Engaging Technology as a Personalist

Editor’s Note: The following essay was originally written by Jim Allaire, founder of CatholicWorker.org, sometime in October 1995.

I count myself among that cadre of people who seek to lead a life committed to social justice and peacemaking as a requirement of my Christian faith. As a member of a Catholic Worker community, I am inspired by the gentle personalism of Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, and many Catholic Workers, past and present, who likewise have and are striving to build a new society within the shell of the old.

I am also someone who uses computer technology, seeing it as a tool for building that new society where justice and peace can flourish.

In a recent Sojourners article, Bob Sabath, one of the founding members of the Sojourners community, tells of receiving blank stares, muffled laughter, or outright hostility when he spoke of integrating computer technology and social change. He capsulates the naysayers’ response as:

“Computers are technological toys of the white, male, educated, privileged class that complicate our lives, feed our addictions, destroy real community, and increase the pace of our already too hectic lives. And history shows that all of these new technologies inevitably promise more than they can ever deliver and ultimately do more harm than good” (Sept/Oct 1995, p. 10).

Like Bob Sabath, I too have experienced disdain for my positions on incorporating computer technology into the community of which I am a part, the Catholic Worker Movement. Many Catholic Workers might readily agree with the naysayers’ sentiments characterized above and then go on to add, “And furthermore, computer technology is at the heart of the warmaking machine, impersonal government bureaucracy, and blatant economic exploitation by transnational corporations. Computer technology has accelerated the alienation of the worker and the loss of dignity of manual labor. Certainly Peter Maurin, one of our founders, would not have endorsed computers!”

Catholic Worker Tradition

If this were a face-to-face dialogue instead of a printed page, I would first respond: “It’s interesting that you should mention Peter Maurin.” Consider this essay the rest of what I would go on to say.

Dorothy Day repeatedly said that Peter Maurin started the Catholic Worker Movement because he was the person who came to her with the idea for The Catholic Worker newspaper. When Peter Maurin found Dorothy Day in 1932 he was already passionate about communicating his vision for transforming society. Peter would go to New York’s Union Square, which was a center of social ferment, dialogue, and labor organizing in that era, and talk to anyone who would listen to his ideas.

Dorothy Day was a journalist whose fervent prayer was to use her talents to serve the poor. On May 1, 1933, they distributed the first issue of The Catholic Worker in Union Square. As Union Square was in the 1930s, so today the World Wide Web of the Internet is the commons, the street, where the hawking of ideas increasingly takes place. The distinctive Catholic Worker message of the primacy of the spiritual, nonviolence, voluntary poverty, hospitality, and community belongs on the Internet.

Is our passion for peace and justice joined to a passion to communicate similar to that found in Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day?

There is a little-known episode in Catholic Worker history that bears retelling in the present context. In May of 1934, The Daily Catholic Worker appeared, a one-page mimeographed sheet. The purpose of the daily was to supplement the monthly tabloid by commenting on the news of the day, and it included a short “easy essay” by Peter. This experiment in publishing a daily sheet lasted only a month, probably because the tasks of hospitality took precedence or there was a lack of funds.

The May 1934 Catholic Worker has a short article about the project, likely written by Dorothy Day, with the headline “MIMEOGRAPH MACHINES URGED BY P. MAURIN FOR EVERY PARISH.” The article recounts instances of priests around the country who distributed mimeographed sheets after Sunday services to propagate Catholic social thought. The author of the article writes:

“As for us, we look on our mimeograph machine with great pride and affection. . . . Peter Maurin is going around urging pastors to buy them” (Catholic Worker, May 1934, p. 5).

I am simply amazed by this little experiment in communication and the willingness to use a printing technology of that era. To urge the use of the mimeograph at the local Church level was an innovative idea at the time. I suggest that a personal computer connected to the Internet is analogous to the mimeograph machine of sixty years ago.

The Personalist Philosophy of Emmanuel Mounier

Even though anecdote and analogy are interesting ways to argue for engaging technology, as a personalist, they are not sufficient if the objections listed at the beginning of this essay are to be honored.

Peter Maurin’s example also points us in a more conceptual direction, one that can serve as a general framework for responding to objections to modern technology. Peter Maurin was a lifelong student and an agitator of ideas. One philosophical approach that he brought to the Catholic Worker Movement was that of personalism, chiefly represented in the thought of the French thinker Emmanuel Mounier.

It was through Peter’s initiative that many of Mounier’s works were translated and published in America. When I discovered that Mounier had addressed the problem of modern technology, I was eager to learn what he said, encouraged by Peter and Dorothy’s deep appreciation of his thought.

In 1947 Mounier addressed a sociological conference in Paris on the psychosociological origins of the reaction against technics (a talk published in translation as “The Case Against the Machine” in Be Not Afraid, Rockcliff Publishing Corporation, 1951). The title of the talk suggests that Mounier may be totally against technology, and at times his presentation of the arguments against technics and machines are so convincing that the reader feels that they cannot be countered.

But Mounier takes a measured approach, and for each set of reactions against technology that he discusses, he presents a counter argument based on personalist principles. Mounier’s challenge to us is to reflect on these principles, and then use them to clarify our specific concerns about technology.

Powers of Domination

First of all, Mounier does not see the central problem residing in the objects of technology themselves, the machines or devices—in our era, for example, such things as lasers, rockets, industrial robots, or computers. The abuses brought about by machines through industrialization, mechanized labor, and today, globalization of the economy, are the result of “the directives imposed on the machine from outside by the dominant economic regime” (p. 32).

When we react to the misuses of technology and machines our energy should be directed against the source of the misuse, the powers of domination, not toward the machines themselves. It may turn out that the best tool of choice for resisting the abuses of “economic globalization”—the contemporary code word for multiple abuses today— is modern computer technology.

Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello in Global Village or Global Pillage (South End Press, 1994) create just such a scenario. Their vision is vintage Catholic Worker, built on “mutual aid and strategic alliances,” with collective action for the common good made possible by today’s computer tools.

War Making

Probably the most serious reaction against technics and the machine involves its relationship to war. Mounier writes:

“The memory of the espousals of war and the machine is still vivid in the people and the terror they feel as each fresh progress of the machine is linked to recollection of this liaison” (p. 39).

To associate oneself with technology can create a visceral repulsion, almost as if one were touching the very tools of death. Mounier struggles with this issue and can only muster this argument—that military techniques have had beneficent peaceful uses. In our time, for example, lasers that guide bombs are also used in life-saving surgery; radar that can guide pilots to their targets also alerts civilian aircraft to dangerous wind shear or warn a town of impending threatening weather.

I and most pacifists find this response inadequate. The same principle of separation—separating technology’s effects from the powers that misuse it—can apply in this context. Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, in his conferences on Christian nonviolence, is fond of repeating the words, “A bomb is no more lethal than a broomstick without the will to kill.” This is the response we are called to—resist the will to kill, and make every nonviolent effort possible to resist warmaking policy and the making of the bombs themselves.

Just as we can separate the positive uses of machines from their misuse by dominant economic forces, we need not maintain an absolute association between technics and warmaking. It is even possible that our technological inventiveness may yet find ways to prevent war or make it obsolete.

God-given Creativity

Mounier has great faith in the God-given creativity of human beings and sees our essential nature as that of “a maker of things” (p. 47). Humanity is on a grand adventure “in order to erect the anthroposphere through his intelligence and his machines” (p. 49). The “anthroposphere” is that sphere where humanity—spirit and matter united—enters as a positive life force into the Earth.

So far our intelligence has produced only the “first young shoots.” Technics and machines should not be rejected out of hand, according to Mounier. The mess that we find ourselves in—economics, ecology, wars—will require that we turn our minds and our essential inventiveness loose and not constrain it further. Our technical inventiveness is a life force within nature that can be destructive, but that can also be restorative.

An example of this today is the work of Wes Jackson and The Land Institute in Kansas, which is using the tools of modern science to study, build, and restore native prairies. Satellite technology allows us to peer down on our planet and see a depleting ozone layer and ocean pollution so that we can correct our abuses.

The Human Person

Although it isn’t overtly stated in the objections characterized at the top of this essay, the issue of human freedom is just below the surface. In our collective contemporary psyche lies a fear that technology will banish our fundamental dignity, our human freedom.

As Mounier describes the reactions to this threat:

“Thus from whatever angle we see it, the machine seems to be inhuman. … On every side we see that the first world of the machine produces a cruel distortion of personal life and a pulverization of freedom.” (pp. 60–61)

Mounier’s answer to this fear is straightforward: engagement with technology must proceed; we cannot become “mollusks wedged into the corner of a rock” (p. 63).

Over and over again humanity is tempted to retreat, to go inside and hide from the fears of the world. We see that in individual lives and in our collective behavior. We see it in the behavior of nations and in the Church. (Is fundamentalism just such an attempt to hide?)

Against the tendency of withdrawal, individualism, and egoism, “technical activity, like work, is a weapon against narcissism. For that alone humanism should be grateful” (p. 63). For Mounier, narcissism is the extremely self-absorbed tendency of modern times; narcissism is the opposite of engagement, the essential imperative of personalism.

Engagement is living in one’s time, blending existential joy and tragic tension, acting to influence history, and continuing the analysis and redirection of our Spirit-given energies when necessary.

Conclusion

I experience in my life that engagement with technology is a possibility and a reality. I hear the objections of others and take them seriously, and sometimes my own vertigo tempts me to capitulate completely and get rid of my computer. But it is also in my nature not to despair and turn away from engagement.

Underlying Mounier’s thought is Christian hope, not optimism or pessimism. Hope is a sense of the solid possibility that good can prevail because we partake of the Spirit in Christ. We will not be saved by our machines, nor will we be damned by them.

“But stupidity lies, not in the machine but in those who have asked it for what it cannot give, and are naive enough to expect the machine to be a substitute for virtue” (p. 35).

Discernment must continue regarding engaging technology, with thoughtful and prayerful reflection in search of what points toward the realization of the Reign of God versus what merely indicates the progress of culture.

I agree with Mounier’s conclusion:

“Our generation has the hardest task: that of hoping and willing against the stream, without any immediate expectations. But we have first of all to de-mystify the problems and exorcise the follies created by our fears” (p. 64).

“Fear is useless” Jesus tells his disciples during the storm on the lake (Mark 4:35–41). It is through our engagement with this world, including technology, that our fears are overcome.

As personalists, in the tradition of Emmanuel Mounier, we cannot suppress authentic God-given energies and fruits of the creative Spirit.

Completed about 10/1995.