beyond one word metaphors, the middle-ground position, saying it depends and other oversimplified counsel

This is Part II and Part III of a post series called "Living responsibly and gracefully with technology"

In class last week, Jenna McWilliams, remarked that the technologists and anti-technologists approach to school reform is not fundamentally opposed. This is a bold idea, considering that technologists and anti-technologists frequently view themselves as opposed to one another, and indeed, even define their positions in terms of opposition to other. At a practical level, this opposition is even more palpable: one group proposes to do away with the school system replacing it with online courses, while the other group proposes to do away with technology to have classrooms without computers, instant messaging, online forums, powerpoint presentations, and the like. But Jenna’s insight strikes through all of these differences to demonstrate that at a fundamental level these two polarized sides believe in the same common goal, and are motivated by the same desire: to support education. They share the same value of education, but where they disagree is what best supports or contributes to education. Some think technologies hold promise, others do not. Some think the school system is a good idea for education, others think it is destructive.

What amazed me by Jenna’s insight is that instead of moving between the extremes to a middle-ground she moved underneath both extremes to find their common ground. And, quite curiously, from the vantage point of the common ground where the driving question is “what best supports education,” the middle-ground appears insufficient: what best supports education is half-technology half-non-technology, or some compromise between the two? Or would the middle-ground position be the neutral tool metaphor, that technology can be used for good or bad educative purposes? I am now beginning to wonder what the middle-ground position even means. From underneath, it is the same as both extreme positions, it is a desire for supporting education, but rather than believing technology is the best way to support education, or the worst way to support education, it believes that technology is a so-so way to save education? Or a sometimes good way and sometimes bad way to support education? From the adiaphora perspective (see part 1), education is an aim outside of our control, and whether technology supports it or not is partly a matter of chance, partly a matter of how responsibly we employ or keep away technologies from the classroom. The best approach to supporting education, then, is not adding or subtracting technology to the classroom, but by taking responsibility for the addition or removal of technology, acknowledging that part of this responsibility is acknowledging that technology (or a lack of) in of itself is not enough to guarantee education. This is substantially different than just taking a middle-ground position which deems the issue a functional calculus between how much or how little technology is advisable to use to reform education. Instead it goes underneath the positions, and goes beyond the debate of how much technology will best support education. It brings into the foreground the issue of responsibility and the realities of chance when it comes to whether educational reforms ultimately work or not.

Thinking about the middle-ground position now, as applied to our earlier contexts, of the technocratic dream fallacies and the technology metaphors/perspectives, also renders the middle-ground rather inadequate. Take for instance, the idea that technology is a deterministic force contrasted to technology as a neutral tool. These are two extremes, and it may seem intuitively advisable to take a middle-ground approach. But instead, if we go underneath the two, we see that both share a common ground, both provide mischaracterizations of technology, ascribing qualities to technology (determinism, neutralism) that it does not actually have. And what would it mean to take a middle-ground position between two fallacies? To see technology as both neutral and determining, as partly neutral and partly determining? The middle-ground would be just as fallacious as the extremes, perhaps because from the common ground perspective, we grasp how the middle-ground still shares the same root system of these concepts, the same erroneous characterization of technology.

Or what if we were to take a middle-ground approach to dealing with the metaphors of technology, instead of asking what we can gleam from thinking of technology as tool, or as text, or as adiaphora, if we somehow tried to finagle some middle position? What do we do when we have three truths, and try to situate ourselves somewhere in between two or three of them? Why not take the common ground approach and see what binds these perspectives together, and why each is valuable for their common project – characterizing technology.

Thus Jenna has left me with the following advice: when faced with extreme positions, or even just contrasting perspectives, it is instructive to move underneath them all finding their common ground, and then seek after a solution that keeps this common ground in mind.

Part III

Last semester, I read a book about technology and the handicapped called Devices for the Soul, that (I now realize) also took the common ground approach when comparing technologists with naturalists (and environmentalists). By taking the common ground approach the author, Steven Talbott, was able to clarify a striking similarity between many technologists and naturalists. Despite their differences – technologists envisioning the liberating effects of technologies that will help the blind see, the deaf hear, and in general the disabled be more ‘able’, and the romantic naturalists calling for a return to nature to get back to our roots and senses, and away from the dysfunctions of technologically mediated society – the technologists and naturalists are both alike in that they want human beings to be fully functioning, they just disagree about what best supports that. Further still, according to Talbott, both positions deem human beings to be incomplete and not whole. They disagree about what gives us completion or wholeness (again through the addition or subtraction of technology). Talbott goes deeper and asks what is it that makes people whole, in a honest and thoughtful chapter titled, “Can technology make the handicapped whole?” His argument is that we are already whole – in that we are capable of love. If we do not define completeness in terms of functionality of the physical senses (sight, sound, etc), but examine how we are constituted by the ability to love then we are already ‘complete’ in a very important sense. Similarly, the Stoics started from the assumption that human beings are complete – we are born with reason and rationality, or as I like to say we are born with the capacity for responsibility and gratitude. No amount of adding or subtracting technology can change that. Just as no amount of adding or subtracting technology can make us more or less whole, more or less constituted by our capacity for love.

From the common ground perspective then it seems as if a division were to be made it would be not between technologists and naturalists, but between technologists who assume we are already complete and technologists who assume we are not complete, and added to these naturalists who assume we are already complete and naturalists who assume we are not complete. Those who assume we are not complete would debate over whether technology supports this completion. And those who assume that we are already complete, I am not sure what they would debate about, if anything. Perhaps they wouldn’t even be technologists and naturalists in a sense, just people who don’t have a driving need to label themselves one way or the other or to find polarized oppositions to define themselves in contrast to. Or maybe they would feel themselves divided over against those who believe that human beings are fundamentally incomplete. And then I wonder if there is some common ground similarity between these two views or if it just stops at a faith assumption. You cannot falsify the meaning of love as completeness, or the idea that humans are complete or incomplete, thus it rests on an assumption taken for faith. You either have faith that we are not inherently complete and are in need of technology or nature to culminate our completeness (or in despair because you believe nothing is adequate to the task), or you have faith that humans are already complete by virtue of their ability to love, reason, live responsibly, and gracefully. Sure these things need cultivation and to be lived out and valued in practice, but the fact that we already have some kernel of them with which to cultivate is the crucial piece in the puzzle of our completeness, that all the other pieces hang on.

Wherever there are faith assumptions there are usually myths or stories, parables or proverbs, that in some way characterize the truth or the implications of the faith assumption, making it seem real and prevalent. It would be interesting to analyze the different myths and stories people tell themselves from either side of this faith assumption split. We might have the incompleteness myths on one side, those all-too American stories of students competing for the highest grades, business men competing for the largest houses, individuals competing for opportunities to make themselves prosperous, adolescents competing to be the most popular, intellectualists contending to be the most admired and revered, lovers competing for the affection of others, and so forth and so forth. Only with the approval that comes from high grades, nice homes, wealthy fortunes, popular friends, esteemed reputations, and the right mate, do we tell ourselves that we will be completed. That we’re just one job away, one opportunity away, one perfect woman away from feeling complete and whole. On the other side of the faith assumption we would tell ourselves stories about how we were given over completely by the world, and are on borrowed time, to live as well as we can before we give ourselves back over. To appreciate those that we encounter for they are whole beings as well, and if we cultivate our relations with each other we may begin to sense this wholeness more deeply and completely.