequality, and corruption of individuals and their highest ideals, such as human dignity and democracy (Brown 2015 ).

How we got Here

Neoliberalism has created tremendous wealth in the digital age. Austerity measures propel businesses towards greater innovation such as neuromarketing. The financial stakes are so high now that humankind is mining the mind to find out what product is preferred, but that is just the beginning. Neuromarketing now aims to spread and alter specific brain data and brain functions – amounting to consumer manipulation. As Nikolas Rose explains, the “re-shaping of human beings is thus occurring within a new political economy of life in which, in part at least, biopolitics has become bioeconomics (Rose 2007 ).” The link between contemporary capitalism and efforts to strip the mind is unmistakably evident. Modern capitalism has explicitly brought forth dehumanization and objectification.

Reducing a human being to a thing devoid of agency and self-determination degrades the human by othering it. As the person becomes an object, it loses its dignity. Under an fMRI scanner, the human brain is a ‘purchaser’ and nothing more to the neuromarketer. The genealogy of mind-raiding indicates that the next step is to trigger specific action from the objectified purchaser. As Selena Nemorin writes:

In their deliberate efforts to trigger and condition consumers into buying responses, neuromarketing practitioners actively seek to manipulate human processes of understanding, which results in the subversion of core democratic values of freedom of intelligence and self-determination (Nemorin 2018 ).

In effect, neuromarketing could undermine democracy, as the foundation of civil society is to have rational people making decisions on their community’s and their own behalf. By definition, rationality is a calm, calculated state. If one takes away the human’s communal standing and rationality, one is left not merely with a homo oeconomicus (for even that would require rationality) that acts rationally in its market decisions but with a homo alalus : a machine-like man.

It is perfectly acceptable to treat machines as machines and animals as animals, but, as European Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative tells us, humans are to be treated not as a thing, but as an end in itself. Humans are different from other creatures because they are born with the self-determination to be moral and thus to enshrine with dignity. Without autonomy, dignity is lost. Homo sapiens , the moral animals, that have been othered to the point of being treated as a laboratory experiment subject that has not been given free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) – like a regular laboratory animal – lose all dignity. Self-determination, dignity, and FPIC are protected as universal human rights. Rights are designed to protect the dignity of humanity – thought to be the essence of being a human.

Without dignity, humans and their societies disintegrate because humans are creatures of profound ethical choice and power over their environment, including over their peers as they all are being-towards-death and therefore, command meaning. In a life of phenomenon, expresses Gail Linsenbard: “ontological freedom, or freedom of choice… is foundational in that it is what all persons are as Being – as human reality, and it makes practical freedom (or unfreedom) possible (Linsenbard 1999 ).” It is through freedom to love and play that meaning is generated in society. Love is only generated when individuals have a ‘world’ as described by Hegelian philosophy. Psyches guide each of our worlds, and we can, of course, share – thus further our loving, though without meaning there is nothing for the Homo sapiens .

Then there is world destruction. The exhumed psyche is a shattered world. Few things can be conceived that match it. Phenomenologists have long been interested in world destruction. Examples include killing someone and catastrophic loss, but few of us know what experiencing mind mining is really like. Violation of what Nemorin calls “boundary-integrity” Footnote 1 happens when minds are hacked. Nemorin’s use of the word ‘boundary’ suggests a value in maintaining a profanum – where the sacred and the profane dichotomy is definite – suggesting that law is the answer.

Social consequences of Neuromarketing

Laissez-faire policies created incentives for modern society’s re-enslavement; they also render the society paradoxical, as there is nothing liberal about living in a community that is devoid of choice, even if it is so in the name of ‘development’. As consumers have their minds tapped, and corporations hurtle humankind towards a neuromarketing dystopia, one has to ask: How does class fit into the futureless age, and would neuromarketing become a tool of the bourgeoisie to suppress the market consumer who will never hold power over a corporate board? Additional to the horrors of bioeconomics are humankind’s trajectorial vestiges of what Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci called ‘cultural hegemony’. A world in where neuromarketing runs amok may well lead to the awful realization of a global class society. Giving in to extreme or unencumbered neuromarketing is giving in to the norm of having a ruling class. There is no way around the personal neuromarketing problem other than to rule it. Should humans let neuromarketing strip them bare of their human rights, or is there a different route?

It is important to note that neuromarketers “do not actively see the consumer as an animal,” but the neuromarketing industry “maintains a conceptual reduction of the consumer to [the] brain as animality is re-inscribed through the discourse, assumptions and operative practices and goals.” Footnote 2 Othering can render policy discourse about consumers faulty on how marketing is helpful, and consumers are rational. For the sake of ethical argumentation, laissez-faire policymakers should refrain from belittling neuromarketing’s nefarious side as many historically have done in debates on the human involvement in climate change.

Futures in human rights

I have put forth the idea that “[Hu]mankind must declare a normative space to contemplate what it means to be human, for there is a necessity and [a] value to the spiritual as a space in which we can conceptualize the human spirit that is not subject to Empire (Sieber 2017 ).” This idea of jurisdiction may be a solution to the problems posed by neuromarketing as well as to other attacks on the human spirit, but it raises some interesting issues regarding governmentality.

Human rights have always had a metaphysical level to them. Protected in the Preamble to the UDHR is a reference to “inherent dignity (UN General Assembly 1948 ).” Humanism has a spiritual streak, as features of sacred and profane are fundamental to the human rights regime. Laws of sacredness and profanity are laws observed and enforced today: Freedom is sacred and therefore protected by law, while bodily harm is profane and prevented by law. Humans are owed a level of privacy and space that, again, are protected by universal human rights. Today, our privacy bubbles are being hacked: what was once assumed to be sacred is now profane.

Jurisprudential language regarding persons relies heavily on the Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, and Christian understandings of what they considered the real person and the persona . The persona is the mask a real person wears (Burchell 1998 ). A person may wear his or her dignity and rights as a persona where the mask is something constructed as purely legal. What I called for was a return to the old notion of spiritual jurisdiction. Jurisdiction is a technology that has a toolkit that includes categories. Categorization of the psyche as a legal space would mark a return to substantial law – not to assume, but to assert rights.

What potential adversity could this measure produce? Entrenched in today’s rights societies is something that Costas Douzinas calls “Foucault’s law”: The situation in where postmodern societies feel more insecure and unfree the more rights are had (Douzinas 2007 ). In other words: Rights have diminishing returns – especially nuanced rights – because they frame rights-holders in some way or another. Take for example the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (UN General Assembly 1979 ). Women’s rights are important for ensuring the dignity of women, but they still frame the individual woman by her ‘gender’. Now, consider how having a legal space for the psyche in the context of human rights would frame and be received by rights-holders. Not everyone may embrace such an invasive, indeterminate, aspirational human right that possesses a seemingly antiquated premise; they may not want to venture into the governmentality involved in overseeing – of all things – the human soul.

A further caveat to my proposition is the law and economics case of diminishing returns and the quest for efficiency. International human rights, which have been subjected to new zealous – albeit deficient – critiques by law and economics scholars(Posner 2014 ) may continue to use utilitarian arguments to justify challenging human rights in general. Law and economics scholars may make a legitimate case against the jurisdiction of the psyche on the basis of efficiency, but where does that leave humankind? It leaves humankind with a problem that perhaps cannot be solved (the jurisdiction of the human psyche), or – in the name of pragmatism – should not be addressed. Therefore, perhaps the most viable solution to the neuromarketing question remains to police individual applications and technologies – however more jumbled that may prove to be legally.

“The flame”

There is a significant precedent in maintaining protection for what one might call the flame or the human spirit. Albert Einstein once said, “The human spirit must prevail over technology.” In the age of unrestrained neuromarketing, one has reason to believe that technologies can intentionally or unintentionally extinguish the human spirit. Neuromarketing and other technologies can obliterate culture and meaning. The arts, which are greatest when agents are introspective, suffer the most in a neoliberal society where they are cut off from reality by neuromarketing and virtual existence. The arts are avenues for spiritual power that keeps the flame burning.

Philosopher Martin Heidegger was notoriously skeptical of technology. He thought that enframing reduces imminence between individuals in society by isolating them. Art, he argued, destroys barriers and brings people closer to truth and authenticity. Heidegger wrote in 1954 that “Enframing means that way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology and that it is itself not technological (Heidegger 1977 ).” Furthermore, “the rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.” Footnote 3 That is, truth escapes humankind unless it tames or turns away from the monstrous apparati it has made. It is Art – the very subject that modern technology suppresses – which acts as a beacon in dark times such as contemporary capitalism. Truth can be difficult or even impossible to grasp when communication is stifled because understanding is subsequently rendered foggy and dumbed-down. Under an unfettered, dystopian neuromarketing regime desire for truth and meaning go down the drain, as society irreversibly become post-truth, post-reason, post-culture, post-meaning, and post-freedom, as the arts are reduced to paradoxically insipid sensationalist tabloids.

Psychopolitics

Foucault wrote in 1975 that “the soul is the prison of the body (Foucault 2012 ).” Just as biopolitics is the politics of bodies, psychopolitics are the politics of the psyche or ‘soul’. Psychopolitics has been synonymous with torture because the first book published on Soviet torture techniques was titled Brain-Washing: A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics . Unlike Foucault’s biopolitical systems of coercion, modern psychopolitics represses and seduces the human psyche. As sinister as psychopolitics sounds and as futile the existence it renders sounds, they are part of the new status quo.

In Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power philosopher Byung-Chul Han bridges the idea of biopolitics of coercion and violence. Violence is “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation (Krug et al. 2002 ).” Big data and modern neurotechnology have the potential to be violent because of their use of psychopolitics on the human psyche. In his book,

Han argues that digital psychopolitics can intervene in human psychic processes. One of his worries about psychopolitics’ microphysics of power is that it will be even faster than human free will – meaning that, when left unchecked, psychopolitics may very well beckon the end of human freedom. Humans would no longer be able to subdue big data’s microphysics because of the microphysical dimension it operates in (Sieber 2019 ).

Freedom is protected by Article 1 of the UDHR, but if the human mind can no longer subdue big data’s microphysics because of the dimension it operates in, then how can humanity cope with the dangerously unmanaged marriage between big data and neurotechnology? As promising as digital technology may be, a more in-depth look shows that “when left unaccounted for, it offers no future or reason yet remains commander of humanity’s future.” Footnote 4 Therefore, it must become a human sustainability project to address neuromarketing.

Mental privacy as a human right

Many bioethicists have promoted discussion on neurospecific rights. The advocates of implementing mental privacy as a human right say, “the neurotechnological future we are approaching will require us to guarantee protection not only to the information we record and share, but also to the source of that information since they may be inseparable (Ienca and Andorno 2017 ).” Footnote 5 But what would enforcing mental privacy as a human right entail, and in what meaningful way can a duty-bearer protect rights bearers from a pernicious process that they are oblivious to? Researchers Marcello Ienca and Roberto Andorno propose “the formal recognition of a right to mental privacy, which aims to protect any bit or set of brain information about an individual recorded by a neurodevice and shared across the digital ecosystem.” Footnote 6 They are adamant that humans “need wider privacy and data protection rights” and that “the need to protect information generated below the threshold of voluntary control demands for the recognition of a new right that is specifically tailored on the characteristics of brain information and the new possibilities opened by mind-reading technologies,” Footnote 7 yet fail to address how that should be done. One can always write rights, but one cannot necessarily protect those rights.

Governmentality entails that the people trust the state with the morals of its government. Moreover, governmentality shapes the practices that “try to shape, sculpt, mobilize and work through the choices, desires, aspirations, needs, wants and lifestyles of individuals and groups.” Footnote 8 An intensely moral agreement between the people and its leadership, governmentality has the power for good or evil: benign purpose or invidious purpose. Protecting citizens’ rights is often the initial intent, yet rights can fail in the form of re-enslavement. Worse yet, data collection – which is inherent to governmentality – could be used by a regime to abuse groups. A regime of human rights is not guaranteed to be a regime of peace.

Regulation of Neuromarketing

As Han writes in his book Topology of Violence , “Regulation is always accomplished as spatialization and localization. Sheer violence alone is not capable of forming spaces or creating location. It lacks the space-building force of mediation. Thus it cannot produce a legal space .” Footnote 9 In an example, Han makes note that power always involves consent, as “Power, in contrast, develops along a yes.” Footnote 10 He writes, “The greater the popular approval of the ruler, the greatest is the ruler’s power.” Footnote 11 He reiterates, “Even forcible subjugation contains a yes.” Footnote 12 Absolute violence is fundamentally different from power in this sense.

Han contends that “An absolute no negates the relationship of power, that is, subjugation.” Footnote 13 Furthermore, “Contemporary violence is based more on the conformity of consensus than the antagonism of dissent. Thus one could invert Habermas’s phrase and speak of the violence of consensus .” Footnote 14 Han ends his dismantling of expanding legal spaces to detect violence with a blaring analysis of the new status quo: “Today, politics itself is positivizing itself into work without any possibility of sovereign action .” Footnote 15 This means that not only would it be nearly impossible to identify any evidence of neuromarketing’s violent psychopolitical actions, but the conception of a soular jurisdiction (i.e., a jurisdiction of the human psyche) is also rendered futile. Neoliberalism’s subtle, stealthy manifestation known as ‘neuromarketing’ can no longer be traced or brought to justice, so the only conceivable way of curbing its negative effects is through regulation of the devices themselves. Insofar, my proposition of a jurisdiction or legal space for the contemplation on the human spirit may well be necessary, but it will not suffice in actually protecting the human psyche from violence.

Alternative futures

Heidegger famously said in an interview: “only a god can save us.” Footnote 16 He was referring to the kind of hegemonic predicaments humankind is in now. To put Heidegger in context, we must look to the law. In natural law, any end is justified, yet in positive law, any end is justified by its means of creating order. Philosopher Walter Benjamin made note of divine violence as violence that maintains law and order. With divine violence, there are no ends but a call from within. Footnote 17 It is called ‘divine’ because it is outside the flow of history and time; it is a pure manifestation that is both spiritual and apostate. Civil disobedience, on the other hand, is peaceful political protest that may be impossible under “neuroscientific and neurotechnological imperialism.” Footnote 18 Heidegger meant that, if anything, the holy (not God itself) could save humankind from its demise. Philosophy will not solve the problems of modernity, but meditation that leads to a new way of thinking may. Hence, only a god can save us, says Heidegger. Although convexly worded, I think Heidegger would consider human rights as legal technology and the ideal of human dignity a poetic necessity. Insofar, human rights could continue their role as humanity’s redemptive scaffolds, or law could prompt the necessary reengineering of technology to comply with our uniquely human needs.

Another alternative to positive law that renders a field whereby one can interpret mental privacy is to accept a heretical existence. Society may have to settle for the future it is getting. If so, humankind may learn to redefine the individual body and self. Human agency is manifold. One must then ask: Why would one oppose losing a fraction of agency to neuromarketing? Humans are born unfree; they live their entire lives without total free will; they enslave themselves to laws, yet nevertheless, they live. What is stopping people from voluntarily losing more agency to technology if it is economically prudent? Jurisdiction would open the door to debate on the right to property. Much like selling one’s own organs on an open market, may voluntarily selling access to one’s mental privacy be made legal? This law and economics course would cut human rights to its groundless core – an angst-reducing and a sanctity-creating mechanism that is altogether disinterested in the unknown and functions primarily in absolutes in a world that may command a retreat therefrom.

Then remains the rather profitable, albeit still realistic, future of a commercial good produced that can be worn as a physical persona. Fitted like a mask, humans around the world who choose to opt-out of surveillance (and can afford to) could wear a concealment or use a disorienting mechanism (e.g., surgical masks, digital-camouflage garb, makeup, laser pens), as we have seen in the recent Hong Kong resistance in the heavily surveyed Chinese metropolis. This would likely pose a mere blip for big data collection, as it will likely amass enough information to compensate. In such a case, the persona would be a cost-bearing item, possibly furthering any economic divide.

Lastly, technology is inherently innovative. This is true for efficiency and for correcting economic externalities of production. Take the green revolution for example. Humanity found ways to generate energy while curbing carbon dioxide emissions. There, it innovated to create similar production outputs, if not more and reduced emissions. With nuclear arms, humankind has largely chosen to deescalate and scale down, but one can never uninvent the bomb. Any effort to enforce ignorance about the brain in marketing or data collection would be what economists call a market distortion : insufficient supply for the quantity demanded because of interference. In the past, these have led to criminal activity (e.g., the trade of drugs and people). Furthermore, data collectors may not be retroactively stripped of the information they legally obtain. How data is managed from now on is an issue in itself.

Conclusions

This article examines the implications of new technologies that encroach on a space (the psyche) alleged to be sacred. In such a context, it approached the topic as an ethical issue by evaluating the implications of escalating legal measures and also the absence thereof.

If “the modern notion of human dignity involves an upwards equalization of rank, so that we now try to accord to every human being something of the dignity, rank, and expectation of respect that was formerly accorded to nobility,” Footnote 19 then, there is no way for neurotechnological imperialism to progress in a way that does not increase the gulf between the wealthy class and the working class if it will be an instrument for cultural hegemony. In that respect, the digital revolution’s dystopic course is socially damaging to the human value of dignity.

Furthermore, the use of neurotechnology can violate citizens’ universal human rights to self-determination and privacy that may never be regained given the dystopic trajectory. The number of voices calling for new human rights is growing, and they are seemingly legitimate. That being said, theorists allege that this may be a lost cause since it is unrealistic to govern the psyche in any pertinent sense. The human right to mental privacy remains aspirational and has gained some traction. Ienca and Andorno’s paper on what they call a ‘right to mental privacy’ recommends new regulation that may be the only answer to the dangers of unfettered neurotechnology.

If humankind lives in an age where modern technology has pressed it to react to technology for the sake of human dignity, we have reached truly a historic point in history. No longer are we in the state of nature where conflict exists solely between humans, Earth, and animals. Now humankind’s creations (technology) have created new points of conflict. The Hegelian master–slave dialectic is perhaps better understood today as, say, the human–computer dialectic. Both fight each other for autonomy – the only difference is that stealthy neurotechnology depends on an apathetic, willing human population. These issues are what make the discourse on neurospecific rights and regulation so remarkable.

Neurospecific rights would also contribute to the reduction in the sleek glamour of the still relatively young international human rights law regime. The law and the concept of human dignity have been made messy by technology. This stands to remind scholars that the law itself is technological – an evolving human construct.

Lawcraft that pushes back against allowing technology designed to use human faculties as a resource at the expense of individual human dignity should be cautiously embraced. In a neoliberal age, regulation is a necessary yet not so sexy political stance. Civil society should be informed about the dangers posed by neuromarketing before giving in to its soft hegemony. Equal-standing citizens deciding with clear eyes on what is just is part of sufficient democracy. But legal scholars cannot forget that law itself is technological, and insofar, the concept of human dignity and themes surrounding it (e.g., freedom, conditions for valid consent) must be further expounded upon.

Neuromarketing and other modern neurotechnologies that harness the power of the human psyche will challenge what it means to be human because it is not clear that there will be a universal response to its harmfulness. A capitalist agenda may triumph – making citizenry bear the economic cost of maintaining a literal persona.

Finally, this article questions the efficiency (i.e., payoff) of intrusive neurotechnology. If there is a net benefit, there is – albeit a small – space in legal scholarship for condoning pernicious technology. The time is now for people to debate and set a legal precedent. The applications of big data and neurotechnology deserve the attention of activists, ethicists, lawyers, and policymakers. Neuromarketing, in particular, has enjoyed life on a lawless frontier and should be subjected to delibrative governing before it fully mutates into a digital-aged form of barbarism : when technology (neuromarketing), spirituality (worship of the Market), and the politics of custom (mind-reading) are used to commit acts of extremely cruel conquest (cultural hegemony in the creation of a subjugated class), where the whole are promised salvation (greater efficiency) and the few (dissenting voices) are cast aside for their infamy.

Availability of data and materials

Not applicable

Nemorin, Biosurveillance in New Media Marketing , 213.

Ibid., 216.

Sieber. “Does Facebook Violate Its Users’ Basic Human Rights?,” 143.

Marcello Ienca and Roberto Andorno, “Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology.” Life Sciences, Society and Policy 13.1 (2017): 14.

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Jeremy Waldron, Dignity, Rank, and Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 ), 33.

Abbreviations

Convention on the Rights of the Child

Electroencephalogram

Functional magnetic resonance imaging

Free, prior and informed consent

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

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Technology and Human Dignity: The Contemporary Relevance of George Grant's Views

Eamon Joseph Brennan Mr. , University of Windsor Follow

George Grant, Technology, Demythologization, Nature, Steven Vogel

George Grant argues that modern innovations in technology are delineated by what he terms ‘the co-penetration of art and science’, which disposes their rational methods towards the satisfaction of while in a purported ‘spirit of creativity’. Though such a spirit has provided many benefits, a natural worry arises as to what may be justified, morally, within the parameters of such creativity. For Grant, such skepticism is well-founded as the gradual expansion of technology is co-measure with ‘demythologization’, that is, the loss of any sense of objective, transcendent purpose. Noting how this worrying trend invites a dangerous premise of making human life subordinate to such creative drives, Grant asserts that the highly individualistic nature of modern technological thinking ultimately challenges the idea of human dignity itself. However, in his Thinking Like a Mall, Steven Vogel argues for the non-existence of nature by attempting to demonstrate that the entire world is simply the result of Man’s artifice. Labelling such projects as technological, Vogel goes on to say that each technology’s ‘wildness’ prevents it from being absorbed into projects of mastery, negating concerns that technology will attempt to master human nature. Yet in presenting Grant’s historical examination of the idea of technology, particularly as it relates to the ideas of ‘progress’ and Nietzsche’s critique of the same, I will argue that Vogel’s view of technology is ultimately inadequate as it does not satisfactorily what Grant identifies as the novelty of current technological thinking, which relates to the profound lack of a ‘myth’ to contextualize our moral decision making in modern technological thinking. Rather, Vogel’s account is rather static inasmuch as it equivocates technology with artifacts and does not pay adequate attention to how the idea of technology has developed, particularly in recent history. As such, Vogel’s moral program fails to address the issues that Grant raises, and thus reinscribes the most harmful aspects of technological thinking.

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Reflections on Science, Technology and the Human Spirit

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Arthur Lyon Dahl International Environment Forum Geneva, Switzerland

Paper prepared for the Triglav Circle 2018 Chateau de Poussignol, Blismes, France 30 June-1 July 2018 http://www.triglavcircleonline.org/

Too often in our world, science and religion are seen as in conflict, if not contradictory. As a Baha’i, I have never had that problem, and chose a career in science because it seemed to be the best expression of my spirituality. These reflections emerge from this experience of science in harmony with the human spirit.

First, it may help to explore what we mean by the human spirit. It is obvious that we have a physical reality, with a body subject to the constraints of any animal. Science is itself a proof of our rational or intellectual reality, which distinguishes us from all other animals. There might be more controversy in the scientific community about whether we have a spiritual reality, yet some form of spiritual experience is so widespread that it is hard to deny that there must be something behind it. Here I am assuming the acceptance of this spiritual reality.

Once we admit the existence of a spiritual reality that we all possess in embryonic form and that must be developed, this comes to justify our higher human purpose, to cultivate the limitless potentialities latent in human consciousness. There is, in fact, an essential connection between the outer and inner dimensions of our existence.

“We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions.” 1

I have been fortunate that my own spiritual tradition has from the beginning had great praise for science. Baha’u’llah, the founder of the Baha’i Faith, wrote:

“Knowledge is as wings to man's life, and a ladder for his ascent. Its acquisition is incumbent upon everyone. The knowledge of such sciences, however, should be acquired as can profit the peoples of the earth, and not those which begin with words and end with words. Great indeed is the claim of scientists and craftsmen on the peoples of the world.... In truth, knowledge is a veritable treasure for man, and a source of glory, of bounty, of joy, of exaltation, of cheer and gladness unto him.” 2

“The source of crafts, sciences and arts is the power of reflection. Make ye every effort that out of this ideal mine there may gleam forth such pearls of wisdom and utterance as will promote the well-being and harmony of all the kindreds of the earth.” 3

The son of the founder of the Baha’i Faith, ‘Abdu’l-Baha, similarly wrote:

[Humans are] “the highest specialized organism of visible creation, embodying the qualities of the mineral, vegetable and animal plus an ideal endowment absolutely minus and absent in the lower kingdoms - the power of intellectual investigation into the mysteries of outer phenomena. The outcome of this intellectual endowment is science which is especially characteristic of man. This scientific power investigates and apprehends created objects and the laws surrounding them. It is the discoverer of the hidden and mysterious secrets of the material universe and is peculiar to man alone. The most noble and praiseworthy accomplishment of man therefore is scientific knowledge and attainment.” 4

We see Science and Religion as two complementary knowledge systems, both of which are necessary to guide civilization forward: - science without religion falls into materialism; - religion without science tends to superstition and fanaticism.

Unfortunately, both these excesses are common in the world today, and are behind many of our difficulties and crises.

The problem is that science and technology are neutral, their discoveries can be used for good or evil. It is religion, broadly defined to encompass all spiritual traditions, that provides the ethical framework and moral purpose for science and technology.

It is in this framework that we can explore some of the dichotomies that science and technology present to us today, and to consider how the human spirit can best profit from the wonderful tools that science has given us.

Technology can liberate or imprison

As physical beings, we have all sorts of practical limitations, which dominated our potential for most of the existence of the human species. Life was largely devoted to meeting our physical needs and avoiding life-threatening situations. Now we can dive under the sea, go to the moon, fly faster than the speed of sound or go anywhere on the planet, speak to anyone around the world, record our thoughts and experiences, and manipulate our environment as we wish. It would seem that our liberties have no limits, and the consumer society is there to cater to our every want. And that is the paradox. We have trapped ourselves in our consumer culture, forced to keep upgrading our technologies to avoid falling behind. Our home is our castle, protecting us from unwanted encounters. and our motor vehicles are similarly designed to protect us from other people. We have become prisoners to our technologies. Rather than liberating us from the struggle for existence so that we can devote our energies to more important things of the spirit, we surround ourselves with distractions so that we do not have to face the spiritual void within ourselves.

Technology can unite or divide

Now that it is technically possible to encounter and exchange with every other human being on the planet, we can for the first time experience and profit from the unity of the entire human race. The rich diversity of human experience is available at our fingertips, not only as it is at present, but as it has been documented down through history. We have access to all the holy books, all the discoveries of science, all the literary, artistic and musical masterpieces from every culture, all the richness of human experience. We can converse, exchange pictures, interact and collaborate as never before in history. This is the perfect foundation for us to live together in peace and harmony. Yet the technology also seems to bring out all that is worst in human nature. We spread fear and hate of others, manipulate public opinion with “alternative truths” and false news, bully and intimidate, slander and corrupt, and find wonderful new outlets for criminal activity. Humanity today seems ever more fragmented and divided in our technologically united world.

Technology for independence or dependence

Science and technology have not yet freed us from all human limitations. We still can fall ill, have accidents, and must some day grow old and die, although perhaps with modern medical science much better than before. Still, the choices before us at any point in our lives are greater than ever. We are even independent of day and night, although we have to sleep at some point. Most technologies are now so portable that we can take them with us everywhere, and be in contact when and where we want. Yet the result seems more often than not to trap us and make us dependent. At least in the more developed parts of the world, the new technologies have led to new kinds of dependence. Everyone seems more preoccupied with their smartphone than their immediate surroundings or the people around them. The World Health Organization has declared video and on-line game dependence as a mental illness. Professional life often requires being constantly available wherever and whenever the work requires it. Social media are designed to trigger the same pleasure centres as cocaine. Technology is the new opiate of the people.

Technology for profit rather than service

Most technological innovation today is carried out by the private sector driven largely by the search for profits. In today’s materialistic economy, profitability is the driving force for a company, rather than just one measure of efficiency among others. It has become the end justifying any means. There are counter currents, such as in the open source software movement, but success is still largely judged by the accumulation of individual and corporate wealth. The result is a distortion of the aims of science and technology. Rather than making discoveries and inventions that will be of service to humanity, the pressure is to focus on those that will bring the most profit. This either means those that will appeal to the rich, who can afford to pay for them, or those that attract the most advertising revenue. This then leads to data profiling, reinforcing confirmation bias, and other manipulations to target consumers with the ads to which they will be most susceptible. There is little or no interest in technologies that will be of service to the poor and will empower them to self improvement, with the exception perhaps of the rapid spread of cellphones and phone-mediated payment systems and banking services which are transforming the lives of many poor around the world.

The privatization of scientific information using technology

One perverse result of the revolution in information technologies is the privatization of knowledge, including scientific information. The system of intellectual property rights has been steadily reinforced to protect and increase corporate profits. Much of this has focussed on the entertainment industry, but it has now extended to the privatization of scientific knowledge. A few multinational scientific publishing houses have bought up the most important scientific journals, including rights to all the back issues. These have been put on line for a price. Researchers in universities or scientific institutions have libraries prepared to pay for institutional subscriptions, but otherwise articles can only be read for a high fee. For researchers in poor countries, or those without an institutional affiliation, or retired, the scientific literature is available on line but beyond reach. This is science by and for the rich, excluding most of the world from accessing or participating in the latest scientific advances.

An ethical approach to science

If we return to our higher human purpose to develop the potential in human consciousness and to be of service to an ever-advancing civilization, then we must turn the motivations for and uses of science and technology to these purposes. A scientific knowledge of the integrated nature of the biosphere, our place in it and our responsibility for it, needs to be coupled with an ethical or spiritual motivation to change our behaviour accordingly. As the Bahá’í International Community has put it:

“Recognition that creation is an organic whole and that humanity has the responsibility to care for this whole, welcome as it is, does not represent an influence which can by itself establish in the consciousness of people a new system of values. Only a breakthrough in understanding that is scientific and spiritual in the fullest sense of the terms will empower the human race to assume the trusteeship toward which history impels it.” 5

Our approach to science and technology needs to change in fundamental ways as part of the general transformation needed in society and called for in the UN 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals. For example, science for the common good should be funded as we would fund other common benefits, with public support and philanthropy. Where discoveries are profitable, there should be mechanisms to direct at least a share of those profits back into the scientific enterprise.

Also, science should be accessible to everyone, and everyone should be empowered to contribute to scientific advancement. While there is a role for the highly trained scientist and elaborate scientific instruments at the cutting edge of research, science should not be restricted to an elite. Indigenous peoples have deep wisdom about their environments accumulated over many generations of careful observations. This is also science, although perhaps understood in a different intellectual framework. Everyone can learn to observe the world around them, and to think rationally in terms of cause and effect, while exploring, inventing and experimenting with solutions to their local problems. This is also a way to cultivate the potential in the human spirit of each person.

If we are to survive these turbulent times, where our technology is impacting the planet with everything from plastics to greenhouse gases produced from fossil fuels, and science is warning us to make rapid and fundamental changes before it is too late, we must draw on both our science and the powers of the human spirit to save us from ourselves. To the extent that we succeed in this, it will contribute to our spiritual as well as material advancement.

“As trustees, or stewards, of the planet's vast resources and biological diversity, humanity must learn to make use of the earth's natural resources, both renewable and non-renewable, in a manner that ensures sustainability and equity into the distant reaches of time. This attitude of stewardship will require full consideration of the potential environmental consequences of all development activities. It will compel humanity to temper its actions with moderation and humility, realizing that the true value of nature cannot be expressed in economic terms. It will also require a deep understanding of the natural world and its role in humanity's collective development - both material and spiritual. Therefore, sustainable environmental management must come to be seen not as a discretionary commitment mankind can weigh against other competing interests, but rather as a fundamental responsibility that must be shouldered - a prerequisite for spiritual development as well as the individual's physical survival.” 6

1 . Letter written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi, 17 February 1933, Compilation on Social and Economic Development, p. 4 2 . Bahá'u'lláh, Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh , The third Tajallí, pp. 51-52 3 . Bahá'u'lláh, Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh , Words of Paradise, Eleventh leaf 4 . 'Abdu'l-Bahá, in Bahá'í World Faith , p. 242 5 . Bahá'í International Community, The Prosperity of Humankind , Office of Public Information, Haifa, 1995 6 . Bahá'í International Community, Valuing Spirituality in Development: Initial Considerations Regarding the Creation of Spiritually Based Indicators for Development . A concept paper written for the World Faiths and Development Dialogue, Lambeth Palace, London, 18-19 February 1998

Last updated 4 July 2018

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Technology and the Spirit of Ownership

Paul J. Cella, III

F or the past few years, President George W. Bush has promoted the ideal of an “ownership society,” and advanced a number of specific policy proposals that aim to broaden and deepen personal wealth. While the catch-phrase is new, the ideal is not, and it has much deeper roots and purposes than simply “saving Social Security.” Property was central to the American founding, and it remains central to America’s economic, social, and moral way of life. An ownership society naturally resists the encroachment of despotism, clings to its liberty jealously, and guards against the particular distempers of the technological age. It is this last purpose of property that most interests me here: private property as a moral and social corrective to the potential excesses of modern technology.

Creativity and Nature

T echnology, we must remember, is a form of human splendor; it is the produce of human ingenuity interacting with the natural world. But technology also presents us with its own novel challenges, including the obscuring of its own causes. In part by design, technology distances the user from the maker by a series of mechanical intermediaries. I use a computer virtually every day of my life, but my understanding of how the machine works is embarrassingly minimal. When there is a problem with it, the solution is usually the same: “Call Tech Support.” This experience is surely familiar to many Americans. It suggests both our impotence and our sense of entitlement: we cannot fix the machines that we come to take for granted; we forget the majesty of the first makers; we inherit tools we can use but rarely understand.

In the hyper-modern age, it is sometimes a challenge to remember the human hands behind every technological artifact, and to remember the distinctly human character of production itself. As G. K. Chesterton elegantly put it in his 1935 book The Well and the Shallows :

The man who makes an orchard where there has been a field, who owns the orchard and decides to whom it shall descend, does also enjoy the taste of apples; and let us hope, also, the taste of cider. But he is doing something very much grander, and ultimately more gratifying, than merely eating an apple. He is imposing his will upon the world in the manner of the charter given him by the will of God; he is asserting that his soul is his own, and does not belong to the Orchard Survey Department, or the chief Trust in the Apple Trade. But he is also doing something which was implicit in all the most ancient religions of the earth; in those great panoramas of pageantry and ritual that followed the order of the seasons in China or Babylonia; he is worshipping the fruitfulness of the world.

An orchard shares something very basic with a computer: it is a technological artifact. It is the produce of human creativity engaging the natural world. An animal will never make an orchard, even if it will make a nest. But men make things which fill no immediate need — save their own need to master and shape the materials of the earth. “And God said unto them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’” The biblical tradition calls men image-bearers, reflecting in some small but real way the singular power of Divine Creativity. It was the Creator who gave us the principle of property and charged us with the duty and privilege of interacting with the created world. This doctrine is what Chesterton refers to when he writes of a “charter” given by God. The original author of the ownership society was also the Author of the universe.

Private property allows each man to engage with the world as an earnest artist, to be a creator in his humble corner of Creation. Even small property is a complete studio for the human spirit: it needs not a whole orchard, but merely a whole garden. To labor over one’s property is to infuse things with humanness; it is to add our memories to the tangible world, like silent hanging trinkets of hopes and struggles shared, fears realized or relieved, lives lived and lives lost. Anyone could have mowed the lawn at the home where I grew up, but my father did — many hundreds of times, and then I did, and then my younger brothers; my mother’s work was in the gardens. Elsewhere a half-dozen friends and family lent their sweat and toil one weekend to the project of turning the driveway into a tolerable basketball court. These examples and innumerable others are what made our home ours ; they represent the human character of human enterprise. Property, in this sense, is the opportunity and realization of the human spirit. It checks the swagger of the autocrat like countless small stinging darts. The great champions of liberty across history, as well as their antagonists, knew well the ineffable value of property.

Free enterprise and private property were both necessary prerequisites for modern technology. I do not say that technology is by any means the greatest achievement of these principles — it would be nearer to the truth to say that liberty is. But technology is central to the life of most free people and free nations, which is why we need to explore the ways that technology can imperil the spirit of liberty. It is possible to forget that technology is an instrument and allow it to become an idol. It is possible to enslave ourselves by technology, even as we imagine that we are setting ourselves free.

This danger becomes most vivid in the rhetoric of some biotechnology enthusiasts. We are told that we must make our decisions on a question like cloning human embryos on the basis of “good science,” leaving “theological” objections to the side. In this context, a critic of Leon Kass once scoffed: “Is [he] really citing the God of the Patriarchs as a guide for contemporary medical regulation?” But it is very important to recognize that, whatever one thinks of the God of the Patriarchs, someone (though he may go unnamed) must be cited as a guide for contemporary medical regulation. Perhaps it will be Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism; perhaps Rousseau and perfectability; perhaps it will simply be the “bioethics” industry and the amoral authority of the stock analyst. The point is that it will emphatically be someone. To follow the compass of “good science” alone usually means doing what is good for the scientists. But what is good for the scientists is not always good for everyone. And a nation that stands idly by as its moral imagination is silently ushered out of the room is an emasculated nation; it is the very opposite of a free people.

It is important to make clear here that technology qua technology poses little threat or challenge at all. Technology simply ceases to exist in any meaningful way absent its human operators. If men vanished, then machinery and technology would quickly fall to comprehensive ruin. If I criticize technology, what I am really criticizing is our interface with it, our implementation of it, and our bluster about it. My beef, though it may be adorned with arguments about technology, is emphatically with men, not with things.

The Cultural Contradictions of Technology

W hat is it about the technological age that threatens a subtle corrosion of its human foundation, and how do we arrest or moderate that threat? Our answer begins by seeking the element of truth in the old story about wealth and success breeding complacency and decadence. The Christian tradition formulates this story by frequent and pulverizing reference to the spiritual perils of prosperity. “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!” Christ warned. I do not know how a Western Christian in the early twenty-first century can read such passages and not tremble. Why is it hard for the rich? Because their wealth so easily becomes an obstacle to the appreciation and pursuit of the things that really matter. It becomes, so easily, so subtly, their idol. In a similar way, wealth obscures its own causes. An ambitious but honorable businessman works his way to great affluence; but his son, despite all the father’s best efforts, falls into degeneracy and dishonor. The father, in his mind’s eye, set success as a distant goal, almost a vision or dream; for the son, however, success is all around him, so large that he can hardly see anything else, and he goes blind. Prosperity paradoxically enervates the human virtues that gave rise to it in the first place.

The most zealous critics of capitalism see only the spoiled son, not the hard-working father; and thus they come to believe that success must always derive not from virtue but from vice. We can, I think, dismiss this charge as irretrievably partisan: it sees only what it wants to see. It is true that the free enterprise system can be maneuvered to reward the unscrupulous, but this is not some singular feature of free enterprise. All those willing to act without moral constraint will likely find their profit. There is always gain to be had in plunder and treachery; the phenomenon is not unique to capitalist societies. The socialist societies of the past simply made plunder and confiscation the principles of their political economies, to the dreary ruin of so many.

But while this critique of capitalism is often made in the most one-sided way, it tells us something important about how prosperity comes to be perceived when it has become ubiquitous. We all come to be tainted by the vision of the spoiled son. In the technological age, this danger works itself out primarily in this way: the harvests of our labor, our technological artifacts, often weaken the human character that made technology’s rise so dramatic. We become spoiled. The danger is not in some marching tyranny of machinery; it is in a diminution or impoverishment of the human things behind technology. We risk becoming so enamored with our toys and gimmickry that we fail to cultivate the human virtues that sustain and dignify technological creativity.

Our danger is that modern men, armed with the most sophisticated techniques and technologies, will lack any real understanding of the dignity of human work. They will become perpetual middlemen. Part of this alienation lies in our remoteness from the causes of things, on the one hand, and from their consequences on the other. A man aspires to be a doctor but instead finds himself an amateur attorney and document-shuffler: filling out forms, filing reports, ensuring at every stage that he is beyond liability. Technology has made his job “easier” but it often makes his patients more distant — both because he sees them less and because they come to trust the technologies of medicine more than the man who prescribes their use. Success rates may be higher, outcomes may be better, but a certain alienation lingers in both parties as the human touch diminishes. The doctor’s vocation is transformed from personal interaction and care to impersonal liaison between the enormous technological institutions of modern medicine and the patient. The doctor discovers one day that he is less a healer than a bureaucratic middleman.

To some extent, this condition is engendered by the moral limitations of the modern welfare state. We can hardly expect men to see clear, much less noble purpose in the mechanism by which Stranger A extracts income from men’s paychecks to distribute to Stranger B, who may or may not be poor. It is absurd to imagine that the personal moral duty called charity can be discharged by this impersonal process, whatever one might think of the necessity of the welfare state. But alienation is also engendered by the increasingly abstract or intangible nature of our free economy. The American worker is highly productive, but how often does he know well what he produces? He likely knows his own part, but does he comprehend the whole?

There is something august and human and indescribably sane to be said for completeness, even if it is simple. We hire out our gardening, our lawn-mowing, our child-rearing, our customer service, and our tech support. We buy our furniture from do-it-yourself catalogues, and experience the illusion of “making something” that is really mass-produced by others. Many modern employees, even when they labor in industries they admire, only infrequently perceive a satisfying completeness in their work. It is like a minute core sample from some larger enterprise; its final dignity is often obscure to them.

Technology can also obscure the humanity of the human beings we interact with. For example, the Internet is wonderfully efficient at distributing information and at democratizing the Fourth Estate, but it can also isolate and dehumanize. Anyone familiar with Internet debate understands this reality all too well. There is a sort of raucous and wooly community among the multitude of bloggers. It is always fascinating, frequently rewarding, and at times magnificent: a genuine innovation in free speech and republican discourse. But it is also conducive to meanness and slander. The ordinary inhibitions of human interaction, the natural respect and civility that should be extended between even those who disagree, is attenuated and at times almost nonexistent. The result is often a kind of disembodied aggression, a drab uncharity. People troll the Internet hunting for targets of animus on whom to unleash their polemical weapons. It is very easy on the Web to forget that you are actually in a distant way engaging real people. And in forgetting that, ferocity ensues. Blogging is spirited, but it often lends itself to rancor. At its best, it brings distant people with shared interests together in ways once unimaginable. At its worst, it reflects the radical isolation of technologically-inebriated creatures. In its glories and entangled perils it illustrates the truth that we must be mindful of all that is human behind our contrivances, lest they devour us.

In a rush toward efficiency and convenience, men have grown efficient at overlooking things. We do not see the wonder of the window, so busy are we looking through it. The elevator does not astound us, because we never contemplate elevation. A perennial artifice in fiction, film, and television is the man from the past brought forward to the present, who must spend a good deal of time struggling through astonishment, fear, and bewilderment as he adjusts to his new world. Whatever we may think of this conceit, it rests on a sound insight about the tendency in man to forget where he came from. A few years ago in these pages , Yuval Levin wrote that “repugnance fades with habit” and quoted Dostoevsky’s claim that “man, the beast, gets used to everything.” Man surely gets used to horrors, but he also gets used to wonders — perhaps to such an extent that he may eventually forget that there is wonder and mystery left in the world. He loses the small boy’s amazement at the miracle of the fountain or the magical grotesquerie of the anthill. In losing sight of this mysticism and awe, his spirit is enfeebled — the very spirit that helped give birth to our technological civilization. It was man’s wonder at the fountain that stirred his visions of elaborate irrigation in the driest desert and majestic human settlements in what once was wasteland. “All human pioneers,” writes George Gilder, “from poets and composers in their many epiphanies to scientists on the mystical frontiers of matter where life again begins, are essentially engaged in forms of devotion.” They are worshiping fruitfulness. Forsake the imaginative sense and devotion fades.

Of course, there is another side to this picture: habituation to our technological marvels can also be a catalyst to further innovation. Unsatisfied with what exists already, the inventor seeks to create something new. But the true inventor is unlikely to allow his restlessness with the present to turn into disdain for the past. The dreamer who aspires to colonize Mars is unlikely to hold the Apollo astronauts in contempt. He is much more likely to revere and honor them by continuing their creative work.

The Meaning of Ownership

T his brings us to our second question: How can we avoid the cultural contradictions of technology? How can we avoid the danger that our technological achievements will erode the human spirit that makes human creativity both possible and meaningful? The answer depends significantly on the promotion of private property. Men are manifestly more likely to regard with reverence, to cherish for itself, a thing which they own. A man can hardly feel alienated from his own house, or from the simple pleasures of labor in his own garden. I would even prefer private property when it conflicts with the free market principle — as it does on occasion. In the preponderance of instances, these two principles cohere nicely. But it is not mere semantics that divides them, and our laws should favor property over the market in any given conflict — especially personal property, where the ownership of assets is more truly connected to the life of an owner.

One must surely grant the importance of largeness in the free enterprise system — for diffusion of risk, accumulation of venture capital, and economies of scale. But I cannot see how liberty is best preserved in the implacable swallowing up of small, autonomous firms into vast bureaucratic corporations. I cannot see the sanity in preferring the huge and cumbersome to the small, local, and independent. I cannot see much to admire in that consolidation which allows a single corporation to own 40 newspapers or 200 banks. It is often remarked, both anecdotally and more systematically, that the corporate psychology vitiates innovation and vigor; that it bureaucratizes and thereby weakens considerably the creative human impulses. Like any bureaucracy, the corporation can regularly mean the promotion of agreeable fecklessness, the rewarding of failure, and the punishment of independent enterprise. We are foolish, as defenders of liberty, if we reflexively defend the corporate economy, or if we willfully ignore the tension that sometimes exists between the corporatist ethic and the spirit of ownership.

Someone will surely reply that I am mistaken in my economics. But they have missed the point. Economics answers to its master: mankind. It is precisely backwards to let economics dictate our principles — for economics is a tool, just like any other applied discipline. Economics cannot tell us our vision of the good life any more than biology can tell us why human life is sacred, or chemistry why a glass of beer after a hard day’s work is such a great pleasure, or physics why men look to the heavens with such awe. Economics can surely aid us in our efforts to achieve the good life, but it cannot, of its own devices, articulate the good life. The reign of economics as a kind of totem is the sign of a servile people.

Both philosophically and practically, the broad ownership of property is the greatest tool we have to embrace and secure the immense benefits of technological civilization, and to check the encroachment of spiritual enervation on the sanctity of human initiative. All private property secures liberty, as every cunning despot who subverted the former to obliterate the latter knew well. The Bolsheviks concluded, shrewdly and correctly, that when the state is the only employer, disobedience means starvation. That was their innovation in political economy, and it took men like Trotsky and Lenin — not good men mistakenly doing evil, but evil men rarely mistaken in any of their calculations — to implement so fearsome and cruel a regime. If demons like these hated private property, we have reason enough to cherish it.

The ownership of property, something purchased on the credit of honest labor, is a near-constant reminder of the ultimate humanness of all our achievements — even, perhaps especially, our technological achievements. In a technological civilization, property often appears as little more than a bundle of documents representing stock options and retirement plans and personal savings accounts. There is more “property” in my filing cabinet then there is in the rest of my home. The property is in the record of transactions and contracts. But when a man looks on his house — the wallpaper that so stubbornly resisted removal, the innumerable minor but trying repairs, the paint applied and stains removed — he sees his labor as real and material; he cannot be alienated from it. Looking next on that bundle of papers in the filing cabinet, he more solidly comprehends what they mean. When he knows real property, he more clearly understands and cherishes its mere representation in paper statements. Ownership has become live and vivid to him.

Modern technology often comes to us as if an inheritance. We are (most of us, anyway) remote from its causes and its inner principles. How many newcomers to the American South (like myself) know anything about the development of small, cheap air conditioning units, even though that development was absolutely crucial to the late economic boom in cities like Atlanta? This whole story of invention and engineering and refinement is obscure; air conditioning is our lovely little inheritance. But the inheritance feels a bit more personal when I own it myself and find myself responsible for its upkeep, even — perhaps especially — in the middle of oppressive summer heat when the unit breaks down. The principle of property has drawn technology nearer to me, and made it more human, even in this small and merely illustrative way. But technology might come to appear like mere sorcery if the regime of proprietorship were imperiled. And here it must be emphatically acknowledged that property, despite the many accretions against it, still thrives in the United States. Stock ownership — a strange manifestation of private property, but a manifestation nonetheless — is wide and ever-widening. Home ownership soars; similarly automobiles and DVD players and, yes, air conditioners are owned by an ever-increasing number of people. Every major town has a Home Depot store. These are not insignificant things.

Life, Liberty, and Property

B ut they could come to naught if the very principle of private property is subverted or allowed to decay with neglect. The technological age challenges the idea of property by making it more abstract, more immaterial, and more distant — though in the end no less real. Intangible manifestations like intellectual property assume a new predominance, with concomitant legal, social, and political difficulties. The popular music industry is a good example: It faces new questions about how to protect the makers of music in an age where every recording can be easily copied for free. This puzzle — music belongs to the maker even as it becomes the possession of the masses — is just one example of how technology transforms the meaning of property, but never eradicates its importance. Where property is immaterial or wholly unseen, there is the danger that the idea of property will be attenuated and thus made more vulnerable. Everyone will claim other people’s creations as their own, and thus lose sight of the honor owed to creativity itself.

Life, liberty, and property — of these declared rights we cannot forget the indispensable last, for it is through private property that we engage with the ineradicable humanness of our technological civilization. To weaken property rights is to render creative exertion defenseless and unintelligible; it is to drive a wedge between material products and the human activity of production. But this sad development is by no means inevitable. We need only remember that technology, for all its marvels, remains a great human problem. A technological society is not the same as a free society, much less a good and decent society. Technology can produce a peculiar kind of deadening in the human spirit, a deadening of precisely the human character that gave rise to our technological age. But the ownership society, rightly understood, can provide a partial antidote to this dreary trend in the life of toil and hardship freely endured for the sake of something owned and cherished. The distance between things and man can be narrowed; the final humanness of technology can be established; and the problem of technology making slaves of its makers can perhaps be averted.

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Humane dissent from technocracy

Exhausted by science and tech debates that go nowhere?

Summer 2005

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Creating Technology Worthy of the Human Spirit

Spiritual caretakers have been present in every culture throughout human history. We know them as ministers, rabbis, lamas, shamans, imams, chaplains, gurus, and wise elders. In modern, secular times, they also include therapists, social workers, meditation teachers, and more. These caretakers support us through birth, death, and many of the most intimate and complex parts of the human experience. They use skills honed over many years that require paying radical attention to the humanity of others. Yet where is this expertise to be found in the creation of the digital technologies that have become portals through which we live, love, learn, grieve, and connect with our communities? Those who design and build digital technology must accept that we have become de-facto spiritual caretakers with the power to treat the well-being of humanity with care or with negligence. Unfortunately, caretaking is a role that computer science degrees do not prepare people for, few business models optimize for, and algorithms can not easily solve. This article outlines two concrete best practices that can help foster genuine responsibility and care on the part of technologists and technology companies. First, technologists must recognize that what we create is an expression of our own inner state. Our spiritual and emotional health is inextricably linked with our ability to build technology with responsibility and wisdom. Second, technologists must create an empowered seat at the table for those with the expertise and orientation needed to care for our souls, whether from a religious or secular lens.

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L. Burton and L. VandeCreek, Professional chaplaincy: Its role and importance in healthcare, Journal of Pastoral Care , vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 81–97, 2001.

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