I am a Luddite ... and it is ok

I often blog here worrying about technological changes, even though I make use of various modern technological offerings.  Yet, at work--when it comes to teaching--I am one of those who even complain that most faculty continue to operate as if we are in some dark ages before the internet.  If you have paid attention to my posts, then you would have understood that I am not opposed to technology itself.  My worry is about how we are not pausing to take stock of how technology and our eager embrace of all things new is rapidly changing the understanding of what it means to be human.

Threading that proverbial needle is difficult.  Most people can't quite seem to understand why I would constantly harp on this issue.  I do that not because of the technology worries but because most people do not seem to consider what it is to be human and how the changes are affecting that understanding.

Today, I get more support for my position in this essay:

Humanity has had such a particular and privileged conception of itself for so long that altering it, as technology must inevitably do, will indeed change the very nature of who we are.

My point, right?

That essay provides a quote that I had no idea about; a quote from an old hero of mine, Leon Trotsky, (whom I ditched a long, long time ago:

To produce a new, “improved version” of man—that is the future task of Communism. Man must see himself as a raw material, or at best as a semi-manufactured product, and say: “At last, my dear homo sapiens, I will work on you.”

Humans as "raw material" is why I hate the modern usage of "Human Resources" in any corporate structure.  I way prefer the old usage of "Personnel."  We humans are not a resource, dammit.  (Though, I did like the way Julian Simon used it when he referred to humans as the Ultimate Resource.)

While contemporary Luddism fixates on the evils of technology, it’s not driven by the threat of technology supplanting or replacing humanity. Rather, Trotsky’s quote reminds us of the possibility that we will come to see ourselves as no different from machines. Technology doesn’t dehumanize us; it’s the knowledge behind it that does. Fighting the machine, then, is fighting a vision of the future in which the human is the machine.

Exactly.  This is what I, too, have been writing about for a long time.

Luddism is not nostalgia for the past.

Again, exactly what I write here and tell students too.  There was a lot more bad than good in the so-called good old days.

For the thinking Luddite, technology becomes a serious threat only to the extent that it threatens to collapse the boundary between human and machine. I think it very unlikely that this boundary will collapse in practice any time soon, despite the predictions of the transhumanists who cheer on the Singularity. These Luddite fears, however, are going to inform every step that we take toward “improving” the human.

 You see why I am all the more at ease in worrying about how technology is altering our understanding of what it means to be human, and how the pace of technological changes might not even give us enough time to process the changes?

A race to find that technology that will deliver the ultimate happiness is not for me

In a conversation a few years ago, I spontaneously described myself as a neo-traditionalist in my profession.  Whether or not the rest paid any attention to that descriptor, I loved it.  The more I thought about it, the more I felt that I am a neo-traditionalist not merely in my profession but in other walks of life too.

My relationship to technology is a wonderful piece of evidence.  I like to use the tools and the gadgets that help me pursue an enhanced and "easier" traditional life.  Technology in the classroom in order to make the thinking process a lot more informed and exciting, but not to replace the old Socratic approach.  The nonstick pan and the microwave and semi-processed food help me take a shortcut to healthy and tasty variations of old food habits.  And I often I blog expressing my angst that technology is ruining life.

The unease with, and distrust of, technology for the sake of technology, while overlooking the important question of what it means to be human, means that this neo-traditionalist is also a neo-Luddite.

Neo-Luddism began to emerge in the postwar period. First, the power of nuclear weapons made it clear to everybody that our machines could now put everybody out of work for ever by the simple expedient of killing them and, second, in the 1980s and 1990s it became apparent that new computer technologies had the power to change our lives completely.
Thomas Pynchon, in a brilliant essay for the New York Times in 1984 – he noted the resonance of the year – responded to the first new threat and, through literature, revitalised the idea of the machine as enemy. “So, in the science fiction of the Atomic Age and the cold war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny the machine taking a different direction. The hardware angle got de-emphasised in favour of more humanistic concerns – exotic cultural evolutions and social scenarios, paradoxes and games with space/time, wild philosophical questions – most of it sharing, as the critical literature has amply discussed, a definition of ‘human’ as particularly distinguished from ‘machine’.”
In 1992, Neil Postman, in his book Technopoly, rehabilitated the Luddites in response to the threat from computers: “The term ‘Luddite’ has come to mean an almost childish and certainly naive opposition to technology. But the historical Luddites were neither childish nor naive. They were people trying desperately to preserve whatever rights, privileges, laws and customs had given them justice in the older world-view.”

Like the author of that essay, I too worry even more about the effects of technology when experts in the field, like Jaron Lanier, strongly caution against the direction in which we are headed.   Like in this post, in which I quoted Lanier's disappointment and frustration:

I'm disappointed with the way the Internet has gone in the past ten years" ... "I've aways felt that he human-centered approach to computer science leads to more interesting, more exotic, more wild, and more heroic adventures than the machine-supremacy approach, where information is the highest goal.

The skepticism is ultimately because I am convinced that it is an erroneous link to happiness that the consuming people make when they enthusiastically adopt the latest gadgetry.  Gadgets don't make people truly happy.  The happiness from owning an iPhone4 quickly goes away when one eyes the iPhone5.  Happiness comes from within.  

Thousands of years ago Buddhist monks reached the surprising conclusion that pursuing pleasant sensations is in fact the root of suffering, and that happiness lies in the opposite direction. Pleasant sensations are just ephemeral and meaningless vibrations. If five minutes ago I felt joyful or peaceful, that feeling is now gone, and I may well feel angry or bored. If I identify happiness with pleasant sensations, and crave to experience more and more of them, I have no choice but constantly to pursue them, and even if I get them, they immediately disappear, and I have to start all over again. This pursuit brings no lasting achievement. On the contrary: the more I crave these pleasant sensations, the more stressed and dissatisfied I become. However, if I learn to see my sensations for what they really are – ephemeral and meaningless vibrations – I lose interest in pursuing them, and can be content with whatever I experience. For what is the point of running after something that disappears as fast as it arises? For Buddhism, then, happiness isn't pleasant sensations, but rather the wisdom, serenity and freedom that come from understanding our true nature.

Maybe I need to update my descriptor.  I am not merely a neo-traditionalist, I am a neo-traditionalistic neo-Luddite.  Like anybody cares about all these self-descriptions ;)