The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World

by Andy Crouch

More and more of human life will be consigned to environments that work better for machines, and for Mammon, than for persons—environments, like a modern warehouse, full not of gloriously transfigured persons exercising godlike powers but of diminished laborers trying to stay out of the way of boring robots.

This kind of technology leads to the creation of cultural goods that are less like a device and more like a tool. Rather than disengaging us from the world and thrusting us into the superpower zone, this branch of technology relies on the ingenuity we human beings have brought to our work and play in the world from the very beginning. Yet this kind of technology has degrees of complexity, precision, and power that outstrip any pretechnological tool. The best word for this kind of technology is instruments.

Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, in which Socrates retells the story of Thoth inventing writing and presenting his invention to King Thamus. Thamus acknowledges that Thoth has done something very clever and that his invention will seem to give human beings more capacities. But, Thamus observes, Thoth’s gift takes away capacities as well. (1) Now you’ll be able to write down stories and information, meaning (2) you’ll no longer have to remember them—true. But (3) you’ll no longer be able to exercise the human capacity for oral memory, and (4) now you’ll have to write something down in order to remember it.

We were promised a bicycle for the mind. I suggest we hold out for what he promised and not let go until we have it. We were not promised the disengagement and dullness of boring robots. We were not promised the addiction and anxiety of devices that tempt us with superpowers and leave us drained, that dangle hopes of satisfaction but leave us empty, that offer to recognize us but rob us of the face-to-face life for which we were made.

This is the one thing we need more than any other: a community of recognition. While we must always insist that every human being is a person whether or not they are seen or treated as one by others, we also know that no human being can flourish as a person unless they are seen and treated as one. And for that, the household is the first and best place.

To live in a household is to give up a great deal of autonomy and independence—the very things that make us desperately lonely but also the very things that we believe are our birthright as subjects of Mammon’s empire.

All of them had to be built at some point in the past, all of them have to be maintained in the present, and none of them can be taken for granted in the future. Indeed, we live in a time when many people no longer believe those canopies of trust exist at all, or ever existed in the first place—a time when many of them are being torn by suspicion and betrayal. The whole world rediscovered in 2020 how much our lives depend on being able to breathe the air around us without fear of infection. But trust is the oxygen of any healthy social world. We are all discovering how a failure of any of the canopies that cover our common life leaves us unable to breathe.