You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

As an example of Lanier's concerns, consider the following paragraph:  "I know quite a few people, mostly young adults but not all, who are proud to say that they have accumulated thousands of friends on Facebook.  Obviously, this statement can only be true if the idea of friendship is reduced.   A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.   Each acquaintance is an alien, a well of unexplored  difference in the experience of life that cannot be imagined or accessed in any way but through genuine interaction.  The idea of friendship in database-filtered social networks is certainly reduced from that."

Could it be that if we are ever going to be fully present in a given moment or to a given person, we are going to have to limit our connectivity?   

Lanier goes on to discuss the pursuit of quality through quantity, suggesting that in reality these two pursuits are actually heading in different directions.  (My own editorial note on this:  Just ask Toyota.)  Those of us who blog or tweet regularly know what he is talking about.  A couple of Lanier's suggestions:  

"Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that need to come out."

"If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state (my note:  but that would take time and work and reflection!) instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would a machine."

Of course, when one is talking about persons, the question of materialism is bound to crop up.  Are brain and mind and person synonymous?  Can we be reduced to energy (electrical impulse)?    Lanier's thoughts on this, which include a call for "intellectual modesty", are perhaps unexpected:   "The desire for absolute order usually leads to tears in human affairs, so there is a historical reason to distrust it.  Materialist extremists have long seemed determined to win a race with religious fanatics: Who can do the most damage to the most people?"

There are other questions Lanier asks that I expect aren't even on most of our radars--but they should be.  Otherwise the answers are going to be decided for us in ways that we may find profoundly disturbing, and it will be too late for us to be able to do much about it.  For instance, there is the whole question of authorship.  Lanier warns of those who consider it their "'moral imperative' that all the world's books would soon effectively become 'one book' once they are scanned, searchable, and remixable in the universal computation cloud."

This is just a tiny snippet of the kinds of substantive issues this book addresses.    Coming from the "father of virtual reality", a person at the top of his field in the very heart of technological prowess and progress, we ignore this book and the questions it asks at our own peril.

The United States is becoming a broken society. The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged. Unemployment will remain high. It will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis.

This confluence of crises has produced a surge in vehement libertarianism. People are disgusted with Washington. The Tea Party movement rallies against big government, big business and the ruling class in general. Even beyond their ranks, there is a corrosive cynicism about public action.

But there is another way to respond to these problems that is more communitarian and less libertarian. This alternative has been explored most fully by the British writer Phillip Blond.

Blond argues that over the past generation we have witnessed two revolutions, both of which liberated the individual and decimated local associations. First, there was a revolution from the left: a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores; a legal revolution that emphasized individual rights instead of responsibilities; a welfare revolution in which social workers displaced mutual aid societies and self-organized associations.

Then there was the market revolution from the right. In the age of deregulation, giant chains like Wal-Mart decimated local shop owners. Global financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away. Unions withered.

The two revolutions talked the language of individual freedom, but they perversely ended up creating greater centralization. They created an atomized, segmented society and then the state had to come in and attempt to repair the damage.

... Economically, Blond lays out three big areas of reform: remoralize the market, relocalize the economy and recapitalize the poor. This would mean passing zoning legislation to give small shopkeepers a shot against the retail giants, reducing barriers to entry for new businesses, revitalizing local banks, encouraging employee share ownership, setting up local capital funds so community associations could invest in local enterprises, rewarding savings, cutting regulations that socialize risk and privatize profit, and reducing the subsidies that flow from big government and big business.

We started a discussion Tuesday centered on David Livingstone's book Adam's Ancestors. This is a fascinating look at the history of the development of ideas about Adam and the context within which they arose. It is only indirectly a look at the theological implications of Adam as the first man and progenitor of the human race. We will return to Adam's Ancestor's next week - but today I would like to take a short detour and put up a video conversation with Peter Enns for consideration (see another discussion centered on the video at BioLogos).

The most significant challenges in the consideration of Adam as progenitor of the human race are the connections that Paul draws between Jesus and Adam, the nature of the fall and the entry of evil and sin into human life. In this video Pete Enns emphasizes that "Paul's a first century man and what he says about Jesus and Adam must be understood in that context.(1:55)" There is nothing in the nature of revelation to suggest that God gave Paul lessons in geology, geography, paleontology, or science (my way of putting it - not Pete's words). On the other hand Jesus was revealed to Paul and known in the flesh to his contemporaries, James and Peter among others. Paul takes the importance of Adam from a grounding in the story of the Hebrew scriptures, he takes his understanding of Jesus from contact with eyewitness and his own encounter with the risen Lord. This leads to a question I think worth some conversation.

What is the theological truth underlying Paul's use of Adam in Romans 5 - and how does this impact our understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ? 

Or more succinctly ...

What was revealed to Paul and taught by him to the church?

(A second related video excerpt is posted after the jump)

Another video excerpt from Enns was posted yesterday on Science and the Sacred:

The doesn't deal directly with Paul - or Adam, but introduces some interesting ideas as well.

If you wish to contact me directly you may do so at rjs4mail[at]att.net

". . . you are the devil's gateway. . . you are she who persuaded him, whom the devil did not dare attack. . . . Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on your sex, lives on in this age; the guilt, necessarily, lives on too."

Tertullian

The view of woman as "temptress" has early roots and is alive and well today both in the wider culture (see links below) and sadly also in Christian circles.

I was a speaker at a gathering of pastors who were interested in doing a better job of utilizing women's gifts. The first question asked during the open forum afterwards stunned me, "If we work with women, won't we be tempted?"

What followed was not a candid discussion about the heart and where is the real problem when there is a moral failure (as in as what goes on behind closed doors when a man is alone with his computer), but a laundry list of precautions to safeguard oneself from moral hazards when working or dealing with women.

Women find this kind of thinking offensive, and rightly so. This low view of women conflicts with the Bible's high redemptive view of us. What strikes me as I think about this, however, is that this negative view of women also reflects badly on men as testosterone driven, morally weak, and unable to control themselves. This is not to say that our sex-saturated culture doesn't create serious problems for everyone. But it is one thing to think wisely about modesty and conduct and quite another to view women as seductresses.

So here are my questions:

First, are men also outraged by the temptress view of women because of what it implies about them? And second, is it possible to hold a low view of women without degrading men?

Your thoughts?