The Peril and Promise of Technology

Exploring the ambivalence we feel toward technological advance.

Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.

Key points

• We often use technology as a means of distracting us from the deeper questions about the human condition.
• And yet, the very thing that distracts and distorts has the potential to open new modes of existence.
• This conflict leaves us feeling deeply ambivalent toward the technologies we create.
• Such ambivalence reminds us that with every step forward, we take a step back and we only gain by giving up.

“‘Look you here,’ Sancho retorted, ‘those over there aren’t giants, they’re windmills, and what look to you like arms are the sails – when the wind turns them they make the millstones go round.’”

~ Cervantes, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha

Don Quixote is perhaps best remembered for his misadventure with the windmills. Even those who have not read Cervantes’ madcap novel — about a man so enamored with the books he reads that he imagines himself a knight-errant traveling the Spanish countryside and righting wrongs with his lance — are likely to recall the iconic scene in which Quixote sets himself against a horde of wind-powered “giants” and, naturally, hilarity ensues. The humor, of course, resides in the fact that Quixote is so swept up in his fancies that no amount of rational argumentation can dissuade him from his quest. He doesn’t just imagine himself a knight. He is one. And all evidence to the contrary is scornfully eschewed.

This, at least, is the traditional reading of the text: Quixote is mad, his ideas are nonsensical, his adventure a farce, and those around him must either placate him in his psychosis or risk falling victim to his delusional antics.

Yet as one makes one’s way through the novel, one can’t help but to notice that Quixote’s apparent folly is actually quite perceptive. When, for instance, he treats a pair of “ladies of easy virtue” as if they were “two beautiful maiden,” is he touched or does he simply appear to be so to a world that would degrade them by treating them as “dissolute wenches”? When he looses a gang of prisoners from their bondage — in spite of the fact that he knows they are convicted criminals — has he lost sight of reality or is he perhaps seeing it more clearly than ever, insisting as he does that “the knight’s sole responsibility is to succour them as people in need, having eyes only for their sufferings, not for their misdeeds”? And when he fears that man’s technological advance has produced “monstrous giants” rather than complicated machines for grinding up grain, is he raving like a loon or might he be giving voice to our own anxieties about the tools we create?

The 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger concludes his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” with a quotation from the poet Friedrich Hölderlin: “where the danger is, grows the saving power also.” Like Quixote with his windmills, Heidegger recognizes the monstrous side of technology — the ways in which the devices we make distance us from the world and from one another. Our ever-expanding technological capabilities, he suggests, pose one of the greatest threats to human existence. For Heidegger, we often use technology as a means of distracting us from our anxiety, preventing us from asking deeper questions about the human condition and thus concealing from ourselves essential aspects of our own nature.

And yet, the danger of technology is always bound up with its “saving power.” The very thing that distracts and distorts has the potential to open new modes of existence, enabling us to live lives more fully human, more fully engaged.

The deeply ambivalent nature of our feelings toward technology — experiencing advance as neither good nor bad, but always both — is perhaps best captured in an example from a remoter time, a time when our forebearers had to contend with the advent of technologies we now consider commonplace. In the Plato’s Phaedrus, for example, Socrates expresses some reservations about his neighbors' newfound reliance on the written word. Books, he suggests, seem to be tools invented to improve memory and make us wise. And yet, literacy has the potential to “introduce forgetfulness into the souls of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own.”

For Plato, memorization was an essential aspect of education and the invention of the written word threatened to undermine it. His point, of course, was made in writing, and we only remember it today – nearly 2,500 years later – because that piece of technology (the book) has preserved it for us. Still, his observation is an important one: with every step forward, we take a step back and we only gain by giving something up.

Emerson has a similar realization in his great essay “Self-Reliance,” where he bemoans the deadening effect of technology on our more innate virtues:

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of muscle. He has a fine Geneva watch, but he fails of the skill to tell the hour by the sun… The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit… and it may be a question whether machinery does not encumber.

That our machinery does encumber is not really a question. Nor is it a question that it enhances our lives. But the ambivalence we feel toward it leads to the very discontent Freud so rightly identified in his loving critique of civilized life.

It is the same discontent that inspires the Quixotes of the world to dive headlong into works of fiction searching for adventure; the same discontent that led Heidegger to seek solace in the poetry of Hölderlin; the same discontent, perhaps, that leaves us today yearning for an art form or an artist worthy of our attention.