I was raised a good, catholic boy. I went to Catholic schools (both primary and secondary), I was an altar boy for a while there in my early teens. I attended church with my mum on most Sundays. Sung the hymns. Said the prayers. Then, one day, thought to myself – hey, I’m not sure I agree with these ideas.
Soon, I stopped going to church. I started to argue with my mum (a catholic), and my grandmother and uncle (both protestants) about all the ways in which their blind belief was simply illogical and irrational. I branded myself an atheist but, later on, decided agnosticism was the thing for me – I would prescribe to no belief.
But of course, there was science – good ol’ rational, logical, deductive science. We were unequivocally proving things with science. We’ve proved that we evolved from apes and not a guy’s ribs. That death meant there was no afterlife. That ‘sin’ was something created to help control an unruly population in the Middle Ages. Yeah! Science! This was it. We could do and know anything with science, eventually.
But here’s where even science goes wrong: it turns out that we can and will never know everything. And, because this is true, we need faith. There’s no such thing as atheism or agnosticism in its truest sense. We need to believe in something. Faith is inescapable.
In rejecting Catholicism I simply transferred my belief to another thing, science. And, the more time you spend with science (as I did with Christianity) the more you realise that it can’t do everything, either. It’s only really good for a certain type of knowledge – the stuff that’s observable and measurable by a third party. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just that it still has limits.
Some of us have faith in the free market. Others have faith in dictatorial leaders (on Earth or in Heaven). Some of us have faith in processes (like design) or systems (like democracy), and some of us put our faith in the people closest to us – family and friends. Some of us are beginning to idolise the billionaires because, as it turns out, some of us believe that technology will save us.
Is technology our saviour?
As I write this, the world is beginning to agree that we’re in trouble – if we don’t change the way we live our lives, our species (and a few others) simply won’t survive. And, as I write this, our Prime Minister is seeking to invest 500M dollars in his faith. Yes, he’s an unashamed Pentecostal Christian, but he doesn’t intend to give that money to the church. No. He wants to give it to Technology – technology not taxes.
But what does it mean to have faith in technology?
A few years ago I read something somewhere that stated that we only refer to things as ‘technology’ if they were invented in our lifetime. Anything, before we were born, isn’t technology, it just is. It begs the question, what is the ‘technology’ that our Prime Minister believes in so strongly?
I’ve been working in software for almost 20 years, building tools that help people solve problems of various sizes and scale. I’m pretty proud of the work I’ve done but I’ve also had first-hand experience in the unintended consequences that giving tools to humans always has – first we shape the tools then the tools shape us.
Historically, give or take a few disasters, one could argue that technology has had a net positive effect on the short-term quality of life of the human race. The wheel. The lightbulb. The bicycle. The aeroplane. The invention of democracy, capitalism, industrialism. These tools and systems have indeed raised the tide and lifted the boats with it. We’re living in less poverty, globally, than ever before.
But, how’s it really going? Where are we now? With the growing global agreement that things aren’t looking great, maybe those technologies and systems haven’t been thinking long-term enough. Could there have been another way? Might we still have time to course-correct if things haven’t gone quite to plan?
Maybe to have faith in ‘technology’ really means to have faith in human ingenuity and creativity? That, somehow, we’ll work it out. Our life depends on it. We’ll use science and collaboration. We’ll use the very systems that got us into this predicament to get us out of it. Capitalism and Industrialism, pointed at the exit sign, away from this impending catastrophe, might just be the thing.
But. Even as I write those sentences, something seems off-kilter.
If we keep digging the same hole, with the same shovel, we just dig a deeper hole.
If, for the course of human history we’ve had faith in technology, and we’ve arrived here, at the brink of our demise, maybe it’s not the answer. Maybe, we need to do something different. If we change nothing, nothing changes. Using the same shovel to dig a deeper hole will only make the hole ever deeper. It’s the same hole. It seems that what we need now is some sort of airlift, not a bigger shovel.
As a technologist – someone who, for 20 or so years, has witnessed both the profound positive and negative impacts of ‘technology’ (new tools and processes introduced to people’s lives), I have very little faith that doing the same thing – relying on technology – is the way out. Like with almost every problem I’ve built a tool to overcome – the problem is almost never a tooling problem, it’s a people one. And, most of the time, people problems have been solved with people solutions – empathy, listening, fairness, trust, understanding, care, and reciprocity. I don’t think the plan is to spend 500M bucks on those things.
We can’t have a conversation about Enough, either
In a world where many have a lot and many more have a little, it’s difficult to have a conversation about ‘what is enough’, either; the idea of mutuality over hierarchy. Scarcity (both real and manufactured) underpins our largest and most influential system – capitalism, and so to think about a world without scarcity, a world where things like universal basic income exists, feels near impossible until we’re forced to.
We cannot separate humanity from technology, but technology is just half of the equation and I don’t see anyone else thinking about the humanity bit
Many of us, especially those without enough, want more. And who can blame them? It’s a basic, human need for survival. Squirrel away the spoils so we’ll be safe if the disaster happens. But, to get more – to accumulate, save, and store – we need to borrow from the now. It seems that we haven’t historically been very good at borrowing from the now, but we’ve mastered taking from the now. Borrowing requires a paying back. But we’re all told that debt is fine and we should only pay when the debt collector starts knocking. That’s how it’s done.
But we are eating our own gingerbread house. And what we don’t eat gets destroyed by the acid rain that’s beginning to fall. It’s scrapping for our very survival that will and seems to be leading to our downfall – like a spider trying to climb the side of the toilet bowl only to slip and fall back in again. The climbing is getting more difficult the more tired we become. Meanwhile, the tide is rising. Literally.
So what to believe in, now?
I don’t have solutions but a recognition and understanding of our place in things – the work of scientists like Carl Sagan, poets like Mary Oliver, religious teachings like Buddhism – seem to be part of an answer. Our indigenous Australians have been and continue to ask for a voice to power. But who’s listening? The religious despise the scientists and vice versa. The economists despise the poets and vice versa. The politicians represent their individual preferences, not their people. Everyone is right, and no one is.
I used to have faith that a common enemy would bind us. The scenario of the interplanetary adversary would mean that humans would finally see ourselves as a unit; a common whole. But now, through the course of one of those moments – a global pandemic where each and every human became the vulnerable one – I’ve seen how deeply our beliefs are held and amplified against one another. It seems that no matter the challenge, we will always find a way for it to be us versus us. And, whilst we’re busy arguing with each other, the world around us will disintegrate. Not in a cataclysmic, overnight sense. It’s far more likely to be slow, banal, and boring.
And yet, despite all of the logic and rationality that I can use to analyse the system we’ve built for ourselves that the science tells us will surely spell our demise – I find myself, still, with hope. The science will probably tell me that my brain is wired that way – it’s some sort of biological survival mechanism because the opposite of hope is simply too detrimental to my health. Religion would tell me that all things come to an end or that there’s an afterlife anyway, so there’s nothing to worry about. Capitalism would tell me that the market will work it out for us.
I don’t know what to believe in anymore, but I’m pretty sure technology isn’t it.