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- In lines he composed for a play in the mid-1930s, T. S. Eliot wrote of those who
“constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”
That last line has always struck me as a rather apt characterization of a certain technocratic impulse, which presumes that techno-bureaucratic structures and processes can eliminate the necessity of virtue, or maybe even human involvement altogether. We might just as easily speak of systems so perfect that no one will need to be wise or temperate or just. Just adhere to the code or the technique with unbending consistency and all will be well.
This
- searching for the truth, or a sufficient approximation, is more than a merely intellectual activity. It involves, for example, humility, courage, and patience. It presumes a willingness to break with one’s tribe or social network with all the risks that may entail. In short, you need to be not just clever but virtuous, and, depending on the degree to which you lived online, you would need to do this persistently over time, and, recently, of course, during a health crisis that has generated an exhausting amount of uncertainty and a host of contentious debates about private and public actions.
This
- It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to conjure up other similar examples of the kind of virtue our digital devices and networks tacitly demand of us. Consider the discipline required to responsibly direct one’s attention from moment to moment rather than responding with Pavlovian alacrity when our devices beckon us. Or the degree of restraint necessary to avoid the casual voyeurism that powers so much of our social media feeds. Or, how those same platforms can be justly described as machines for the inducement of petty vindictiveness and less-than-righteous indignation. Or, alternatively, as carefully calibrated engines of sloth, greed, envy, despair, and self-loathing.
- The point is not that our digital media environment necessarily generates vice, rather it’s that it constitutes an ever-present field of temptation, which can require, in turn, monastic degrees of self-discipline to manage
- Perhaps this explains the recent interest in stoicism, although, we do well to remember Pascal’s pointed criticism of the stoics: “They conclude that we can always do what we can sometimes do
- We alternate, then, between environments that seek to render virtue superfluous and environments that tacitly demand a high degree of virtue in order to operate benignly. Both engender their own set of problems, and, not surprisingly, there’s a reciprocal relationship between these two dynamics. Failure to exhibit the requisite virtue creates a demand for the enhancement of rule-based systems to regulate human behavior
- This is the temptation that animates the impulse to apply a code with blind consistency as if this would be equivalent to justice itself. The philosopher Charles Taylor has called this tendency in modern liberal societies “code fetishism,” and it ought to be judiciously resisted. According to Taylor, code fetishism “tends to forget the background which makes sense of any code—the variety of goods which rules and norms are meant to realize—as well as the vertical dimension which arises above all of these.” Code fetishism in this sense is not unlike what Jacques Ellul called technique, a relentless drive toward efficiency that eventually became an end in itself having lost sight of the goods for the sake of which efficiency was pursued in the first place
- proceduralism, or the conviction that an ostensibly neutral set of rules and procedures are an adequate foundation for a just society, particularly in the absence of substantive agreement about the nature of a good society
- Or, as Illich argued, if you forget the particular, bodily, situated context of the other, then the freedom to do good by them exemplified in the story of the good Samaritan can become the imperative to impose the good as you imagine it on them. “You have,” as Illich bluntly put it, “the basis on which one might feel responsible for bombing the neighbour for his own good
- n Taylor’s reading, Illich “reminds us not to become totally invested in the code … We should find the centre of our spiritual lives beyond the code, deeper than the code, in networks of living concern, which are not to be sacrificed to the code, which must even from time to time subvert it.” “This message,” Taylor acknowledges, “comes out of a certain theology, but it should be heard by everybody.”