The Illusion of Freedom in the Digital Age
Note: Today I am pleased to publish this guest piece from my friend
.Today, we are gradually waking up to the fact that the crisis of our technological age is at its root, a crisis of freedom. Not long ago, we celebrated the limitless freedom made possible by the digital age, which put infinite possibilities at our fingertips. Now we pay good money for app-blocking apps called Freedom, which promise to protect us from the addictive distractions of our web browser or smartphone. Freedom, it turns out, requires limits. But having forgotten that we are creatures, and come to imagine ourselves as self-creators, we don’t know where to begin in rediscovering those limits.
In my new book, Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License, I argue that we can only learn to think clearly again about freedom if we learn to think theologically about the basis and purpose of our freedom.
We know that God created us for freedom—but what kind of freedom? Not a freedom to do just anything, but a freedom to rule as kings, to take dominion over creation as image-bearers of the Great King. This was a freedom bound by the limits of creaturehood, but a freedom enjoyed at the very highest reaches of creaturehood and intended for even greater exaltation and glory, if Adam and Eve had passed the test. But they just didn’t have the patience. “Take and eat, and you will be like God,” the serpent promised. Kingship and queenship were not enough; Adam and Eve longed for the freedom of infinitude. And strangely enough, they believed that creation itself—a fruit grown from the dust of the earth—could give them the power that belonged only to the Creator.
This is the temptation that technology poses in every age: the lure of transcending our limits, becoming gods, and doing so without the trouble of waiting. Technology promises us reward without labor—or at any rate, more reward with less labor. With technology, we take the stuff of creation, which we have been called to guard and keep, and use it to rival and defy our Creator. Just in case we didn’t get the message from Genesis 3, God repeats it in a second fall narrative in Genesis 11. This time, it is not a fruit grown from the dust of the ground that will enable man to reach the heavens, but bricks baked from the dust of the ground. With their extraordinary technological abilities, men were able to build “a city and a tower with its top in the heavens” and thus to “make a name [for themselves]” (Gen 11:4), rather than waiting in patient devotion upon the name that is above every name. Recognizing the power of human ingenuity, God discerns the peril that awaits our effort to transcend the limits of our creatureliness: “This is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them” (Gen 11:6). Sure enough, it was only the beginning of what we would do. Today we have pierced the heavens and walked on the moon; we have split the atom and called down fire from heaven upon our enemies.
But of course, technology is not all bad; far from it. We were made, after all, to take dominion over the creatures, to transform the voiceless creation that it might give voice to the glory of God through art and music and metalworking. Genesis testifies to the deep ambiguity of all our technology by attributing the earliest technologies—music-making and metallurgy—to the descendants of Cain (see Gen 4:21–22). If we are tempted to view such works as evil in themselves, Scripture quickly rebukes us in Exodus, where these Cainite technologies become the instruments of the Spirit for the glory of God: “See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft” (Exod 31:2–5). When David reforms the tabernacle worship and Solomon builds the temple, the technologies of music-making are likewise offered in service to the Creator. And when in Revelation 21, the kings of the earth bring their glory into the New Jerusalem, we can be confident that this glory includes the astonishing fruits of human technology over the millennia.
Technology is not merely a means by which we bring the original hidden glories of creation to full expression. It is also a means by which we resist, and in some measure roll back, the curse of Genesis 3. If we turn to technology to reduce human labor, who can blame us, in a world where creation itself now fights against us and increases all our labors? “Cursed is the ground because of you . . . By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread” (Gen 3:17, 19)—but rather less sweat, thankfully, in the age of the tractor and the combine. “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children” (Gen 3:16)—but rather less pain, we may be grateful, in the age of modern medicine. Indeed, even the most determined Luddite among us, I feel sure, does not want to go back to a world before antiseptics and anesthetics, a world in which a large share of pregnancies ended in agonizing deaths for both mother and child.
What is technology, then? A God-given tool for mitigating the pain of the curse? A manifestation of our original calling to take dominion over the world? Or a means by which we try to turn creation itself against the Creator, straining against the limits of our finitude so that we might be as gods? Clearly, it can be all three. It can be a means of resisting the bondage of sin and death, of expressing our original creative freedom, and of ultimately destroying our freedom in a search for a freedom that is not ours to enjoy. To use technology for true freedom requires a wisdom and a discernment beyond our years, especially as new technologies emerge faster than we can wrap our heads around them. But we have no choice except to do our best to grow into such wisdom.
Although technology has always been with us, it is hard to resist the sense that something has changed profoundly in the last century or two. Once we were the masters, and technology our servant; today we feel increasingly at the mercy of our own creations. Once we developed particular technologies, instruments to perform given tasks; now we seem simply to inhabit a world of technology. This technological world seems to be an all-encompassing reality from which it is difficult to escape and difficult to lay hold of any piece of creation that we have not already reordered in our image. Even if we have the good fortune to behold an unspoiled mountain vista or sublime waterfall, we are likely to admire it only through the lens of our smartphone, reducing the world to digital form so we can use it to build up our online followings. With the emergence of new digital and biotechnologies, we are at greater and greater risk of trying to make ourselves gods and, in the process, rendering ourselves slaves.
What has shifted? Well, according to C. S. Lewis, diagnosing the change underway eight decades ago in his Abolition of Man, the object of our technologies has shifted. Once we worked primarily on the raw material of the lower creation, on rocks and dirt, plants, and occasionally animals. Now we work upon human nature itself, both our bodies (in the form of biotechnology) and our minds (in the form of digital technology). Initially, we turned our technologies upon ourselves with an eye to healing the hurts of the curse of Genesis—diseases, tumors, and broken bones—thus seeking to restore our bodies to their proper natural operation. Increasingly, though, we are using the same technologies to try to free ourselves from the very limits of creaturehood, to achieve an abolition of the slavery of simply being human. This, as Lewis observed, was a fool’s errand, for our progressive quest to free ourselves from the constraints of nature must backfire once it passes this point: “It is like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house with no fuel at all.” Once we turn our technologies upon ourselves with the idea of remaking the human condition, we are both the subject and the object of this power, master and slave: “Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.”
To escape this bondage which we have imposed upon ourselves, we must turn in repentance to a power higher and greater than ourselves. As Augustine famously observed, “our hearts are restless until we rest in God,” and it is our restlessness that drives our frantic creation and adoption of new technologies today, “distracted from distraction by distraction,” as T.S. Eliot wrote. This does not mean that we must pietistically retreat from the challenges of engaging our technological age, which will require practical disciplines and imaginative policy at every level of community—from the household to the nation-state. But it does mean that all such disciplines and policies must begin with a recognition of the fundamentally spiritual crisis at the heart of our technological crisis.
Brad (Ph.D., University of Edinburgh) is a fellow in the Evangelicals and Civic Life program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He founded and served for 10 years as president of The Davenant Institute and currently serves as a professor of Christian history at Davenant Hall and an adjunct professor of government at Regent University.
To read more about technology and freedom, purchase a copy of Brad’s new book, Called to Freedom, from which this guest post was adapted. Part of B&H Academic’s “Christ in Everything” series, the book released on January 15, and is available from Amazon or Lifeway.
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