solitude, technology, leadership and formation

Posted by: len hjalmarson
Church: Aylmer, Ontario Aylmer
Date: October 29th, 2010

In the last two months one of the subtexts in my conversations and reflection has been solitude. It may have been provoked in part by an article in the UTNE Reader, September-October issue. The article by William Deresiewicz was titled, “Solitude and Leadership,” and was typically insightful and provocative. I’ll offer a few quotes and then some reflection, and then add another article, by Peter Block, to the mix. But I encourage you to read the entire piece. This first quote offers the focus of the concern in the article.

“America now has the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen. What we don’t have are people who can think for themselves; people who can formulate a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things, people with vision.”

The article offers that technology itself pushes us in this direction: toward quick solutions, away from the deep reflection that might observe a new way forward, a new way of thinking about the problem and its relation to a larger whole. Like Brueggemann, Deresiewicz intuits that the pace of our lives causes us to miss small openings: ” the space for imagination to expand and take shape is inversely proportional to the speed at which we live.” (Hopeful Imagination)

SO when Deresiewicz looks at the research around multitasking, things become more interesting,

“A team of researchers at Stanford wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it? The answer — they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find .. were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: The more people multitask, the worse they are not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.

The researchers found that multitaskers are worse at every kind of cognitive function. “They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information.. they were more easily distracted. They were more unorganized, unable to keep information in the right conceptual boxes and retrieve it quickly. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking: switching between tasks.”

Deresiewicz continues, “Multitasking, in short, impairs your ability to think. Thinking.. requires concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea of your own… My first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s..

From here Deresiewicz goes on to talk about concentration, attention and the importance of solitude.

Elsewhere Peter Block, the author of Community: The Structure of Belonging, asks about the future of community. He writes,

“All of us, in one way or another, are in the conversation about the relationship between electronic technology and community. Does the technology build community and relationships or become a substitute for them? Does the internet act as a catalyst to get me out of my house or become a way to burrow further into it?”

The question ties in to much larger questions, questions like “what does it mean to be human?” and, “how do we build a sustainable future?” And the story that Block uses to get at these questions is the story of Faust.

“Faust, an early symbol of modern people, [makes a deal] with the devil. Faust wants to develop a property and needs the land owned by two elderly people who won’t sell. Frustrated, he asks Mephisto to take care of this couple. Mephisto gets the job done, but the method he uses shocks Faust. He had not reckoned that his development project would cost the lives of this couple…

“Later, Berman comments on what is behind Faust’s drive for development: his longing for the new and innovative world. Partly it may be the drive for power, but he says, ‘there is another motive … that springs not merely from Faust’s personality, but from a collective, impersonal drive that seems to be endemic to modernization: the drive to create a homogeneous environment, a totally modernized space, in which the look and feel of the old world have disappeared without a trace.’”

Is it our illusions about progress that drive us? Is it our belief that the ends will justify the means? Is it, as Jacques Ellul might have phrased it, that we pursue not the kingdom itself but “the false presence of the kingdom?” Maybe Block has got it right when he opines, much as Ellul would have done,

“The concern, however, when technology becomes the future and especially the future of community, is that we become an extension of the technology..”

We become what we adore, what we worship.

In 1983 Howard Snyder published Liberating the Church: the Ecology of Church and Kingdom. The work began to give me a language for the discomfort I was experiencing in my own setting. At the time I had just discovered the work of Jacques Ellul. The two writers began to push me outside the boundaries of a system which was as much mechanized as organic.

Snyder reminded us that our word “ecology” is related to the Greek word “oikos” (house) and oikonomia (our word “economy.”) The whole world is God’s household, and his ordering of it is his economy. Snyder writes that, “Fundamentally, the Universe is not ordered logically, psychologically, nor sociologically, but ecologically.” (50) Snyder connects God”s rule to shalom, an embracing metaphor. He continues,

Will we opt for technology or ecology? This is not an either-or choice, but a question of dominant models. Will we view the world essentially as a machine or as a garden? Will we see the earth as a factory or as a home? Will we opt for technology or ecology? This is not an either-or choice but a question of dominant models… If the controlling reality is technosystem, mechanistic technology takes over and life suffers from being squeezed into the “clockwork orange” habitat for which it was never meant…. (43)

The clincher follows on the next page when Snyder writes that, “As men and women become like their gods, so they become like their models. A machine model (a technosystem) produces human robots; an organic model (an ecosystem) produces healthy persons.”

As I finished reading Block’s article I was reminded of Hauerwas quotation from Paul Virilio in Living Gently in a Violent World: “the dominant form violence takes in modernity is speed.”