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Technology and The Human Spirit

TECHNOLOGY AND THE HUMAN SPIRIT: Confronting the New Millenium
— Bruce Francis

T o speak of technology and human spirit in the same phrase may seem paradoxical or even antithetical. However, developments of the latter decades of the last century and emerging issues of the new millennium make it imperative that we consider them together and explore how they are related. That is one purpose of this Perspective issue.
These days "technology" is inevitably associated with computers and with information. Not very long ago the association was with machines and with industry. The word itself has a broader meaning, and can be defined as "any systematic process designed to achieve a planned result." In fact, technology includes a wide range of human activities and can be seen as distinctly human in that it makes full and direct use of some of our most powerful human faculties. For instance, the curriculum of any university is a technology that has been systematically designed and planned to guide and assess learning. For purposes of our analysis here, however, we will focus on those aspects of technology that deal with complex mechanical and informational processes.
The word "spirit," literally "the breath of life," also has a number of meanings in common use. One can speak of spirit as an attitude, e.g., "school spirit." One can use it in a Christian context and speak of the "Spiritual Works of Mercy." To be called upon to "counsel the doubtful, instruct the ignorant, admonish the sinner, comfort the sorrowful, forgive injuries, bear wrongs patiently, and pray for the living and the dead"—all of these are considered acts of kindness in a "spiritual" dimension. There is finally a sense of the word "spirit" that refers to a dimension of human reality beyond ordinary perception, a dimension that many believe undergirds the material dimension and that we experience only indirectly—though some claim to have direct knowledge of it. There are those who would argue that spirit encompasses non-human reality as well, the so-called animal, vegetable, and even mineral worlds, but we will limit the term to the human. Thus "human spirit" refers to our uniquely human characteristics and capabilities by which we experience our reality and attempt to make sense of it.

TECHNOLOGY AMPLIFIES THE HUMAN SPIRIT, BOTH FOR GOOD AND for ill.

As we define technology and human spirit, we find that far from being antithetical, they are in fact intimately connected. Consequently, it is important for humanistic professionals to consider them together and to analyze in depth the ways they affect our being.

Dimensions of Human Spirit
Humans are uniquely gifted with mental capacities beyond those of other species that we know about. These gifts manifest themselves in our ability to reflect, to imagine, and to create. Reflection is our ability to be aware of and to think about our own thoughts. From reflection comes our capacity for complex language (both understanding and expressing), for seeing the humor in our lives, and for making ethical analyses and judgments. Reflection is not an unalloyed blessing, however, for it also enables us to worry and to feel shame. Carried to extremes of perseveration, negative reflection manifests itself in obsessions and even in psychoses. Humanistic psychologists, by and large, place great value on our healthy reflective ability and see it as the basis for our awareness of self.
A second dimension of human spirit is imagination, our ability to construct alternate scenarios, explanations, and futures. Without imagination, our appreciation of scientific theory and artistic products would be pallid, if they existed at all. Imagination carrying positive affect generates new perspectives on experience and alternate explanations for what we see around us, including our predictions and projections of what is to come. When carrying negative affect, our imaginations can conjure up frightening images and horrific scenarios, the stuff of nightmares and phobias.
A third dimension of human spirit and a direct extension of our power of imagination is creation. Creation involves the outward expression of imagination that results in new scientific explanations, new art forms, new cultural artifacts, and even new societal structures. Technology itself and all of its benefits are derived from the creative power of human spirit. So in a very real sense, human spirit and technology are intertwined as cause and effect. So closely intertwined are they, in fact, that no less a humanist than R. Buckminster Fuller commented, "the only way to predict the future is to create it."

How Does Technology Affect the Human Spirit?
The intimate intertwining of tech nology and human spirit manifests itself in a variety of ways. Perhaps the most powerful and certainly the most controversial is the way technology amplifies the human spirit, both for good and for ill. Amplification of spirit causes us to exult in the almost magical quality of technological advance and at the same time to fear its consequences. No better example could be found than in recent discoveries surrounding the human genetic structure. Our knowledge of genetic manipulation promises significant advances in disease control and cure but raises previously unimagined ethical issues of cloning and the dreaded practice of eugenics.
Technology’s amplification of our powers of reflection, imagination, and creation lead inevitably to issues surrounding dimensions of humanity that are thought to be (and vociferously argued to be) fundamental and stable. Many humanistic professionals, in fact, regard these issues as "of the nature of being human." They are:
Technology’s effect on our perception of reality,
Technology’s effect on our experience of change, and
Technology’s effect on the definition of what it means to be human.
Recently, computer technology combined with ultra-realistic film images has opened to our visual experience new worlds that, while virtual, seem real enough to be frightening. The science fiction of Star Trek’s holodeck has prepared our imaginations for the experience of multiple changing realities. David Deutsch, a British philosopher, has in his new book The Fabric of Reality woven together concepts from virtual reality and the multi-worlds quantum hypothesis to create a fascinating (and eminently serious) theory of multiple realities. No one who has seen the recent movie The Matrix and considered its implications can avoid the uncomfortable sense that comes from at least asking the question "What is really real in my experience?"

THE GULF BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND SPIRIT MAY BE IMAGINARY.


Technology’s amplification of the human spirit has also altered the way we experience change. Today, it is a truism to point to the speed of change in every aspect of our lives. Probably the most intrusive examples lie in the field of business where new dot.com enterprises emerge from the cocoon of venture capitalists, bask in the glory of an IPO and a dizzying stock run-up, and just as dizzyingly crash and burn, taking investors’ money with them. We watch the changing economic scene and feel a gnawing sense of powerlessness and loss of control that seems to defy everything we thought we knew about planning and prediction. We are reminded of Ellul’s claim that "Technology may be as natural a part of human evolution as the differentiation of finger and thumb, and in this sense has been until now almost as free from man’s possible control."
In a deeper sense, technology-driven change, and theories created to make sense of it, have altered a fundamental Western view dating from the time of the Greeks about the primacy of change in our lives. Western philosophy deeply ingrained in us the assumption that reality is fundamentally stable and that changes we perceive are temporary and fleeting. For example, traditional notions of self, even the socially constructed ones, have always conveyed a sense of lastingness, of ground to which changes of mood, behavior, and perspective, are temporary figure. In recent years, however, increasing awareness of change has forced us to revise our theories toward chaos and complexity and our perspectives toward variety and multiplicity. It seems inevitable that a figure-ground shift has occurred, and that reality is fundamentally change and only accidentally stable.
Perhaps the most threatening issue arising from technology’s amplification of our human spirit lies in the way technology seems to be altering the very definition of what being human means. We spoke above of genetic manipulation that combines the science of biology with the technologies of information processing to create new genes and even new "cloned" beings. Technological advances in the development of prosthetic devices powered by computers now makes it possible to replace more and more essential body parts. Where can this lead? Today it is a rare individual who does not use a technological device such as eyeglasses, hearing aids, or artificial limbs to replace or enhance physiological function. Many, if not most of these prosthetic devices are developed with or actually employ miniature computers. An interesting question that will become more and more real over time is "when more than 51% of my body is made up of computerized replacements, am I still human?"
And in a recent book that all humanistic professionals should read and critique, scientist and seer Ray Kurzweil paints a dramatic picture of a new species that combines technology and spirit, but not human spirit. In The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Viking, 1999), Kurzweil imagines a world "where the difference between man and machine blurs, where the line between humanity and technology fades, and where the soul and the silicon chip unite." Advances in computer power will inexorably result, he argues, in computers exceeding the memory capacity and computational ability of humans by 2020 (when my grandson graduates from college) and matching all other human abilities by 2029. By 2099 a merger of human thinking and machine intelligence will have obliterated any clear distinction between humans and computers, so that "when the machines claim to be conscious, we will believe them."

The Humanistic Response
What are we to do? How are we, as humanistic professionals, to respond to these technological developments and to their implications? I see a number of possible reactions. The first response I call Compulsive. This is a blind reaction bound up in emotion. It can take the form of blindly embracing technology as an unalloyed good that will solve all problems in time, or the equally blind neo-Luddite view of seeing only technology’s dark side, and of working to destroy it. I call this view compulsive because it seems to me to be highly unrealistic, fear-laden, and even neurotic. It is a kind of "stop the world I want to get off" mentality and flies in the face of what we know from history.
Another reaction I call Conservative. This view professes to favor the benefits of technology but to be uncomfortable with its speed of advance. It wants to control the development of technology, subject it to human planning, and integrate each new advance with current values. This way change will be gradual and any detrimental effects of technology can be detected and mitigated "before it is too late." At first glance, this view appears eminently reasonable and manifests itself in the desire to study the ethical ramifications of technological development and to pass laws controlling its negative effects. But careful analysis shows the conservative reaction to be too slow to keep up with the pace of change and too careful in developing and applying new principles to new realities. The delays we see in the introduction of new energy sources such as nuclear power and in the use of new drugs because of regulatory concerns are examples of the tension between the speed of technological development and the conservative human spirit.
A third response I call Contemplative. This view applies careful thought to the implications of tech-nological development and seeks to remain objective and even somewhat uninvolved while examining the implications for humanity. At its best, this view results in careful evaluation studies of the impact of technology and of how it can best be used. At its worst, this view manifests a kind of alienation from technology, and a "head-in-the-sand" attitude that has a similar effect as the compulsive attitude.
Finally there is an attitude I call Courageous. This is a view I recommend for all humanistic professionals. It builds on intellectual curiosity, on the power of critical thought, and on a certain optimism about how technology and the human spirit are integrated and mutually self-supporting. Jennifer Cobb, in her book Cybergrace (New York: Crown, 1998), uses Teilhard de Chardin’s construct of "emergence" to suggest that the gulf between technology and spirit may be imaginary. She suggests that we need to think more broadly and inclusively about reality and consider the world not as composed of discrete objective things, but rather as events un-folding in time, each with some sub- jective experience. The ethical quest of all reality is to "enhance the rich-ness of experience. The world of cyberspace, she writes, "offers a new lens through which we can grasp the enormous diversity of creative expression evolving throughout the universe." Perhaps "our machines may be conduits to a deeper spirituality."
A new energy center of AHP has been formed to encourage courageous analysis and discussion of the issues raised here (as well as many others we do not have space for). It is called The Technology and Human Spirit Energy Center, and can be found on the Association’s web site at ahpweb.org. I welcome your reactions and suggestions. Write me at bfrancis@capella.edu.

Bruce Francis is Chancellor and Chief Academic Officer of Capella University. He was formerly President of The Graduate School of America, Saybrook Institute, and the Association for Humanistic Psychology. Holding a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, he has extensive experience with distance education, online training, and executive management. His areas of specialization and interest include chaos and complexity theory, e-commerce, and information technology.

Technology, Humanity, and Humanistic Psychology

— Eric Dodson

Our world grows more technological with each passing day. And as we humanistic psychologists gaze upon the vast and varied panoply of technological expansion, it’s easy to feel a little uneasy about its influence on our lives, our presence to each other, and humanity as a whole. It’s easy to feel frustrated—at least a little bit—by our ever-increasing dependency on technology. It’s as simple as hearing that the computer’s down and that we consequently have to wait before we can get on with our lives. And in the banality of such moments, it becomes almost strange to remember a time when computers used to wait on us.
It can be even more disturbing to wonder about the extent to which inhabiting a technological world makes us more technological. This is especially true for people who see things holistically, and who consequently sense the intimacy between our world’s character and our own. It’s not only that we make machines in our own image, as in the obvious case of artificial intelligence. It’s equally true that we too are subtly made-over and reinvented by the very technological world we invent.
Perhaps one of the best expressions of this dynamic is still Marshall McLuhan’s maxim "the medium is the message." McLuhan was writing about TV in the 1960s. But his insight is even more relevant today, in the far more pervasive, subtle, and virulent meta-medium of technology. Think about it; technology has entered almost every single region of our lives. Even the sanctity of our physical bodies is not immune. How many of our bodies are not infused with the subtle technological effects of modern medicine, hybridized foods and synthetic additives, low-grade environmental pollutants, etc. Even when we put on a pair of eyeglasses, we see the world through technology’s lenses—literally. In fact, it is even difficult to eat and breathe in a non-technological way.


...it’s exactly the suppressed sensation of terror that perpetuates our world’s greatest paradox—that we build technology to liberate ourselves...


Marketing the Self and Subjectivity
And what of the selves that are bound holistically to our bodies? What of the incarnate streaming of subjectivity—of mood, meaning, and value—that we humanistic psychologists value. One marker of technological change is the cyber-selves we have created in the form of personal web pages and Internet-identities that interact with other Internet-identities.
However, the real issue has more to do with the ways in which the self is, as Kenneth Gergen puts it, altogether "under siege." Part of this siege has to do with the way in which we now tend to form identities in relation to technologically driven commodity-culture. Certainly just about every advertiser has learned this trick by now. The point is no longer to persuade you and me to buy a certain product; the point is to get us to feel like we’re the kind of people who buy it—people who identify ourselves through the products we buy (check out automobile ads). In such a climate, having a self becomes much more like adopting a fashion than evolving a cohesive narrative about one’s life.
Consequently, the self becomes much more mutable and fragmentary than it’s ever been. Changing selves becomes much easier, since it’s now mostly a matter of resit-uating oneself with regard to commodity-culture—with an optional career change, if needed. In short, in a technologically driven commodity-culture like ours, the self itself becomes a kind of commodity—to be purchased at the mall or on the Internet, rather than discovered via personal introspection, reflection, or study.
The same dynamic is at work on our consciousness. For instance, is there anyone left who doesn’t have Attention Deficit Disorder? Hardly anyone, mostly because we live in a technological attention-deficit world, where human consciousness itself is becoming structured much more like MTV than Tolstoy.
This trend is particularly evident in college classrooms (where I work), where the latent tension is often between my older, slower, literary consciousness and the faster, more fragmentary, image-oriented form of consciousness my students have. It’s no mere accident that most of my students probably spend at least ten hours watching technologically produced images (in the form of TV, the Internet and video-games) for every hour they spend reading books. Their awareness itself is being structured along new, mostly post-literate, iconographic lines—where powerful images and sound bites (not literary narratives) form the primary locus of meaning-making in their lives.
And I really can’t say that I’m personally immune. In fact, when I have the courage to perceive it, I can actually feel my own consciousness becoming more fragmentary and iconographic over time. I find that despite my fondness for literary consciousness (intensified by earning four college degrees), I too can now watch a Nine Inch Nails video much more easily than I can read, say, Anna Karenina.

Erasure of Language and Meaning
Of course, this shift from the literary to the iconographic is influencing more than the structure of our individual awareness. This change is also affecting the very nature of meaning, as well as the processes by which we make meaning. To put it bluntly, meaning is becoming less about coherent sentences and narratives and much more about fragmentary sound bites and evocative images. At the same time, the mytho-poetic power of words is itself undergoing a peculiar kind of attenuation. I call this phenomenon the "erasure of language," and it’s mostly a product of the intensely repetitive quality of modern, technologically driven advertisement. For instance, have you noticed that through sheer repetition the once-powerful words "Be all you can be" have now come to mean almost nothing at all—just a jumble of sounds people vaguely associate with the U.S. Army? Have you noticed that practically everything (and hence nothing) has become "extreme," and an "instant classic?" What’s going on here? In part, the poetic, evocative power of words is being drained via hyper-repetition. And this tendency naturally impels an ongoing search to locate the few words that still have enough power to move people. Have you noticed how car manufacturers and politicians have begun to speak about "passion?" In our world, this is a sure marker that the evocative power of "passion" is about to be erased.

Iconographic Poets
The erasure of language poses a particularly thorny challenge for humanistic psychology, whose enterprise still largely seeks to call humanity toward something like a destiny. The problem is that humanistic psychology’s traditional call can’t help sounding more and more like another cheap ad.
Consequently, it seems to me that we humanistic psychologists really need to let go of our mostly erased holy-words and narratives and enter into a never-ending iconographic poeticization of our project. I feel that at the level of our very existence we now need to become iconographic poets of the human riddle. The more we remain behind the curve of erasure by simply intoning well-worn humanistic litanies, the more we’ll become just another ineffectual historical curiosity. By the way, this is also part of the reason why advertisers and movie-producers are now getting much more social mileage out of humanistic psychology than we humanistic psychologists are. They’ve learned to express humanistic ideas and feelings iconographically, for a mostly post-literate audience. For instance, wonder about which has more real, palpable, humanistic impact on more people’s lives: All of the combined output of all humanistic journals, say over the ten-year span from 1990 to 2000, or a single Robin Williams movie?

Living in the Interregnum
However, I suspect that there’s a far more fundamental reason why traditional humanistic psychology is having difficulty keeping pace with our world. The reason is that humanity itself is in the process of metamorphosis—via dynamics intimately bound up with our world’s technological character. I feel keenly that we are living in a kind of interregnum, a "jump time" as Jean Houston says, an exciting but disorienting transitional period between two paradigms. And I feel that the rules of the game are shifting so radically that our world is starting to call for a new kind of "humanity" altogether. In fact, I feel that we may well be passing beyond the outer rim of Homo Sapiens (loosely, humanity that knows) into what I’m calling Homo Ludens (humanity that plays).
What might this new form of "humanity," perhaps only now being born, start to look like? How might Homo Ludens, the future species beyond Homo Sapiens, live, feel, think, and breathe? Following Robert Romanyshyn, I suspect that one way of wondering about questions such as these is to trace the trajectory of technology’s dream—not only its pathologies, but its promise for future life. For instance, suppose that at some point in the future technology actually ends up making our lives easier (yeah, I know it’s a stretch)—so easy that we’re eventually liberated from economically based competition for material well-being. Suppose that we didn’t have to do anything in particular to have our material desires met (like in Star Trek, The Next Generation, for instance). What would we do? What would make life meaningful if we didn’t have to be productive to feel like we’re living well? Who would we be if our careers weren’t our first (or only) way of describing ourselves? What kind of lives would we lead at that point? And why?
On the surface, these questions seem idyllic. But I suspect that they also hold a hidden terror for most of us. As existentialists such as Kierke-gaard, Heidegger, and Sartre indicate, real freedom is, among other things, absolutely terrifying. And I sometimes suspect that it’s specifically the suppressed sensation of terror that perpetuates our world’s great paradox—that we build technology to liberate ourselves, only to find that we spend even more of our lives in its thrall. I sometimes suspect that we actually prefer to stay on that hamster-wheel of paradox rolling, rather than face the terrifying vision of freedom and change that technology also bears. In short, my own perception is that leisure—its meaning and the way we live it—is now becoming technology’s greatest challenge to humanity.

Overcoming the Terror of Leisure
So, how would we live if we could manage to face the challenge and terror of leisure? My own vision is that we would spend much more time cultivating a profound sense of play, as well as laughter and dance.
I’m envisioning Homo Ludens as being at once playful and profound. For instance, perhaps much of our lives would be spent learning new kinds of laughter—maybe eventually learning to laugh like the open skies. Well, why not? I imagine further that we would cultivate a much deeper sense for the erotic. Maybe our sense for the erotic would eventually grow so vast that it would slip past the confines of our sexuality, and spill into the whole of our lives. Perhaps for Homo Ludens, living would be mostly about making mad, delirious love—endlessly and boundlessly—with each other, with the universe, and with the pulse and cadence of life itself. I’m also envisioning Homo Ludens as poetic in nature. Maybe without the prod of necessity, we’d drop the habit of saying tedious things in dull ways, and ultimately learn to speak mostly in the wide and secret language of life. Maybe then we can even learn to live creatively—as though in each moment we were actually giving birth to something unique and irreplaceable. And finally, I’m envisioning Homo Ludens as being "spiritual." Without the "need" to compartmentalize church, work, and recreation, maybe most of our days would be filled with the feeling that our spirits are dancing with the entirety of existence.
At this point, all of this may seem too wild and unrealistic—that humanity and technology together may give birth to a new order of beings who are so profoundly playful, erotic, poetic, and spiritual that the word "human" as we know it no longer even applies. But is it so inconceivable? Is it beyond our compass to be midwives to a radically different order of humanity? I don’t think so, and technology can play a part. Does it offer us plenty of pain and koyaanisqatsi—"life out of balance," as the Hopi Native Americans describe it? Sure. But let’s not forget that technology opens new, untamed vistas for us; it offers us new joys and intoxications, and maybe ultimately new ways of being.

Humanistic Psychology’s Crossroads
In conclusion, it seems to me that humanistic psychology can play an extremely vital role in all of this. After all, what other form of self-understanding is bold enough, playful enough, transgressive enough, and creative enough to do the job? To me, the critical question for humanistic psychology in our technological age is this: Are we going to shrink back from the challenges (and opportunities) our technological world is offering us? Or are we going to embrace technology wholeheartedly—with an awareness of its shortcomings but an even greater sense for the charm of its possibilities? To put it another way, are we going to remain safely content within the humanistic project as we’ve known it, or are we willing to reinvent ourselves as midwives attending the birth of a bold and brilliant world? As for me, I’m setting a strong course for the center of the storm. "What better place than here? What better time than now?"

ERIC DODSON, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the State University of West Georgia, where he teaches courses in humanistic and existential psychologies, as well as an advanced graduate seminar in Technology and the Human Spirit (photo on page 2). Eric also holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in computer science and has worked as a systems analyst for General Electric.