Hutterites and Technology

This is a long essay I wrote to supplement some presentations I gave for Hutterites on the topic of technology. This essay is intended for a Hutterite audience and so uses Hutterite examples and assumes a communal context. That said, the insights of this essay could apply equally to any family or community who wants to be more intentional about how they use technology. As it stands, this essay is the most comprehensive articulation of what I think about how to approach technology. The piece Gluttony, Fasting, and Feasting: Three Approaches to Technology can be seen as a shorter version of this much longer pieces.

Hutterites and Technology

            One of the most important questions facing us today is how human beings should relate to their increasingly complex technological environment. As a Hutterite, I believe there is a vital need for an informed, nuanced, conversation about technology. Unfortunately, the Hutterite conversation has not been informed by the work of philosophers of our technological society such as Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry and others. This essay hopes to address that gap by introducing readers from a specifically Hutterite context to major critiques of our technological age, while also pointing towards some constructive alternatives. My argument will proceed through five major claims. First, that technology is not neutral and that human beings are shaped by their material environment. Second that modern Western Civilization is oriented around a story of technological progress that is very different from the stories that guided traditional cultures. Third, contemporary western society can properly be called a “Technological Society” because it is governed by what Jacques Ellul calls Technique. Fourth, that Technique is pulling us into a future that is not of our own choosing. Finally, I will argue that if we can grasp the shape of our enslavement to Technique, we also gain the possibility to choose a different path.

Technology is not neutral

The most common way that our thinking about technology goes wrong is that we assume that technology is neutral. People will often say things like, “my iPhone is just another tool, it all depends on how I use it.” In Hutterite or Christian circles more broadly, one of the obstacles to a good and thoughtful conversation around technology and Technique is a kind of naive piety. The assumption is that as long as people have good intentions, have their heart in the right place, or have the right ‘inner’ attitude, that they will be able to use technology wisely or need not worry about the influence of Technique. This distinction between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ obscures the importance of ‘outer’ reality in shaping our attitudes and culture. Resisting Technique is certainty a matter of the heart, but it also requires an awareness of how these larger technological, cultural, and material forces act upon us, as well as a recognition of the importance of community and culture in resisting them.

This way of thinking about technology (one that makes a sharp distinction between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’) doesn’t really address the problems of technology because it assumes there are no problems, granted technology is used responsibly. On this reading, we would expect human beings and their communities to be the same before and after a major technological change such as the advent of the printing press, the automobile, or the iPhone. But how can that be true? These new technologies make it possible for people to do things they couldn’t have done before, to think thoughts they couldn’t have thought before, to make decisions they couldn’t have considered before, or to see the world in a way they couldn’t have seen it before. In short, these new technologies “cause us to see ourselves and to act in ways that were previously unknown to us.”[1]

Think about it. What happened after the invention of the automobile? How are human beings and their culture changed? Most obviously, the automobile brought with it a whole host of other technologies: car factories, highways, gas stations, and so on, all of which change the human environment. Automobiles also brought with them car accidents, car insurance, and more organs available for transplants. New possibilities are opened: People can move away from their birth communities, live far away from their job, or have friends and family across the country. New ways of thinking and seeing the world are revealed. Think of the cultural meaning of the car and the open highway and all that signifies about freedom and new possibilities. What about the difference in speed between a horse drawn carriage and a car? The car literally makes our world smaller, distances shorter, and extends our connections and relationships across geographical space. The point of these examples is not to say that the automobile is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but simply to illustrate how new technologies change us and our cultures. Media theorist Neil Postman explains the point I am trying to make:

Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. I can explain this best by an analogy. What happens if we place a drop of red dye into a beaker of clear water? Do we have clear water plus a spot of red dye? Obviously not. We have a new coloration to every molecule of water. That is what I mean by ecological change. A new medium does not add something; it changes everything. In the year 1500, after the printing press was invented, you did not have old Europe plus the printing press. You had a different Europe. After television, America was not America plus television. Television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry, and so on.[2]

Let’s extend this further. Not only do the technologies we use shape us and open new ways of acting and seeing, but our use of technology says something about who we are. An essential part of what it means to be human is that we are creatures who make and use things. Humans of every culture have always made and used tools. The tools we use and make say something about who we are, where we are going, and what we want. How a community or a culture uses technology, what kinds of technologies they invent or use, reveals what that community values. Think about some of the following cultures and their relationship to technology: What does how these communities use technology say about them? What do we think about them?

• The Ancient Greeks
• The Amish
• A traditional tribe in the Amazon
• The Modern West

Even if we do not know much about how these communities use technology, it is helpful to notice that there is more than one way of integrating technology into the life of a community. Indeed, the Modern West’s relationship to technology is very different from how all cultures in the past related to technology. To summarize the difference briefly, in the past, technology was integrated within a culture; in the modern west, ‘technology’ (or, more accurately ‘Technique’) has replaced culture. It’s also helpful to notice how we react to the other cultures on this list. Consider for example Daniel L. Everett’s description of the Amazonian tribe, the Pirahãs, approach to work and technology:

I noticed that in spite of how important these tools [for tilling fields] are to them, the Pirahãs do not take good care of them. Children throw new tools in the river; people leave the tools in the fields; and often they trade tools away for manioc meal when outside traders make their way in. A pattern was emerging: they had no method for food preservation, neglected tools, and made only disposable baskets. This seemed to indicate that lack of concern for the future was a cultural value. It certainly wasn’t laziness, because the Pirahãs work very hard…There were many other aspects of Pirahã material culture that supported my growing belief that planning for the future is less important for the Pirahãs than enjoying each day as it comes. As a result they invest no more effort in something than is necessary for minimal function. When I tell people about the simplicity of the Pirahãs’ material culture, they often become curiously concerned. After all, we define success in industrialized cultures at least partially as the ongoing improvement of our technology. But the Pirahäs show no such improvement, nor a desire for it.[3]

If we are honest, what is our first reaction to this culture, or towards other cultures like the Amish? Perhaps some of the following thoughts come to mind:

• Life for these people must be awful, difficult, and hard.
• These people are repressed by regressive cultures.
• These people are old fashioned, they’re stuck in the past.
• These people need to ‘get with the times’, they should progress beyond their superstitions.
• The lifestyle of these people is not efficient or economically productive.
• We have progressed beyond where these people are at, eventually they should/will become like we are.

Where do these assumptions come from? Why do we think them? In some ways, Hutterites are more similar to the Amish then to the Modern West, yet we seem to be buying into a way of thinking that looks down on Amish society. Why is that? This will be the subject of our next section.

Technology Stories

To begin this section, it might be important to say something about a term that most of us might assume we already have a good grip on, the word ‘culture’. In Hutterite circles, people will often speak critically of ‘mere culture’, pointing out how rigid traditionalism, and a focus on arbitrary rules and externals have made Hutterites lose sight of the essentials of the faith. While I agree with this critique, I would like to argue for a more positive view of ‘culture’. Human beings do not exist alone, we are social creatures, as the old adage puts it: ‘no man is an island’. Culture is what we do together as a community. A ‘culture’, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is the “distinctive ideas, customs, social behaviour, products, or way of life of a particular nation, society, people, or period.” Or, in a classic definition from E. B. Taylor, “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired . . . as a member of society.” The word ‘culture’ is etymologically connected with the word ‘cultivation’, that is, the tilling of the soil. Perhaps our minds go to Genesis 2:15 where God places humans in the garden to “cultivate it and keep it.” Cultivating and culture-making then, are part of the process by which humans make a habitable place for themselves in the world. ‘Culture’ is something that a people build and uphold together, it is the common life that structures and orients how people live their lives together, relate to the natural world, and experience time. Culture provides us with a ‘homeworld’, a context within which people can find meaning, belonging, and orientation. Part of the struggle of life in the modern west is that many people do not really have this kind of a ‘homeworld’, and find themselves adrift as lonely, isolated individuals. It is of course also true that culture can be oppressive (Hutterites know all about that!) but at the same time, human beings can no more exist without culture than they can without other human beings.

What holds a community or culture together is the ‘stories’ or ‘narratives’ they tell about who they are, where they are going, and what they are doing. Think about our own Hutterite communities. We think of ourselves as somehow connected with what God began with the calling of Abraham, continued in the people of Israel, and brought to its culmination in Jesus. We see ourselves as grafted onto the people of Israel, sharing our possessions in the spirit of the early Church, and more particularly, guided by the tradition of the Radical Reformation. Our communal life then, is guided, shaped, and oriented by this larger story from scripture, church history, and the Hutterite Chronicle.

How does this relate to our ongoing discussion of technology? We have argued that the kinds of tools a community makes and uses tells us something about who that community is, where they are going, and what they think they are doing. In short, how a community integrates technology into its culture tells us something about the story they are orienting themselves by. In a similar way, the stories a community orients themselves by, also tell us something about how it relates to technology.

Let’s examine two stories from the distant past, one from early Greek civilization and another from the bible. Our first story is from Homer’s The Odyssey. Our hero Odysseus is trapped on the beautiful goddess Calypso’s Island, far away from his wife and homeland. On Calypso’s Island, Odysseus has everything he could ever desire, all his needs are met, he lives in perfect security and abundance, yet he longs to return home. Calypso presents Odysseus with an astonishing choice: rather than undertaking the suffering of a long and difficult journey back home, why doesn’t he stay and let her set him “free from time and death forever”?[4] In his response to Calypso, Odysseus begins by acknowledging the reasonableness of her offer, “You are quite right. I know my modest wife Penelope could never match your beauty. She is a human: you are deathless, ageless.”[5] But then Odysseus makes his decision. But even so, Odysseus says—even though I cannot refute your arguments—inexplicably, even irrationally he says: “But even so, I want to go back home.”[6] In this astonishing story we have the claim that there is something about our human life, with its limits, suffering, and particularity that is good and worth holding on to, even if we have the means to move beyond it. Philosopher Martha Nusbaum describes Odysseus’ decision as follows: “He is choosing the whole human package: mortal life, dangerous voyage, imperfect mortal ageing woman. He is choosing, quite simply, what is his: his own history, the form of a human life and the possibilities of excellence, love, and achievement that inhabit that form.”[7]

A different but related story is found in the book of Genesis. The people of the earth come together with a plan for a grand building project. They want to build a “tower that reaches to the heavens” (Gen. 11:4), that is, out of the human realm and into the realm of God. This plan and its execution are an image of human hubris, an attempt to transcend the creaturely realm and become like God. God’s response to this endless expansion beyond human bounds is to restore limits in the form of culture and language. (Gen. 11:9) These two stories, the story of Calypso’s Island and the tower of Babel, both in their own way, show ancient communities aware of human limits which are good and need to be respected. Both point to a way of relating to technology and integrating it within culture that does not move too far beyond these human limits.

If these stories show how communities of the past related to technology, what ‘story’ do we tell in the modern West? Further, what does that ‘story’ reveal about who we think we are, where we are going, and what we think we are doing? The ‘story’ that is often told, implicitly and explicitly, runs something like this:

Once upon a time human beings were narrow-minded, superstitious, and technologically unsophisticated. For these humans, life was awful and difficult; in the famous words of Thomas Hobbes, “nasty, brutish, and short.” With the advent of Industrialization, Capitalism, and modern Science, life became progressively better. We moved beyond superstition to reason, and into a world of comfort, ease, and pleasure. With more technological progress, we know that life will continue to get even better. The problems we haven’t ‘fixed’ yet, will be ‘fixed’ by future technological advances. In the meantime, it is our duty to bring regressive ‘third world’ countries up to our level of economic and technological progress. In the future, we hope to be able to move into a ‘trans-human’ future where we overcome the arbitrary limits of human biology and finitude.

While we may never have heard anyone tell this ‘Story’ in a straightforward way, I would guess that most of my readers have the basic outline of this story internalized. Most of us see a pre-technological society as unliveable; our present moment as the peak of human progress; and the future as better than both the present and the past. We live lives oriented towards the future: the present for us is nothing more than an earlier stage of progress that must be overcome for an even brighter day to dawn. We lose the ability to appreciate and suffer our reality for what it is, because we live with the secret expectation that it will one day be overcome by a new technological ‘fix’.[8]

Which ‘story’ guides or orients our Hutterite communities? We often like to think that we are guided by the story of the bible—and in many ways we are—but to what degree are we guided instead by the story of technological progress? The way the ‘story of progress’ has seeped into our thinking can be seen in the language we often use. We talk about “new and improved” or “in with the new and out with the old”; words like ‘efficiency’, ‘innovation’, or ‘productive’, have become part of our everyday speech; and the language of ‘progress’ slips easily off our tongues. Hidden assumptions such as the following guide our thinking:

• The growth of technology is the same thing as progress.
• The past was simply ‘worse’ then the present or the future.
• Culture, traditions, or ‘thick’ communities are oppressive and restrictive.
• Individual freedom is the ultimate good.
• More ‘efficiency’ in whatever domain of life is always better.

At this point it is important to emphasize the truth contained in these statements. Yes, in many ways life today is ‘better’ than life in the Middle Ages. Yes, technological change has made our lives easier, more human. Yes, cultures and traditions can be oppressive and restrictive. Yes, individual freedom is a wonderful thing. Yes, ‘efficiency’ is not always bad. However, what we have bought into is the idea that these things are always good and true, or that they are good and true without cost, without also bringing bad things with them.

 As an alternative to this simple story of progress, it is much more helpful to speak of gains and losses. What would it mean to recognize that technological change potentially brings with it destruction along with benefits, and that those benefits often contain hidden costs that we are not always aware of? Technological change opens new possibilities and closes others. We live in a world with tremendous medical technology, efficient transportation, individual freedom, broad scientific understanding and more. However, these ‘gains’ also come with ‘losses’: growing dependence on technological institutions, loss of culture, individualism, loneliness, alienation, and the destruction of nature, and so on. Rather than seeing technological change as a simple story of ‘progress’, we should be attentive to what has been ‘gained’, what has been ‘lost’ and what different paths we could have taken (or still can take!).[9]

Technology and Technique

This leads us to the next stage in our argument. We began our thinking on technology by thinking about how particular technologies impact us. For example, many words have been spilled thinking about the impact of cell phones and social media on how humans interact with each other. These are helpful things to be thinking about. But I would like to look at the question of technology from a broader and deeper perspective. Think again about how communities in the past related their culture to technology: A tribe in the Amazon, the Amish, the Ancient Greeks, all integrate or integrated technology into a culture very differently then we in the Modern West. This gets us to the right questions: What drives this difference? How could we characterize the outlook or stance or approach which drives our approach to technology? How do we in the Modern West relate to the world? These might sound like hopelessly abstract questions but bear with me.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger asked this question in his famous essay, The Question Concerning Technology. For Heidegger, what characterizes the Modern West’s approach to technology, the ‘stance’ or ‘outlook’ we take towards reality, is the following: We see everything—creation, animals, humans, society, work, health, education, food, and so on—as standing ready and waiting for improvement, calculation, and maximization of profits and production. The ‘essence’ of modern Technology—what drives us— “is to seek more flexibility and efficiency for its own sake.”[10] This is radically different than how all other cultures have thought of technology or human making.[11]

The philosopher of technology, Jacques Ellul uses the word ‘Technique’ to describe this drive to organize, maximize and ‘improve’ all domains of life. Ellul has argued that our society in the Modern West is best described as a ‘Technological Society’, because it is Technique, rather than culture, politics, morality, beauty, or religion which increasingly governs all domains of life. In all areas of life, we are searching for the one best way,[12] the most efficient, productive, or effective way of doing things. The various domains—agriculture, transportation, politics, economics, manufacturing, and so on—all seek the one best way, and together form a complex system. Changes in one domain, means changes in another, thus, attempts to tweak this or that part of the system miss the forest for the trees: “It is useless to hope for modification of a system like this—so complex and precisely adjusted that no single part can be modified by itself.”[13] Because this complex system is characterized by the search for the one best way—the most efficient, effective, productive way of doing things—it resists being limited by ethics, culture, or politics. It expands and develops almost by itself. Although we think we are in control, it is actually in a profound sense this system which dictates our actions: Who wouldn’t want a new seed variety which yields more and makes more money? Who wouldn’t want the new machine or technique which can double production? Who wouldn’t want that new breeding program which can increase animal birth rates?

A disturbing real-world example of this is the rise of work “productivity tracking.” This phenomenon was accelerated by the rise of remote work during the pandemic. Seeking to increase productivity, many companies required that employees install software that measured clicks and, via the computer’s web-cam, time spent in front of the screen. A report from the New York Times notes that this form of monitoring was already “ubiquitous” for lower paying jobs such as Amazon workers and UPS drivers, but is now spreading to white-collar work: “Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, “idle” buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs.”[14]

Some of the employers quoted in the article spoke as if introducing productivity software was inevitable, a choice driven by economic necessity. As one individual stated: “The real question is which companies are going to use it and when, and which companies are going to become irrelevant?”[15] These changes seem obvious, rational, and unquestionable, they are adopted as a matter of course. But in the process, our ability to make our own decisions has been lost. The possibility of a genuinely free choice about which technology to adopt and which to reject has been lost. Instead, we are being led around by the nose by technological rationality, technique, or the one best way.

Technique or technological rationality doesn’t just impact domains like agriculture, manufacturing, or distribution that we think of as economic; it impacts all domains of life in a technological society, such as schooling, medicine, sports, or religion. This can lead to what Ivan Illich calls ‘paradoxical counter-productivity’,[16] where the quest for more efficiency ends up undermining the real goods that were being fostered: Genuine learning, healing, sportsmanship, and transformation—things that require time, care, and attention—are distorted and sidelined in the pursuit of efficiency and maximization of profit. Churches become focused on Church growth and membership rather than genuine transformation and discipleship. Schools become focused on improving grades and job opportunities as opposed to genuine learning or education. In all these domains, the real thing (education, discipleship etc.) becomes replaced by a technical counterfeit (growth of the church, increasing the GPA).

In the attempt to improve and maximize this technical counterfeit, the world is re-conceived and remade in terms of information, data, and statistics. This statistical world, fully mapped out, is then able to be brought under effective technical management.[17] The internet makes this a disturbing reality: Google Maps effectively maps out the entire globe. The online activity of individuals is assembled into an individual profile. ‘Home’ devices like Google’s ‘Nest’ audio or security systems expand data collection into the privacy of one’s home. As data collection encroaches ever deeper into our lives through apps, phones, search, and ‘smart devices’, the possibility of technical management and ever more precise ad targeting grows with it. The work of Shoshana Zuboff on the rise of what she calls “Surveillance Capitalism”[18] documents how the data collection of big tech corporations like Google and Facebook has spawned a new form of digital capitalism. The data that these corporations collect is used to predict future behavior, it is this “digital future” that is then sold to advertisers, who then attempt to shape behavior:

It is a movement founded on predictive algorithms, mathematical calculations of human behavior. Surveillance capitalists “sell certainty to business customers who would like to know with certainty what we do…” The best way to make your predictions desirable to customers is to ensure they come true: “to tune and herd and shape and push us in the direction that creates the highest probability of their business success”. There’s no way “to dress this up as anything but behavioral modification”. In 2012 and 2013, Facebook conducted “massive-scale contagion experiments” to see if they could “affect real-world emotions and behavior, in ways that bypassed user awareness.”[19]

While examples like these are dystopian and chilling, the encroachment of powerful tech companies is not the most insidious way that Technique has become part of us. In many ways, this statistical management way of thinking has become part of our subconscious psychological furniture. We think of our entire lives in terms of a ‘life plan’ and try to map out and plan our days, weeks, months, and years to ensure time is spent well and economically.[20] We thus apply the logic of ‘technique’ to our entire lives, seeking to ‘maximize our potential’, develop a ‘growth mindset’ or ‘manage time’ efficiently.

This search for the one best way is in principle never ending, there is no limit, no threshold at which there is ‘enough’ efficiency, productivity, or profit. We often feel like we are part of a rat race to ‘keep up with the Johnses. This is because the threshold of efficiency, productivity and profit always continues to rise. From the perspective of the one best way, we can never be efficient enough, productive enough, profitable enough or fast enough. To keep up, we always need to conform to the latest development, or we fall behind. This has a psychological toll as individuals feel as if they are constantly on a hamster wheel, but never good enough, never shaping up to expectations. David Zahl puts his finger on this cultural phenomenon in his book Seculosity:

Listen carefully and you’ll hear that word enough everywhere, especially when it comes to the anxiety, loneliness, exhaustion, and division that plague our moment to such tragic proportions. You’ll hear about people scrambling to be successful enough, happy enough, thin enough, wealthy enough, influential enough, desired enough, charitable enough, woke enough, good enough. We believe instinctively that, were we to reach some benchmark in our minds, then value, vindication, and love would be ours—that if we got enough, we would be enough.[21]

It is increasingly the story of Technique, rather than the narratives of scripture or tradition which orient our lives. Increasingly, the technician, pollster, or ‘expert’ replaces the moral authority of communities or traditions, or even the autonomy of individual choice. In a similar way that people in the past looked for favorable omens or the blessing of priests, we want our decisions about where to live, who to marry, what job or school to pursue to be backed by expert opinion or ‘the science’. (I am not saying we should dismiss science or experts—both are vital and necessary—but instead am noting at how a slavish worship of these leads to a hollowing out of individual or communal agency.)

We start to value people and things in terms of their efficiency. Perhaps the most disturbing example of this is the way our culture increasingly regards the disabled and the elderly. It becomes difficult to see the ‘point’ in a life that is not economically productive or the value in suffering with these human beings. From the perspective of Technique, the sensible thing to do with these lives is the same thing our agricultural system does with chickens who don’t produce enough eggs.[22]

It becomes harder to see the value or ‘use’ of culture, literature, art, or spirituality. After all, what can these things do for us? What ‘use’ or ‘function’ do they serve? Aren’t they just a waste of time, a draining of resources? Even attempts to defend these things often ends up using the logic of Technique: a literature degree is advertised as improving job opportunities and workplace skills; spiritual practice as maximizing psychological well-being leading to greater success in pursuing life goals, and so on. Technique becomes our reality, a straitjacket that straps us in, an iron box that closes around us, a way of thinking from which there is no escape.

Technology as Destiny

It should be obvious from these examples that something has gone wrong. Our technological society no longer serves human beings; it has expanded beyond human proportions. Although it claims to be the height of rationality, it is obvious that there is something very irrational about our technological society. One writer argues that one of the key features of our society is, “the rational character of its irrationality.”[23] Once one has grasped the picture that is being described in the pages above, it is hard to escape this conclusion. In so many ways our technological society presents itself as the epitome of reasonableness. We are told that we are being guided by ‘facts’, ‘science’, or ‘expert opinion’. Polls, statistics, and public opinion encircle us at all sides, pressing us into conformity with what is ‘average’, or ‘normal’, while shielding us from ‘risk’. Brought under the management of Technique, the way forward in various domains just seems obvious, unquestionable, and rational. There is a one best way to grow crops to ensure maximum yield, and we have no choice but to conform. There is a one best way to raise animals, and we have no choice but to follow. There is a one best way increasingly of doing just about everything, and we feel no choice but to give in. Indeed, one of the most striking things about our society is how we don’t even consider most areas of life to contain moral questions. When it comes to farming, manufacturing, economics, and so on we don’t even think there are moral considerations to ponder: all that matters is to find the one best way of increasing efficiency and production. In thinking this, we have simply given into being ruled by Technique or the one best way. As Ellul points out, for Technique, there are no moral considerations: “a principal characteristic of Technique… is its refusal to tolerate moral judgments. It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain. Technique never observes the distinction between moral and immoral use. It tends, on the contrary, to create a completely independent technical morality.”[24]

What is lost in the rule of the one best way, is quite simply our agency, our freedom to decide whether this actually is the ‘best’ way. What, after all, do we mean by the ‘best’ way? Best for what? Our industrialized agriculture might be the ‘best’ way to make money. But is the ‘best’ way for creation? The ‘best’ way for human beings? The ‘best’ way to work? The ‘best’, most ethical way of raising crops? Is it the ‘best’ way for humans and creation to relate to each other? Is it the ‘best’ possible future? Whenever words like ‘better’, or for that matter, words like ‘progress’, are used, it is important to ask what criterion is being used to measure the improvement. Quite often a perspective that values efficiency over all else is being smuggled into our thinking. What the one best way, the rational way of Technique, ‘the experts’, and the ‘facts’, can never answer is whether the world they are recommending is actually good, livable or appropriate for human beings and creation.

Without meaning to needlessly court controversy, an example from recent memory that made these issues very clear was the COVID pandemic. Throughout the pandemic, public policy decisions were justified by citing statistical information, scientific facts, and expert opinion.[25] Often the impression was given that there was a one best way one best way of dealing with an unprecedented global pandemic. As debate around public masking, vaccinations, gathering limits, and vaccine passports raged, it became increasingly clear to me that there was no simple path from the oracular pronouncements of science to how human beings should organize their life together. Of course, the facts about vaccines, masks, and viral transmission are vital considerations, but what to do about those facts, how they intersect with the complex world of human culture and community are questions that no expert can answer.

What an example like the COVID pandemic response might make (some of us) see, is that the real question is still an open one: What is the future we want to live in? Is the world that Technique, the one best way, and technological ‘progress’ are taking us into actually a future that is good? If we survey our technological society, are we satisfied with what we see? When we give into the one best way, we are being led by our noses into a future that we have not chosen for ourselves. However, when we realize that the most efficient, productive, or profitable way is not necessarily the best way for human beings—then we suddenly have the freedom to choose a different path. What might a different way look like? We will be exploring that question in our next section.

Hutterite Conviviality: What are Hutterite Communities for?  

            As we have seen, technological ‘progress’ for its own sake does not lead to human flourishing. Instead, when technological systems grow beyond a certain level of speed or efficiency, they end up working against what they were originally created to do. What we need is for tools, techniques, and technological institutions to be put within human limits and then put in the service of culture, so that they enhance our humanity and life-together rather than destroying it. In some ways, Hutterites are already doing this. However, we are not often very intentional about it. Are we just mindlessly allowing ourselves to be led around by Technique, or are we taking the freedom to chart our own path forward?

A small but illuminative example of what a more balanced use of technology might look like can be seen in the Hutterite practice of grave digging. In my community, it is traditional for the men of the community to gather at the graveyard to hand dig the hole for the departed. In winter, sometimes jackhammers will be used to break away the frozen surface, but then the rest will be done with shovels. There are usually two people in the hole digging, and a large group standing on the surface, talking, and waiting for their turn. The graveyard and the common work make for an ambiance of somber joy. This whole rich scene is an image of a well-balanced relationship between human beings and technology. We use certain forms of technology such as jackhammers and shovels, without which the work would be backbreakingly difficult. At the same time, we recognize that certain forms of technology would be inappropriate. Digging the hole with a backhoe would destroy the communal experience around the grave, would be irreverent to the graveyard, and would rob the men of the community of a deeply embodied way of paying their last respects. From this example we can already start to get a glimpse of what a good relationship to technology would look like.

We can see from this example that how we use our tools, or what tools we use has the potential to either enhance our community life or to degrade it. It’s worth asking the fundamental question: What are Hutterite Communities for?[26] How we answer this question will guide how we think about what place technology has in our communities. If our communities exist for the purpose of maximizing profit and growing economically, then of course the logic of Technique will govern all areas of life in our communities. However, if our communities exist to reflect the teachings of Jesus and the joy of the gospel, embodied in a rich life together—then our approach to technology will be much more creative and nuanced. We might ask of our tools, machines, and methods some of the following questions: 

• Do they enhance or undermine human community and culture?
• Do they enhance our connection with humans and nature, or do they alienate us from both?
• Do they make us more human, more creative, more free, more skillful, and more communal; or do they make us less human and more dependent on technology? 
• Do they make us see the world in a richer, fuller way, or do they lead to a limiting of our vision?
• Can the user choose what the tool is used for, or does the tool manipulate the user?[27]
• Can they be fixed and or used by local communities, or are they ‘black boxes’ that can only be fixed or used by experts?[28]

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it helps us to begin thinking about what a better approach to technology might look like. Rather than giving into the logic of Technique, we need to find a way of relating to technology that puts human beings, culture, and nature first. We could imagine how this might apply to various domains of life in Hutterite Communities. In Hutterite manufacturing shops, is the primary aim to improve production, efficiency, or profit? Of course, these are valid goals in any business, but they cannot be the only aim. Can we envision a different kind of work environment in which human beings can find a home rather than being used simply as means to an end? Such a shop would foster good, meaningful, skillful work, rather having workers perform drudging, repetitive tasks on an assembly life. People would be brought together to work on common tasks or projects, rather than being isolated from each other. Work would be connected with the life of the community so that working would simultaneously be an act of culture building. Such work would produce high quality, useful products which skillful workers could take pride and pleasure in. This work would work with the grain of natural limits, rather than destroying the natural world.

We could imagine something similar within domains of education, raising animals, growing crops, preparing food, medicine, transportation, and on and on. In all these areas, we have become so focused on speed and efficiency, that we often end up undermining and debasing the good things we are supposed to be fostering! Thus, we have education systems that don’t know the difference between good grades and learning; animals that are treated like machines rather than animals; food that is mass produced, unhealthy, and wasteful. In all these areas, what might it mean to think first of fostering flourishing community, building culture, making good things, and valuing the natural world?

In this, we can gain some orientation from the Sermon on the Mount, which speaks profoundly into our technological context. Jesus tells his hearers that no one can serve two masters, for either we will love one or hate the other, no one can serve God and Mammon. (Matt. 6:24) Either we can follow the one best way, the road of maximum efficiency and Technique; or we can go the way of fidelity to God and the good things that have been given to us. This second path requires that we give up our anxious attempt to control the future (after all, isn’t that the essence of Technique?) and instead learn to receive God’s gifts with an open hand—the bounty that is present here and now. (Matt. 6:25-26) Rather than managing the future, we are called to live faithfully and attentively in the present, caring for the people and places around us: “Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added onto you.” (Matt. 6:33) The good things of life cannot be delivered by technological institutions or efficiently produced. Instead, they can only be nourished in a patient fidelity to the places and people that I am present to and care for. In this, I cannot improve upon the beautiful words of Wendell Berry:  

“The higher aims of “technological progress” are money and ease. And this exalted greed for money and ease is disguised and justified by an obscure, cultish faith in “the future.” We do as we do, we say, “for the sake of the future” or “to make a better future for our children.” How we can hope to make a good future by doing badly in the present, we do not say. We cannot think about the future, of course, for the future does not exist: the existence of the future is an article of faith. We can be assured only that, if there is to be a future, the good of it is already implicit in the good things of the present. We do not need to plan or devise a “world of the future”; if we take care of the world of the present, the future will have received full justice from us. A good future is implicit in the soils, forests, grasslands, marshes, deserts, mountains, rivers, lakes, and oceans that we have now, and in the good things of human culture that we have now; the only valid “futurology” available to us is to take care of those things. We have no need to contrive and dabble at “the future of the human race”; we have the same pressing need that we have always had—to love, care for, and teach our children.”[29]

Bibliography

Berry, Wendell. “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.” What are People For? San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990.

Berry, Wendell. “Why I Won’t Buy a Computer.” What are People For? San Francisco, North Point Press, 1990.

Berger, Peter, Briggitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner. The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness. New York: Random House Publishing, 1973.

Brock, Brian. Wondrously Wounded: Theology, Disability, and the Body of Christ. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2019.

Dreyfus, Hubert L. “Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology.” Technology and Values, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997. pp. 41–54.

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. New York: Vintage Books, 1964.

Everett, Daniel L., Don’t Sleep There are Snakes, Vintage Books: New York, 2009.

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Gerland Publishing, Inc. 1997.

Illich, Ivan. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976.

Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York, Marion Boyars, 1973.

Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man. New York: Routledge Classics, 2007.

Neil Postman. “Five Things We Need To Know About Technological Change.” Talk delivered at Denver, Colorado, March 28, 1998. https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf

Stivers, Richard. Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational. New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 2001.

Zahl, David. Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became our New Religion and What to Do about it. Minneapolis: Fortress, Press, 2019.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future in a New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2019.

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[1]. Class notes from September 13 class of Ethical Living in a Technological Society.

[2]. Niel Postman, “Five Things We Need To Know About Technological Change,” talk delivered at Denver, Colorado, March 28, 1998. https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf

[3]. Daniel L. Everett, Don’t Sleep There are Snakes, (Vintage Books: New York, 2009), 78-79.

[4]. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson, (W. W. Norton Company Inc., 2018.), 5.136-137.

[5]. Homer, The Odyssey, 5.213-214.

[6]. This sentence is from an English paper I wrote on the Odyssey. Julian Waldner “Home is where the Hearth is,” unpublished paper, November 23, 2022.

[7]. Martha Nusbaum, “Transcending Humanity,” in Love’s Knowledge, (Oxford University Press, 1992), 366.

[8]. Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 11.

[9]. This paragraph is drawing on a paper I wrote for Ethical Living in a Technological Society. Julian Waldner, “Reflection on Current Views on Technology,” unpublished paper, September 20, 2022.

[10]. Dreyfus, Hubert L. “Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology.” Technology and Values, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997, 27.

[11]. See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 64-79. 

[12]. Ellul, The Technological Society, 79.

[13]. Ibid., 116. Drawing on an essay for Ethical Living in a Technological Society. Julian Waldner, Marcuse, Ellul, and Heidegger on Technology, unpublished paper, October 31, 2022.

[14]. Jodi Kantor and Arya Sunderam, “The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score,” The New York Times, August 14, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/14/business/worker-productivity-tracking.html.

[15] Ibid.,

[16].  Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976).

[17]. Richard Stivers, Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational, (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 2001), 79-108.

[18].  Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future in a New Frontier of Power, (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).

[19]. Joanna Kavenna, “Shoshana Zuboff: ‘Surveillance capitalism is an assault on human autonomy,’” The Guardian, October 4, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/04/shoshana-zuboff-surveillance-capitalism-assault-human-automomy-digital-privacy.   

[20]. Peter Berger, Briggitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness, (New York: Random House Publishing, 1973), 72.

[21]. David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became our New Religion and What to Do about it, (Minneapolis: Fortress, Press, 2019), 6 epub.

[22]. Brian Brock, Wondrously Wounded: Theology, Disability and the Body of Christ, (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2019), 122.

[23]. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, (New York: Routledge Classics, 2007), 11.

[24]. Ellul, The Technological Society, 97.

[25]. See for example David Cayley, “The Prognosis,” Literary Review of Canada, October, 2020, https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2020/10/the-prognosis/. Justin E. H. Smith, “Permanent Pandemic: Will COVID controls keep controlling us?” Harpers Magazine, June 2022, https://harpers.org/archive/2022/06/permanent-pandemic-will-covid-controls-keep-controlling-us/.    

[26]. I’m drawing here on a title of a book by Wendell Berry, What are People For?

[27]. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, (New York, Marion Boyars, 1973). 30

[28]. For similar criterion see Wendell Berry, “Why I Won’t Buy a Computer,” in What are People For? (San Francisco, North Point Press, 1990), 170-178.  

[29]. Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” in What are People For?, (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), 178-197.