Professor ponders tech-driven mediocre morality_102003

Posted: 10/17/03

Professor ponders tech-driven mediocre morality

By Jeffrey MacDonald

Religion News Service

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (RNS)–Quentin Schultze has a problem with personal technology. It's just not the problem many critics think he has.

After writing “Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously in the Information Age,” this Calvin College professor finds himself fending off barbs from those who say he resists progress. But resisting progress, he says, is not his goal.

Instead, Schultze aims to warn users of new technologies that, if unchecked, technology will subtly lead people to adopt a morality of mediocrity. New gadgets from e-mail to cellular phones promise convenience and power above all else, he argues. So unless human beings make a point to cultivate such higher virtues as loving, self-restraining and truth-telling, they will come to adopt the low-level ethics of their machines.

Quentin Schultze

“We have to make sure the values of efficiency and control are not the predominant values in our lives,” Schultze said. “Other values come first.”

Schultze makes his case in a 209-page book that Publishers Weekly calls a “clear-eyed critique,” despite its “didactic tone.” Through chapters on “Identifying Our Techno-Moral Crisis” and “Moderating Our Informational Desires,” Schultze provides a guide for navigating the many temptations of the Information Age while developing strong moral character against the odds.

At the heart of Schultze's case lies an assumption that “no medium is neutral,” but instead each cultivates particular habits among its users.

Instant messaging, for example, places a premium on the immediate gratification of receiving text without any wait. Although convenience and speed are good things, Schultze argues, they are not more important than a thoughtful analysis that makes an instant message worth reading. But this insight, he fears, gets easily lost in the daily frenzy to gather information at an ever-faster rate.

“From the perspective of cyberculture, listening is inefficient, old-fashioned and impotent,” Schultze writes. “Yet listening, like non-violent social protest that seems to lack any action, can morally revitalize us, build community and promote social justice as well as personal responsibility.”

For all his poignant observations, however, Schultze is hardly getting an ovation in high-tech circles as a prophet whose time is overdue.

“Anyone who talks like that is automatically branded a Luddite or the next” Unabomber, said Rodney Brown, managing editor of a journal covering the high-tech industry in New England. “The average person isn't going to start criticizing the convenience that new technology brings.”

Even one of Schultze's most generalized points–“technology is not a panacea for society's social ills”–has been contested in a setting that caters to young users of personal computers: Wired Magazine.

“The idea that technology is not a panacea, and shouldn't be looked at that way, is misguided at best,” said Adam Fisher, senior editor of Wired. “In a lot of ways, technology is a panacea. There are technological solutions to many of our society's problems.”

Two examples, from Fisher: DNA testing can determine guilt or innocence in a rape case, and video surveillance can provide security that was heretofore impossible to achieve. He notes that video cameras raise new concerns about privacy but adds that technologies tend to solve more problems than they create.

Schultze is not the first author to take aim at the potentially illusory promises of high technology, yet he brings a perspective seldom heard in the public critique. He approaches the subject as a Christian scholar who sees human beings as “stewards of the God-created world,” where it's better to “obey God rather than play God.” Such an overtly religious viewpoint has seldom been heard in public conversations around technology and changing lifestyles.

“My ideas are not completely original,” Schultze confesses on his website (www.calvin.edu/ ~schu/). “Most of them are rediscoveries of ancient truths found in the Hebrew and Christian traditions.”

For all his reliance on the thought of St. Augustine and other theologians of the ancient world, Schultze has no interest in avoiding new technologies. In addition to maintaining a slick website, he considers himself an “avid” surfer of the Internet.

Calvin College professor Quentin Schultze worries that rapid technological advances will lead to a morality of mediocrity as more emphasis falls on efficiency and control rather than higher virtues such as love, restraint and truth-telling.