As information technology accelerates and people spend increasingly large chunks of their lives online and in virtual spaces, it's natural that deep elements of their personalities – their yearnings, anxieties, and imaginations – be affected.
San Francisco author Erik Davis' new book, TechGnosis (Harmony Books, 1998), explores the fertile ground of information technology as it collides with the age-old human pastimes – spiritual pursuit and mythic wondering. It is a lively treatise on the constant tension that religion and technology exert on each other, and a poignant challenge to those who think the history of science can be fully understood as a linear, rational series of events.
"It's not like this is the true story and the mainstream story isn't true. It's really about how you frame the picture," says Davis, speaking in a San Francisco café. "If you believe, as I do, that you can't talk about technology outside a cultural context, then it becomes necessary to widen your framework and ask what are the more unconscious things in a culture that are going on in any sort of scientific or technological milieu."
Davis argues that the religious and spiritual imagination can never be separated from the technologies that exist contemporaneously. And he makes a good case that many of those with minds active in one area are equally inspired in the other.
To approach today's curious electronic situation, TechGnosis takes readers on a rambunctious journey starting in the ancient world, showing how some ancient Greeks and Jews, revved up from their powerful alphabetic technologies, created spiritual systems that lit fires under Renaissance inventors.
Traveling from the Renaissance to modernity, Davis tells how inventors often intended their creations to answer eons-old questions, and how, when a particular technology didn't live up to its utopian promises, believers discovered a whole new set of questions. Much of the book's interest stems from Davis' gift for interpreting age-old issues in a modern light. He uses vocabulary taken straight from cyber-boosters and techno PR agents to explain the ancient and the esoteric. Although obviously forcing some issues, it's a trick that the author has mastered. For example, Davis describes the alphabet as an information technology, "one that pushed the writing machine's envelope."
Fun and games aside, Davis shows how common drives embedded in the human psyche propel quests for spiritual understanding and mechanical invention alike.
It is, Davis says, "precisely because we're alienated to some degree from nature that we attempt to control it, and refashion some world where we are not so alienated or where the things in nature that cause us suffering are overcome." Technology, Davis says, has helped us refashion the world.
As people throughout history ask the same existential questions, and try again and again to answer them with technology, Davis sees the notion of progress eroding. In his view, people who think information technology is going to save civilization are just as mistaken as those who thought the printing press would.
"On a social level or on the level of the psyche even, information technology has become the last holdout, the Alamo of progress," he says. "Even though we look at the machineries of war and pollution and the material plane and it's pretty hard to have a utopian technological idea, in the level of mind and communication we're still able to maintain this faith that more information is going to make the world a better place."
Unless, of course, we fear it isn't. Along with the brighter side of creating technologies, Davis spends a lot of time thinking about the increasingly common belief that humanity is heading – either because of technology or in spite of it – straight to disaster.
Rather than dismissing that fear, Davis believes that the urge to apocalyptic expression is a strong wake-up call for a deeply changing world, cracking through the idea of business as usual.
"There are massive changes occurring," he says. "Apocalyptic feelings are kind of like a dream text into a much larger cultural mutation that's going on.
"The infrastructure is mutating at an extraordinary velocity, out of anyone's hands. No CEO, no genetic engineer has even the foggiest idea of the scale and enormity of these changes – and yet still we are these humans going through our lives, with our children, and all our human narratives. There's an extraordinary disjunct there that's growing."
Davis explains that many of our culture's current fears come from "the impossibility of integrating the ways that we are meek human beings with human emotions... with our lives as information beings or as points of information and light in this immense lattice of communication, goods, and finances."
