Abstract
On three separate occasions this past week, I found myself walking past other pedestrians who navigated by smartphone without looking up for the sake of orientation or interaction. Missing out on eye contact is just one of many indicators of the new ubiquity of digital technologies across the landscape of our domestic lives. It is into this strange new world, pervaded by banal technological invasions, that Brent Waters offers his new book promising a recovery From Posthuman Back to Human. Waters’s work in Christian ethics covers both sides of the Atlantic: he is currently Professor of Christian Social Ethics at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Illinois, and he completed his DPhil at Oxford in 1999 under Oliver O’Donovan, on bioethics, specifically reproductive technologies. His work since then has expanded to include other issues at the interface of bioethics and technology, particularly trans-humanism.
This book is written as a sequel to Waters’s earlier volume on this subject, From Human to Posthuman: Christian Theology and Technology in a Postmodern World (Ashgate, 2006), and he notes at the outset that he writes this volume in order to correct two specific deficiencies in this earlier monograph. For the first, Waters notes (with reference to his argument in the 2006 book) that he had originally accepted that the pseudo-religious substructure upon which posthuman discourse rests is in its basic form futurist. The danger of fixing our analysis on ‘titillating and tantalizing future’ narratives is that they may distract our attention from analysis of technological imprint on ‘daily, mundane life’ which is where, as Waters argues, technology ‘works its greatest formative influence’ (p. 1). Alongside this emphasis on the everyday, Waters’s second corrective is to offer a more robust and constructive theological counter-narrative. On the basis of these two concerns, Waters deploys this study as a theological reflection on the philosophy of technology more broadly, and in this mode his book joins an important and growing canon of work in Christian ethics which includes Brian Brock’s recent Christian Ethics in a Technological Age (Eerdmans, 2010).
Waters structures the book in three parts, the first of which is devoted to an explication of several primary sources in the philosophy of technology: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Grant, Arendt, and Borgmann. In Part II, Waters provides the promised constructive theological reflection, and in Part III the author focuses in on three technologised contexts in ‘mundane life’, specifically (1) the personal, seen as those ‘modern nomads traversing the emerging technoculture’ (p. 191) via social media, (2) the political, seen particularly in terms of forms of narration and speech that disclose configurations of power, and (3) the public, which Waters offers as a mediating space between Arendt’s ‘private’ and ‘political’ spaces.
In Part I, Waters opens with an analysis of the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger in order to establish how the late-modern impulses of nihilism and historicism form the context for an ‘emerging technoculture’. He suggests that both thinkers ‘appeal to the power of the will to reorient the will to power’ (p. 105), and Waters appeals to their analysis in arguing that the privileging of ‘space, information, and exchange’ has resulted in a new technocultural nomadism (p. 187). Subsequent chapters offer a careful and charitable reading of Arendt, Grant and Borgmann. While a range of other studies have focused on the first two (alongside Heidegger), the German-American philosopher Albert Borgmann has been relatively ignored by modern Christian ethicists. (A quick scan of this journal, the Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, and the Journal of Religious Ethics reveals that his name is only mentioned twice in articles—by Michael Northcott and by Waters himself, both in this journal.) The analysis of Borgmann by Waters here reveals precisely why this is lamentable as he highlights Borgmann’s explication of the ‘device paradigm’, and the covertly theological concepts of ‘focal practices’ and ‘focal communities’ that Borgmann offers as a repair to the encroachment of the device paradigm. Each of the chapters in this section provides a robust synthesis of the philosophy of technology by the featured thinker, drawing on a wide range of primary sources for each. These chapters could provide useful free-standing material for use in teaching in a course on technological ethics or bioethics. Other reviewers may want to quibble with Waters for neglecting other major thinkers such as Jacques Ellul, Carl Mitcham and Lewis Mumford, but in my view such a criticism misses the point of Part I, which is to demonstrate how the theological underpinnings which lie beneath the reflection of each thinker (though more covertly in some cases than in others) are deficient in some way and in need of repair.
In seeking to address this issue in Part II of the book, Waters provides theological reflection which can overcome these gaps while attending to the critical questions raised by the thinkers explicated in Part I. These reflections work in the mode of modern practical theology, deploying what is generally straightforward systematic theological reflection towards modes of praxis, namely ‘confession’, ‘repentance’ and ‘desire’. Many readers of this journal will recognise the influence of Oliver O’Donovan’s work (which is acknowledged by Waters) across all the chapters in this section, such that these can be read as a summary of O’Donovan’s thought towards technological ethics. In general, the chapters in Part II form a highly coherent theological synthesis which serves Waters well in subsequent chapters, and they also effectively highlight the truncated nature of the pseudo-theological underpinnings of Arendt’s, Grant’s and Borgmann’s accounts.
In Part III, Waters turns to the ‘mundane’ context, which realizes the trajectory he set in earlier chapters, and here he deploys the analysis of modern technoculture and the proposed critique in light of the theology of the previous section. By now, Waters has transformed Grant’s critique into confession, augmented Arendt’s new politics with repentance and grace (resituated into the second natality of baptism), and sharpened Borgmann’s focal practices around a teleology which can reorder desire. Each of these in turn is brought to bear on issues concerning the internet, techno-politics, and economics. As Waters points out, his primary purpose in the book is to ‘help Christians selectively resist, engage, and reorient the direction of the emerging technoculture and the lives of its nomadic inhabitants’ (p. 243) and on this level, the book is convincing and well-executed. I should emphasise that, like most volumes within the philosophy/ethics of technology, the structure and purpose of the book are, on the whole, more theoretically oriented, leaving Waters’s recourse to practical reflection on technology quite brief and mostly limited to the final three chapters.
It is on the matter of these practical reflections that I find my one criticism of the book. As many of the thinkers surveyed, and Waters himself, suggest, technology is much more than just a series of objects—it is a disposition or way of being which is diffuse, encircling and inchoate; it is, as Waters calls it, a ‘technoculture’. For this reason, it can resist our efforts to grasp its significance and respond to its encroachment in a morally coherent fashion. While this has some significance for the ‘end-user’ that we write for, it also has great significance for the philosopher, theologian and ethicist as this slipperiness or elusiveness suggests that we should be particularly disciplined about our use of empirically gathered data in offering applied reflection on technology. It is a continuing problem for moral reflection that carefully theorised but empirically grounded study, which one finds in cultural anthropology and sociological studies of technology, has not been brought into engagement with the anecdotes and deductive imaginaries of philosophers and ethicists of technology. Waters offers a small but welcome exception to this general trend in his chapter on ‘The Translucent Self in an Age of Transparency’ by using the work of MIT social scientist Sherry Turkle to illuminate some of his ruminations on identity and digital media. However, elsewhere, Waters’s applied reflections can be idiosyncratic. This may be in part because, as he bravely confesses in a footnote on p. 164, ‘I do not blog, tweet, maintain a Facebook page, or otherwise participate in social media.’ I am not unsympathetic to the desire to undertake a partial boycott of social media (I myself also refuse on principle to participate in the Facebook walled garden) and believe such action can have a useful clarifying effect, like any practice of Christian asceticism. However, this blanket admission leaves this reader wondering why exactly Waters chose to focus the applied basis for a whole chapter on something with which he has (apparently) little observational experience. In trying to resist the temptation to demonise technology, and in reflecting on Turkle’s study in Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (Basic Books, 2011), Waters suggests that, ‘Theologically, to pursue a blanket condemnation and withdrawal is tantamount to writing off the emerging technoculture as irredeemable, a curious claim to make, to say the least, about God’s creation that Christians affirm (or should affirm) as good, despite its disfigurement by sin’ (p. 199). However, in between this and another relatively straightforward Augustinian suggestion (‘Christians … can persuade its [the technoculture’s] nomadic inhabitants to become pilgrims’, p. 199), Waters offers a surprisingly bland suggestion: ‘Practically, if Christians were to surrender their computers, smart phones, and other gadgets, it is difficult to imagine how they or the world would be any better off’ (p. 199). There are dozens of monograph-length studies exploring what happens when people live in special dis-engagement or engagement with technology and many of these have explicitly political and economic connotations. Towards chapter 10 with its focus on economics, Waters might have interacted with Julian Orr’s important book, Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job (Cornell University Press, 1996). Or for chapter 9, Paolo Gerbaudo’s fascinating study of the role of Twitter in the Arab Spring, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (Pluto Press, 2012), might have offered some interesting grist for the mill. I do not mean to belabour the point, but want to emphasize the degree to which there is a range of studies available which are germane to this kind of philosophical analysis. To be fair to Waters, the problem which I am highlighting here is not unique to this book. It represents a broader lacuna within the genre of Christian ethics. However, it is particularly important with moral reflection on something so close to us as technology to engage in more structured use of empirical analysis.
Overall, the arc of Waters’s argument is not undermined significantly by this brief and somewhat eccentric engagement with social media. In fact, setting aside these practical applications, his broader constructive argument is quite convincing, that is, that technoculture leaves a swath of placeless nomads with little sense of their role in contemporary politics or political speech. Further, Waters’s overall programme, which deploys an Augustinian and Christologically-rich political theology (filtered through the work of Oliver and Joan O’Donovan) towards the use of a range of Christian praxis, can repair the otherwise very useful work of philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, George Grant and Albert Borgmann. This seems to me just the right formula to offer Christians hoping to face the emerging technoculture and participate with care and bravery towards an enrichening of public identity and moral speech and a rehabilitation of place.