Faith in Technology?

I am an atheist myself and have been for nearly a quarter of a century now, at any rate since my first year of college, when I thought it through and determined I was quite content to do without god ("a-theist") as a personal preoccupation -- especially among so many others I was discovering at the time.

As a pretty conspicuous queer I have had more than my share of personal abuse at the hands of Christian and other kinds of fundamentalists. And certainly it has often seemed to me that, here in America at any rate, loud out-proud self-appointed "people of faith" have stood in the front ranks of social and political struggles that have been among the most catastrophic in my lifetime. They have been conspicuous among the sneering hatemongers picketing people suffering with AIDS through the 80s and early 90s. They have been among the saucer-eyed know-nothings cheering the dismantlement of science education, deriding evolution, disputing safer sex education and family planning, disdaining needle-exchange, decrying stem-cell research, and declaiming endlessly about a phantasmagoria of clone armies, frankenfoods, human-animal hybrids, and designer babies as a way of elaborating reasonable fears that should have driven reasonable regulation into irrational panics that have blocked the road to inquiry and turned us aside from the application of human ingenuity to solve human problems. They have thronged the ranks of the so-called lovers of the fetus who are so often one and the same as the haters of the child, the ones who refuse women the right to end unwanted pregnancies but then yawn with indifference or what even looks like smug pleasure as the ranks of poor, uninsured, ill-educated children exposed to deregulated toxic substances, rising Greenhouse waters, and drowning in debts to pay for tax-cuts for the already rich swell insanely beyond measure or misery. They have stood shoulder to shoulder among unrepentant racist mobs cheering on a "White Christian America," endlessly at war with the poor within its borders (all in the name of the champion of the poor) and eternally aggressively picking fights in a "War of Civilizations" everywhere else (all in the name of the Prince of Peace).

All of this is just to point out that it is easy for me to understand where the stridency of atheist activists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and others is coming from these days.

But to be honest, despite all of this and despite my own atheism, I have to admit that I personally find it quite easy to sympathize with the lifeways of many people of faith. I find that I cannot agree with "militant" atheists who would claim that there is anything inevitably dangerous or deranging or degrading about the beliefs and practices of the variously faithful.

Too many atheists seem to me to be oblivious to the vicissitudes in the history of human belief to which they are themselves indebted, the traditions of experimentalism, skepticism, heresy, estheticism, ecstasy, doctrinal conflict, and utopian organization that have risen from within communities of the variously faithful. This sort of ignorance or even indifference to historical context among some of the conspicuous spokespeople of "organized irreligion" is a troublesome development among freethinkers, inasmuch as the stubborn repudiation of history is quite as central to the religious fundamentalist mindset as is its authoritarian politics.

Indeed, I would suggest that the inability of the faithful fundamentalist to question the authority of their leaders or the literality of their doctrine derives first of all from their insensitivity and even hostility to the transformative forces and effects of history. I think this is the insight that some critics of the current crop of activist atheists are struggling to express when they decry a worrisome similarity between the militancies of both the faithful and the faithless (and clearly I see their point, even if I think it is a bit belabored right about now when the clash of militant theisms is so overabundantly more catastrophic than any militant atheism could foster at a time like this).

Be that as it may, I'll go so far as to say I sympathize especially with those people of faith who have found their way into the practices of various esoteric mysticisms (some traditions of which were key incubators of protoscientific practice), inasmuch as my own personal practices of lifeway experimentation -- sexual, pharmacological, therapeutic, poetical, political, pedagogical, and so on -- seem to me to have more in common than not, both in their values and their dangers, with some projects of exploratory religiosity.

What seems crucial to me is that we have all of us come to live together now in diverse interdependent technoconstituted societies, and hence whatever paths of personal perfection people find their way to as individuals it is necessary that they take what I will call The Secular Turn. This Turn is hardly a leap into faithlessness as fundamentalists often seem to presume, neither do the demands of the Turn neglect some of the cherished ambitions of science in its more priestly guises (of which it has plenty, despite its pretensions to the contrary). The Secular Turn requires that we are all of us able to distinguish in our aspirations and in our conduct our responsibilities, on the one hand, to the political project of peaceful public co-existence together with a diversity of peers from our responsibilities, on the other hand, to the moral or esthetic projects of private perfection by means of consensual practices of self-creation.

This brings me to the heart of my topic today. I think it is fair to say that I am a "technocentric" thinker; that is to say, my work and my thinking and even quite a lot of my activism these days is focused very directly on questions of technodevelopmental social struggle, thinking through technoethical dilemmas, and charting various technocultural practices. Nevertheless, I find that my attitude toward "technology" differs from that of many of the peers with whom I am conversing and organizing in the trenches.

You see, just as it is true that I think there is no such thing as God to believe in, I think there is no such thing as technology either.

More specifically, I think there is no such thing as a "technology in general" about which a person can or should properly be expected to profess an attitude of "pro" or "con." There are, on the contrary, always only innumerable concrete practices of research, invention, regulation, distribution, appropriation, and use which will be emancipatory or exploitative largely according to their cultural and political positioning.

While I scarcely think that all technocentric sociopolitical views are essentially faithful, it seems to me some such views very palpably are so. This seems especially true of those commonplace professions, especially among many popular futurists and technophiles, of a "belief in technology" that has as its primary force that it impels them into community with those who share their particular affirmation of this generalized technology while simultaneously it arrays them against enemies who presumably are "against" technology in a comparably generalized conception, conjuring up a fantastic battlefield on which clashing visions of something called "the future" (of which there seems to be only one, and the business of which seems to be either to fail or prevail) contest, through them, for supremacy.

And so, yes, I do think an analogy obtains between some professions of a belief in God and some professions of a belief in a "technology" toward which one can be "faithful" or "faithless" in some general sense. To be clear, this is not to deny the social, political, or cultural stakes of technodevelopmental outcomes, but a statement of my preference for assessments of the value of technodevelopmental outcomes as they arise out of the contingencies of ongoing democratic contestation among the diverse actual stakeholders to these outcomes acting within the flow of history.

And I do think this attitude toward "technology" in a broader construal, freighted with fears and fantasies of power, enlightenment, good, and evil, is often (not always) shared both by many who call themselves "transhumanists" or "technophiles" as well as by many who get called "bioconservatives" or "luddites" -- with the main difference among them that some take on a "pro" orientation to this dubious generality while others take on a "con" orientation toward "it."

My attitude toward the formations arising from these stances are exactly the same as they are toward others I would regard as religious. That is to say, I do not doubt that some of them generate viable and valuable pathways to private perfection for those who find their way to them. Indeed, I think none of us should be surprised to discover such practices of identification and disidentification arising out of the breathtaking, threatening, promising, deranging dynamism, stresses, violations, and emancipations of ongoing and upcoming technodevelopmental churn. Even if these practices of subcultural identification and disidentification with a hyperbolized "technology" tend not to be paths of meaning-making and interpersonal-support that personally edify me so much I am nonetheless quite happy to tolerate them as expressions of the multicultural diversity that bespeaks a thriving democratic polity so long as they, like comparable creative professions of faithfulness, take The Secular Turn.

That is to say, I still do insist that there is a difference between a celebration of consensual lifeways and the work to maintain the democratic scene of informed, nonduressed consent on which such lifeways depend. That is to say, there remains the difference between the private and the public, and as always there is a danger from the perspective within particular moral/esthetic communities of affinity to mistake their palpable and parochial satisfactions for ethical/political adequacy. All moral/esthetic formations are vulnerable to fundamentalism, including technocentric ones.

Here we circle back through a different route to questions about which I write very regularly. The politics of subcultural identity will tend to be different in key respects from the politics of advocacy for progressive technodevelopmental outcomes. To insist on this difference is not to be intolerant, but precisely to be tolerant. It is to be tolerant but without succumbing to the fundamentalist faith that morals trump ethics, or that morals should police diversity into conformity through authority rather than politics reconciling diversity on an ongoing basis through democracy. This will play out among variously technoprogressive positions as, among other things, the difference between various commitments to "the future" as against commitments to an "open future" or to a "futurity" that is one and the same thing as freedom.