As a foreword: A fairly bad essay about technology—specifically, digital tools and screens—is making the rounds this week, and I was prompted to dig some old notes out of storage and write the following. It is not a response to that essay, which I won’t even cite, because there are far too many of them. Instead of responding to arguments or taking sides I’m going to pull back and work through a framework for thinking about the available positions. I did not anticipate where I wound up, and as I say it was a bit of thinkpiece, but I’m certain enough of where I ended to file it under “Manifestoes.” You may or may not find it useful.
When confronted with a potentially dangerous technology there are essentially three possible responses. The first is to embrace it optimistically, use it without reservation, and hope for the best. That being both fairly obviously foolish and also more or less the norm of twenty-first global society it has no need of defense, so let’s set it aside. (I you disagree, you’re not going to enjoy what follows, so I’ll set you aside as well.) I’m interested in the other two responses, each of which shows a kind of wisdom—but a different kind, philosophically incompatible, yet both of which may be not only necessary but codependent.
The first is what I’ll call the tao of technology. This is the idea that all things have use to the one who uses them wisely. The sage, in other words. The sage can carry a smart phone in his pocket without continually pulling it out and staring at it, either because he knows that to do so would be foolish or because he has adapted the device to quit distracting him—because he has created some architecture of nondistractability, we might say, either internal or external. The sage can use so-called artificial intelligence to learn about the world in ways formerly impossible without outsourcing his thinking to the machine or growing dependent on it for essential communication skills, because he knows his own mind and has cultivated discipline. And so on.
The second approach let’s call the taboo. Given a tool that people are likely to abuse, it is best to ban it or, at least, heavily restrict its use. A taboo is essentially a law, but doesn’t have to take the form of public law; it may be personal. Acknowledging that I would be better off without a smart phone in my pocket, I might get rid of it and buy a flip phone. I might boycott not only AI tools but those who use them.
But a personal taboo is hard to enforce. In fact, the discipline required to enforce a personal taboo against a tool is exactly the discipline required to use the tool well in the first place, which means that it is an option available only to the sage. A taboo, to be a taboo, must be externally enforced. Again, it doesn’t require an act of Congress. A community might, like the Old Order Amish once did, adopt telephones and automobiles only to decide that it had been more Christlike before, and agree to rip out the wires and sell their cars—dissent coming at the cost of expulsion from the community. Or it might be like the friend you meet at the gym, who will bug you if you miss a workout.
Of course to adopt even a communal taboo requires wisdom; it only recognizes that while the spirit may be willing, the flesh is weak. My own “architecture of nondistractability” involves taking social media apps off my phone, which is really a kind of taboo, but one that comes from (I believe) wisdom, and which helps me to use the device in ways that better serve my life. It’s usually the case that good decisions come from experience, and that experience comes from bad decisions. But real wisdom, the wisdom of the sage, is not merely an ad-hoc bundle of taboos but a sixth sense that guides decisions about new tools in light of some ultimate end—human flourishing, a good life—albeit a sense that, when given shape as a particular action, looks like a taboo.
You might think of the tao as individual and the taboo as communal, or of the tao as internal and the taboo as external, or (as I prefer) of the tao as global and the taboo as particular—or even of the tao as Grace and the taboo as Law. You might think of the waveforms of the tao collapsing into particles of (literally particular!) taboos.
Personally, I would rather be guided in my use of technology by the tao rather than by taboos. That’s my character, frankly; I’ve also put digital technologies to a lot of uses I’d find it easy to justify. Certainly the taboo isn’t what you’d call the spirit of the age, but most people who write about technology in any specific, thoughtful way tend especially toward the taoist approach, precisely because they have thought about it in a specific, thoughtful way. That’s the path to wisdom. It’s natural to think, well, I can use this tool wisely: why can’t everybody? And it’s reasonable to mourn the loss of what new tools may, when used wisely, give us.
Now, from some people this is merely selfish: they are defending their own vested interests. Or they see themselves as the Übermensch who must not be bound by rules designed for mere mortals. I observe that many people who would are taoist about smart phones and artificial intelligence would be glad to ban guns, and I suspect that many hunters would be glad to see Big Tech and its sprawling data centers sink into the ocean.
But plenty of good, smart, wise people think this way—reflecting, perhaps, a high anthropology or a faith in the power of education. I’m generally willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, unless theyre on some tech company’s payroll—for the sake of argument, even then. The trouble is that sages are few, and wisdom is not common coin. It never has been—if it were, translations of Lao-Tzu wouldn’t capitalize the S in Sage—and the culture of twenty-first century global society is not especially predisposed to its pursuit. The simple, undeniable fact is that while virtually any tool can be used wisely, the overwhelming majority of people use digital technologies in ways that do not further any meaningful goals they might articulate for their own lives, let alone those that millennia of philosophers and theologians would applaud. What’s a responsible taoist to do?
The first path is education: teach people to use tools wisely. The difficulty is that teaching is a particular activity. You can only teach so many students—and you can’t do anything like inculcate wisdom at the front of a lecture hall, let alone via streaming video. But in fact you can’t teach wisdom. You can model it, and place other models before a student; you can nurture it. But wisdom is reached, if it is reached, by endless tacking into the wind. Even the best models are to some degree particular: a particular approach to a particular problem, from which you hope the student may extrapolate. If Jesus when casting his seed found that most fell on rock or sand, how much better can you hope to do?
Which is not to say don’t try: only that formal, particular teaching isn’t going to reach everyone, and is not in itself a societal solution. I spent twenty years working in K-12 education, and a large part of my job was teaching teachers to use digital technologies wisely, and to teach their students to do so. That project was, if judged at any sort of scale, an utter failure. On a small scale we did good work, but it was swallowed up by the prevailing culture of foolish embrace. Individual sparks failed to ignite anything like a fire, as stars don’t light up the night sky but remain surrounded by darkness.
The second problem I and my colleagues faced, and failed to overcome, was the pace of innovation. Progress was like crawling along the deck of a ship from bow to stern: try as we might, we were still going the wrong direction. People were only beginning to ask how we ought to be using the World Wide Web more wisely when social media arrived; had barely had time to see the detrimental effects of social media, let alone to think what to do about them, before smart phones let it reach into everyone’s pocket; just imagining possible solutions to that problem when generative AI became available. The mythical Sage may know at once how to use a new tool, but an ordinary sage needs time to figure it out, by tacking and experience—and more time still to figure out how to teach others. It’s a process that simply cannot keep pace with the evolution of digital technologies.
In the very long term, the way the tao becomes available to everyone is not through formal teaching but through acculturation. If you grow up in a world where people use tools wisely, you will quite naturally use them wisely. Countries in which beer and wine are normal parts of communal meals have relatively low rates of alcoholism, comparable to others in which alcohol is used hardly at all.1 Children who are surrounded by books grow up to be readers. Public service announcements and literacy curricula have comparably little effect. The goal, if digital tools are to be permitted to exist, must be a culture in which they are used wisely. But how do we get there?
The short answer is, we don’t. An extended metaphor: You can plant trees, but you cannot plant a forest. You can’t build an ecosystem; it has to develop of its own accord. It may be that the trees you wish to nurture cannot colonize new ground but must grow amidst other mature trees; the forest you envision may be the product of multiple successions. The other plant life, animals, insects required to sustain the ecosystem may or may not return; you had only begun to catalog them—to say nothing of the microbial and fungal life of the soil.
But suppose you wish to try. It will be the work not of years but of generations. In the meantime, you will have to prohibit some things normal, even beneficial in a mature forest but destructive of one in its infancy: no walking among the trees, for example. Most of all you will have to stop the damn bulldozers from coming back.
If any sane sort of culture is going to develop around digital technologies, it will require time and space to develop. We can nurture it, but we can’t plan it or build it; it will have to evolve. And we will have to preserve the time and space it needs to do so, by protecting seedlings from strong winds and trampling feet, by drawing lines and setting boundaries.
A sustainable tao, in other words, is only going to grow in the lee of taboos. In the meantime, strive by all means to become the sage; strive by all means to guide others in the path of wisdom. But understand that to refuse all taboo is to some degree selfish. You, mature oak tree, may not need it, but consider the saplings. You may find yourself the last yard tree in a block of houses: lovely and adored, but very much alone.
And as an afterword: I was wondering whether I should close by bringing this back around to actual technology, when I discovered that Sister Carino had already done so in the current issue of The Lamp.