Humans > Humanity

My wife will often chide me for lagging behind with technological advancements. Our local movie theater did away with humans behind the glass in favor of self-serve kiosks, which, she noted with amusement, threw me off for weeks. Most of the supermarkets and larger retail shops near us have allocated more lines for self-checkout, and I rarely use them because I don’t want to weigh out my own bananas. If anything requires an app or login to use, I’ll take a pass unless it’s absolutely necessary, and I still like having a couple hundred dollars of cold dirty cash in my wallet “just in case.”

But having just finished reading Christine Rosen’s recently published book, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, I found myself encouraged that I’m not the only one with this kind of reticence toward the promised goods of things like social media, smartphones, and AI. I’m hardly a Luddite, but in her book Rosen (a fellow Gen Xer) brings to light many of the unrealized costs of the technologies that we take for granted, and it is clear she values the phenomenological question of what it means to be human. Things like handwriting, the ability to wait or be bored, making eye contact, and having direct (versus mediated) experiences are things I had always taken for granted as someone who grew up before the internet and smartphones. But these things are no longer ubiquitous for Millennials, Gen Zers, and Gen Alphas. 

Ms. Rosen recently spoke with Mike Cosper at Christianity Today, and she made a very insightful comment near the end of the conversation that I hadn’t thought about until she articulated it:

Look at what the theorists of Silicon Valley think about humans. Humans are often described as obstacles to their bigger projects. Often. Read [computer scientist] Ray Kurzweil. See how he talks about people. Because a lot of these theorists who envision for the world a completely virtual experience as being superior to the messy, imperfect human one—they don’t really like people. They talk about humanity, but they rarely talk about people.

Conservatives are lauding technologist-turned-fiscal-surgeon Elon Musk and DOGE for taking a scalpel to federal programs, excising the fat and bloat that no one previously in power was willing to touch. With President Trump’s blessing, he approaches the task the way fellow technocrat Bill Gates took to reforming education: the problem is technological, not pedagogical—students need better technology in order to learn more effectively. 

I’m neither a Musk critic nor fanboy, but it does strangely bring to mind something Robert Tracinski wrote in his article in The Federalist right before the 2016 election:

For the secular leftist, the end state is social and necessarily political. It is all about getting everybody else on board and herding them into his imagined utopia. There are so many “problematic” aspects of life that need to be reengineered, so many vast social systems that need to be overthrown and replaced. But the rest of us are all screwing it up, all the time, through our greed, our denial, our apathy, our refusal to listen to him banging on about his tired socialist ideology. [emphasis mine]

Founding Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and so on was not primarily a way to make millions/billions for the already well-off entrepreneur and founder of PayPal; money was not the motivator. For Musk, it was a matter of saving the human race and using technology to do it because time was running out and we had better act fast. Some of Musk’s concerns track with conservative sensibilities (the falling birthrate, for one), though doing his part for the cause by having a double-digit number of children by multiple women, none of whom he is married to, is not a conservative value.

And Musk seems to have set his sights on politics to more expediently usher in the eschaton. Whether or not the DOGE tactic of excising this wasteful (and often fraudulent) tumor of inefficiencies in government spending with blistering force is prudent or not is neither here nor there. I am not a political aficionado and don’t know what problems require what necessary solutions. But what does strike me is technocrats like Musk referencing the laudable goal of working to solve humanity’s most pressing problems while not seeming to be very comfortable around the actual humans who comprise humanity. For secular technocrats, efficiency is a virtue of one of the highest orders.  But what does strike me is technocrats like Musk referencing the laudable goal of working to solve humanity’s most pressing problems while not seeming to be very comfortable around the actual humans who comprise humanity. Tweet This

Though many conservatives may be wary of her political leanings, Servant of God Dorothy Day was a champion of the particular if nothing else. “It is people who are important,” she said, “not the masses.” Ernst Troeltsch described it as the “unlimited individualism” of Christian faith which finds itself at odds with totalitarian regimes like the CCP. “Life itself is a haphazard, untidy, messy affair,” Day noted when people inquired about joining in her work of serving the poor.  

This is not to defend inefficiencies in government or corruption but only to bring fair warning about those we put our trust in. Those in Silicon Valley who developed many of the technologies we have grown so accustomed (and addicted) to using will not even let their own kids have them. They obviously care about their own children, fellow humans. What then does that say about how they value “humanity” as a whole? 

Rosen closed out her conversation with her host by unwittingly echoing Day’s insistence on this idea of the “scandal of particularity.”

I care about people. I think we should care about people. And we should care about our communities…we can’t possibly care about everyone on earth, as much as we would like to in the abstract. We need to do better care and tending to our own local communities because that’s also something that I think has withered because we have so many options to spend time and entertain ourselves online. Place matters, neighborhood matters, community matters, and those require face-to-face, often uncomfortable, often inconvenient experiences.

For technocrats—whether it’s Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or those in the Valley—humanity’s Messiah will usher in the digital eschaton with seamless touch-free efficiency, delivering the Utopic vision of what we need and what is good for the planet, while precluding the need for interaction or eye contact if it’s deemed undesirable. This should give us all, Luddite or not, a degree of skeptical reticence.