Is Technology a Saint Killer?

The desire for perfection and the limits of transformation

From "The Conversion on the Way to Damascus" by Caravaggio, c. 1601

It was the 1960s, and a young woman named Marsha was struggling with depression and had attempted suicide many times. Reportedly, during one of her many psychiatric hospitalizations,

doctors gave her a diagnosis of schizophrenia; dosed her with Thorazine, Librium and other powerful drugs, as well as hours of Freudian analysis; and strapped her down for electroshock treatments, 14 shocks the first time through and 16 the second, according to her medical records. Nothing changed, and soon enough the patient was back in seclusion on the locked ward...A discharge summary, dated May 31, 1963, noted that “during 26 months of hospitalization [this patient] was, for a considerable part of this time, one of the most disturbed patients in the hospital.”

Through all this Marsha managed to remain, somehow, a committed Roman Catholic. Then one day, she had the following experience while staying at a convent:

I went into the chapel, knelt at a pew, and gazed at the cross behind the altar. I don’t recall what I was saying to God at the time, if anything, but as I gazed at the large crucifix, all of a sudden the whole of the chapel became suffused with a bright golden light, shimmering all over…And I immediately, joyfully knew with complete certainty that God loved me. That I was not alone. God was within me. I was within God.

Marsha’s experience was transformative. Her suicidal thoughts vanished, and she became better able to function in her relationships. With the inner transformation came an external shift—a decision to help others who were suffering the same torment.

She went to school, got her PhD, and went on to create a unique therapy for the treatment of people with borderline personality—a disorder that reflected her own diagnosis, and one of the most challenging psychiatric conditions to treat. Today, for many therapists, Marsha Linehan’s name is as recognizable as that of Sigmund Freud.

The story of Linehan’s life is recounted in her recent memoir, although the focus of this essay is not on Linehan or her therapy, but on the limits of transformation.

What are the limits in our ability to change or transcend human nature through spiritual experiences—or through technology? What are the moral and mental costs of reaching beyond these limits?

Years ago, when I was still in university, I went through many dark nights of the soul. Looking back, I can see that the outward causes were due to myriad ordinary stresses, although it felt, to me, like a spiritual crisis. Feelings of anxiety and low mood became near-constant, dominating my awareness of everything, and it felt like the foundation of my life had become a floor of rotted planks, sagging under the weight of all the negative emotion, threatening to collapse and to pull me into some unknown darkness.   

I remember one hot afternoon when I stood alone on one of the campus lawns, near a pond, and looking up through the willow trees wondering why I was in such misery, as if the universe might answer me. No answer came. The sky was blue, sunstruck, and the tresses of the trees hung drowsily, and geese waddled past, giving no heed to me, a featherless bipedal creature in grungy jeans and T-shirt, face upturned in anguish.

I wanted a spiritual experience. I wanted to be transformed, saved, anything to be free. Why wasn’t I, when I knew it had happened to others?

I eventually did get an answer, one that flipped my world on its axis and changed everything, but it did not come until many years later, when I least expected it.

Transformative spiritual experiences do not usually follow our preferred schedule. They cannot be forced. We can pray for them, reach out in some way, but they cannot be captured or domesticated, because they do not originate from within us but from beyond us.

My own experience, like Linehan’s and probably many others, resulted in a positive shift in perspective and behavior. And while this shift did not make me “saintly” (a fact my family can confirm), philosopher-psychologist William James used this word over a century ago to describe the dramatic behavioral changes that can arise, in some people, after spiritual experiences.

These “saintly characteristics”, summarized in Yaden and Newberg’s The Varieties of Spiritual Experience, include the following:

– a tendency for asceticism, or a marked reduction in consuming physical pleasures

– an urge to “purify” oneself and to sublimate one’s goals

– increased charity toward everyone, especially the poor and the suffering, and in some cases one’s enemies.

– increased willpower to achieve one’s aims

So, if we want to become a saint, we must undergo a paradoxical change in the size of the self: we must strive to make ourselves smaller, by subduing and regulating our desires and passions, yet at the same time we must grow larger, by living with greater love for others, and with higher and more focused purpose.

There is a clear moral dimension here. When we admire the great saints of the world, it is not because they encountered the supernatural, but because their experience positively transformed their relationship to other human beings.

And yet Yaden and Newberg point out there are limits to spiritual transformation. Typically, people’s personalities do not dramatically change—extroverts do not suddenly become introverts, for instance—nor does transformation make people immune to the many imperfections of being human.

This conclusion was based on extensive research, but we also see it in Marsha Linehan’s story. Despite her mental health recovery and accomplishments, she continued to experience periods of emotional struggle in the years after her transformation:

What about the spiritual experience that had transformed me? It is true that I had been transformed, but knowing that I would never walk back over the line to the seeming insanity of my previous life didn’t mean that I wouldn’t still suffer moments of depression.

We might also think of Saint Paul, who had his own bright light transformation on the road to Damascus. The experience transformed the direction of the saint’s life—he went from being a man who persecuted Christians to becoming a Christian himself. Even so, he didn’t cease to be human, and even complained of a “thorn” in his flesh, a chronic suffering of some kind, which never went away, despite his prayers to the very God who had transformed him.

Saint Paul even ended up grateful for this weakness, and all his sufferings, which kept him from pride and taught him a paradoxical spiritual truth: When I am weak, then I am strong.

This view is in stark opposition to our usual instincts, which insatiably tempt us to seek strength, including spiritual perfection, whether that means total detachment from our illusions, or special healing, or some other experience by which we might transcend the ordinary sufferings and limitations of human nature.

We want strength, whether that means power or liberation; it is a natural desire. Which brings us to technological transformation. If spiritual transformation tends to alter our moral nature, while leaving our basic human nature imperfect, what does technological transformation do?

Technology is not values-free; it comes with transcendent fantasies. The ancient Greeks did not have airplanes, but they had the myth of Icarus, who donned wings of wax and feathers. He managed to fly for a little while until, despite his father’s warnings, he got too close to the sun and the wax melted and he plummeted to his death.

According to the Roman poet Ovid, Icarus was drawn by the delight of flying high, and “by desire for the heavens”. Today, we see the same desire in transhumanism, which yearns to rise above our biology and soar beyond human limits.

But while Icarus’ story suggests a moral, transhumanism is too confident to worry about morality. It is so confident it even thinks we can overcome death, or at least try. “Life extension is the most important thing we can invent,” says Balaji Srinivasan. For example, through “genomic reincarnation” we might one day print biological clones of ourselves, genetically identical to us, and then we can show our clones videos of ourselves so that they can formulate “memories” of us. In this way, we vicariously continue living, even after we die.

Today we have iPhones. Tomorrow it will be iBodies. The idea feels creepy to me, not to mention morally objectionable, although give a listen to Srinivasan’s handling of the objection: 

There’s a premise that’s embedded in a lot of Western culture, that to gain something you must lose. If you’re Icarus and you try to fly, then you know you’ll fly too high and you’ll melt your wings. But guess what, we fly every day—commercial air flight, right?

The first time I heard this, I was inclined to agree, as it sounded so reasonable. But is it? What if there is a moral consequence to air travel? I am not speaking about the fact that planes occasionally crash, or about the impact of fossil fuels on the environment. We can go deeper than that. What if we consider air travel not in terms of the technology of flight, but the phenomenon of speed?

The rise of railway travel in the 1800s allowed people to cross geographical distances more quickly than ever. The arrival of the automobile and commercial air flight in the 1900s helped us to transcend geography even faster, and then we experienced a quantum leap with the computer and internet age, when our words and ideas, rather than our bodies, became capable of crossing the globe at near-instantaneous speeds.

Are there any moral consequences to speed? Does it make a moral difference that our bodies now regularly travel at 0.75 of Mach while our words can travel through data cables at around two thirds the speed of light? Is there any cost to our human nature, now that we have transcended the slow rhythmic walking pace of our ancestors, and the less hurried, less frenetic, pace of their thought processes?

I have flown many times in my life, and often to Switzerland, where my wife’s family lives. There is a mountain we regularly visit, whose snow-covered slopes melt through the summer, sending threads of water across a grassy, gravelly plateau a kilometer or so wide, and down a tumbling waterfall, and along a bed of stones, where we sometimes take a drink out of the cold river.

There is a slight risk, of course. Cows graze on the plateau. Still, we have done it, trusting that a reasonable level of filtration has taken place during the water’s journey. 

Before the internet, human thought was filtered through history much like meltwater coming off a mountain. The filtration was slow, moving from person to person, or from scrolls and books to people. Admittedly it was imperfect, favoring men’s filters more than women’s, and the powerful more than the weak, but there was virtue in its slowness, for slowness is purifying.

The accelerating effect of the internet has not deepened our knowledge of history but scattered our attention, often into the shallowest places. The result is a loss of accumulated historical wisdom, a loss of an ancient filtration system that, for all its flaws, helped us discern what ideas were worth passing on. The internet has eroded the mountain by rapidly flooding it with unfiltered information.

How can a society cohere, when its ability to think coherently is compromised by a weak filter that lets too much through too fast, including the cognitive dung? How do we arrive at any shared sense of truth in our core values, when so much has become muddled and toxic?  

Some imagine that a powerful AI, like GPT-4, will ultimately answer the question, “What is truth?”, although as one commentator has pointed out: 

This entirely misses the point that in human society “right” answers and “socially acceptable” answers often aren’t the same thing. What is factually true might also be offensive. Other “correct” answers are dictated by faith, intuition, belief, dogma, political power, and social trends. How should GPT-4 handle these situations? Whose version of truth is the actual truth?

Whose version indeed. That is exactly the problem we face. As our cognitive (thinking) center fragments and deteriorates, flattening our mountain of wisdom, so does our shared sense of truth and identity and purpose.

At the same time, the near-light-speed of our social communications has amplified some of our worst emotional tendencies, inflaming antagonism and divisiveness, causing dramatic rises in depression and anxiety among our youth, toying with our dopamine system, among many other impacts.

We are experiencing a double impact to our social mind: our cognitive center is weakening, and our emotions are becoming more poorly regulated. If somebody like that showed up at a psychiatry clinic, he or she might be diagnosed with a personality disorder. At a societal level, we end up with an unstable identity and rising social disorder, including expectations of civil war between red and blue states in America, or else, as Rod Dreher muses, the need for a national divorce.

And what happens to our saints? If being a saint means that we become in one sense smaller, through increased self-regulation of our desires and passions, yet in another sense larger, by living with greater love for others and with higher and more focused purpose, then the internet and its associated technologies and platforms tend toward the opposite: to dysregulate our desires and passions, to blur our mental focus and purpose, and to encourage social divisiveness.

We could find exceptions, of course. Not every technology, internet-based or otherwise, is a saint killer or society killer. And I would go further. As I mentioned in A Pilgrim’s Creed, if God is a primary creator, then we are sub-creators who invariably desire, and should, reshape creation for the purposes of play, exploration, and invention, and that includes the invention of technology.

The same lesson is inherent in the myth of Icarus, for the moral of the myth, as Ovid tells it, is not that wanting to fly is evil. Icarus’s father, Daedalus, who is the inventor of the feather-and-wax wings, gives these instructions to his son before he puts on the wings and takes flight over the sea:

Let me warn you, Icarus, to take the middle way, in case the moisture weighs down your wings, if you fly too low, or if you go too high, the sun scorches them. Travel between the extremes.

The challenge is balance. Part of our task, as sub-creators, is to cultivate a deft navigational wisdom that steers between dangerous polarities and finds that razor’s edge. And yet we often fail, as our tendency, like Icarus’s, is to get swept up in the sheer delight of what our creations allow us to do, and “by desire for the heavens”.

Why do we desire the heavens? Because we sense, deep down, we were made for more. We sense we were made to be gods, literally. This is an Orthodox view, although in fact, properly understood, it is also an orthodox Protestant view. From C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity:

The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said (in the Bible) that we were ‘gods’ and He is going to make good His words. If we let Him—for we can prevent Him, if we choose—He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful; but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what he said.

If we were meant to be perfect, as gods, then we can better understand our instinct to seek perfection. We can see why sometimes spiritual practices go off the rails, driving some toward fanaticism or other zealous pathologies while losing sight of the real goal, which is truth and love. And we can see why the same distortion infects the way we use technology.

If anything, the creation of technology—a seemingly “secular” pursuit—can result in worse distortions, because its creators might think themselves free of any irrational religiosity, when in fact all that has happened is that their religious instinct is fully alive, only hidden from view. 

We do not live in a secular society. We never did, never will. Burn every church and temple, turn the Tai chi centers into dollar stores, smash every fat Buddha statue in the doorway of a noodle restaurant, and you accomplish nothing—and worse. An unrestrained spirit will be released onto the world, unmoored from truth, its passions utterly dysregulated, blind with self-love.

Some would say that spirit is already here, and has been for a long time, although our strivings for perfection through technology have magnified its power or even, perhaps, given it a body and nervous system to inhabit.

If Marsha Linehan were a saint rather than a psychologist, then she might devise a new therapy, this one to be practiced by an entire society that is suffering from an emerging mass-scale personality disorder. It might assuage our emotional chaos, although I don’t think it would be enough.

Without a shared coherent truth, we will never find our centering balance. Like Icarus, we will fail to navigate the extremes, and rise too high, or drop too low. We will seek perfection for its own sake, rather than truth and love.

And if we seek perfection as the goal in itself, then our strivings for it through the internet and its devices will lead to strivings through even greater powers, whether AI or whatever the next technical wonder happens to be; and the mountain of wisdom will continue to erode, until at last it becomes a flatland of sludge, which is where we crash when the wings melt off our arms.

We may die in that sludge, and if we don’t, we may witness something rising out of the primordial goop of tech and toxicity—something awesome yet horrible. For in a world that cannot be perfected by human power, the unyielding effort to do so could lead to monstrosities.

And in the meantime, a great many lies.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not technology, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not technology, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not technology, it profits me nothing…And now abide faith, hope, technology, these three; but the greatest of these is technology. 

- 1 Corinthians 13 - Machine Standard Version