Hold or cut the golden thread?

There's a ‘mysteriously beautiful’ vision threaded through our world, writes Stephen Cottrell. In an extract from his Dear England book, the Archbishop of York considers the Beatitudes.

Stephen Cottrell

Stephen Cottrell is Primate of England and Archbishop of York. He has authored 20 books.

A CGI render of a grid of golden lines receding into the perspective

The golden thread.

Joshua Sortino on Unsplash.

The heart of Jesus’ teaching is found in the longest teaching passage in the Gospels, it is known as the Sermon on the Mount.

It begins with a mysteriously beautiful passage known as the Beatitudes.

Here Jesus sets out a series of maxims that at first sight seem to be his equivalent of the Ten Commandments. Like Moses, the Old Testament prophet who received the latter, when Jesus receives the Beatitudes he has gone up a mountain.

And like Moses he has a series of short, pithy things to say that will then need a lifetime to work out.

However, the Beatitudes are not a moral code. They are not things you can either do or not do. They are attitudes to which we can aspire. Rather than describing the moral life, a code by which we can justly live alongside each other in society, they describe what it looks like to 'go the second mile’. They describe what perfect love in action looks like.

Here they are:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

I don't propose to spend ages unpacking these. But alongside the Ten Commandments themselves, the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, the Beatitudes have become one of the central documents of the Church.

Living by them is the work of a lifetime.

They are the centre of Jesus' teaching. Their meaning, however, isn't always self-evident. Like his stories, they need inhabiting.

They are very challenging. It isn't easy to be merciful. It isn't easy to make peace. Especially if the likely outcome is the persecution we usually make efforts to avoid. Not that there is anything good about persecution. As we know, mockery and ridicule hurt. How much more hurtful is it to be hunted down because of your witness to peace? Nevertheless, it is witnesses to peace that Jesus is recruiting here. His own life, and everything that he teaches, led this way: to the peace that is beyond the world's understanding and is about a wholeness and totality of giving and receiving love.

Jesus is inviting us to live with a different set of attitudes. And he does not baulk from acknowledging that these attitudes will bring us into conflict with the carefully protected interests of those who secure power and influence for themselves at the expense of peace. They exchange it for what is little more than a truce. At best, an absence of war, what we live in our jealously guarded siloes and forcibly protect our borders, repelling intruders and stamping on those who even dream differently.

In our own society, thankfully, we enjoy freedoms of speech and action. This means that we rarely meet with much opposition beyond people's unreflective apathy or polished disdain. But these freedoms we enjoy should not be taken for granted. They have been hard won. They could easily be lost. Especially if we fail to see where they have come from; precisely this realisation of the dignity and worth of every person and our responsibilities to each other that arose through Christ.

Unfortunately, these things that underpin what is best in our society are not self-evidently the best. We've got so used to them that we easily imagine they are. But actually, we don't observe them in the world around us. Nature, for instance, is not democratic. Nor particularly caring. The weakest usually die first. The fittest survive. Nor is it much different in human communities. Our history - always written by those who win - is one bloody story of conquest after another.

Empires rise and fall, and there is very little to suggest that there might be another kingdom where a different set of values prevails, and where the king turns out to be the servant of all. But that is precisely the Christian narrative. It is a golden thread running through human history. In every age it can either be held on to, or cut away; left to our own devices, especially when our backs are to the wall, we find that the human compass is usually set towards self-preservation. Our empires and systems are usually designed to keep others out. Or at least in their place, so that they can serve us. In this so-called ‘real world’, shepherds do not go in search of one lost sheep, as Jesus suggested God does, in one of his parables. That would be uneconomic. Like the rest of us, they play a percentages game, and for the sake of the ninety-nine, we accept the loss of the one. The strongest and the wiliest prevail. That's just how it is, we say. If we can help the weak, we will. But if we can't, or if it affects us badly, we won't and we don't.

This is why the world needs a set of values - and a story - that will save us from ourselves, and our worst instincts. This is why we need a set of values that are rooted in a tradition whose stories and whose very heart are, gloriously, the life and teaching of a person who is himself the revelation of God's love and purposes for the world he made and loves - who even laid down his life to search out those who are lost: the very image of the invisible God. More than that: someone who loves us and knows what it is like to be us, who has experienced from the inside just what it is like to inhabit a divided and compromised world.

Therefore, the Beatitudes are a set of values and attitudes by which we can inhabit the world differently and through which we can begin to see what matters in the world and what must be done.

Dear England: Finding Hope, Taking Heart and Changing the World is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Explainer

Culture

Digital

16 July 2024

6 min read

Tech has changed: it’s no longer natural or neutral

The first in a three-part series exploring the implications of technology.

James Lawrence

James is Canon Missioner at Blackburn Cathedral. He researches technology and theology at Oxford University.

A caveman holding a hammer looks at a bench on which are a broken bicycle and a laptop.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

My son was born in February last year and it seems that every day he is developing new skills or facial expressions and adorable quirks. Just the other day he was playing with some wooden blocks and when they inevitably fell over, he let out the most adorable giggle. As you can guess I immediately reached for my phone so that I could capture the moment. Moments like this happen all the time in the life of a modern parent- we want to share with our spouse, family, and friends or just capture the moment for ourselves because it’s something we treasure. And yet, in this series of articles I would like to consider this moment, and the thousands like it that take place in a technological society, and ask: is everything as benign as it seems?

There are two ideas that often come up whenever people talk about technology. The first is that technology is basically ‘neutral’, that technology only becomes good or bad depending on what you are doing with it. “Look at a hammer,” someone might say, “there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about this hammer, only the end result is good or bad depending on whether I’m using it to hit nails or people!” On this reading of technology, the only important questions relate to the consequences of use.

If technology is neutral, then the primary concern for users, legislators and technologists is the consequences of technology, and not the technology itself. The only way to ensure that the technology is used for good is to ensure, somehow, that more good people will use the technology for good things than bad people using it for bad things. Often this idea will present itself as a conversation about competing freedoms: very few people (with some important exceptions, see this article from Ezra Klein) are debating whether there is something intrinsically problematic about the app formerly known as Twitter, most discussion revolves around how to maintain the freedom of good users while curtailing the freedom of bad users.

We assume that these tools of social interaction like Facebook and Instagram are, in and of themselves, perfectly benign. We are encouraged to think this by massive corporations who have a vested interest in maintaining our use of their platforms, and at first glance, they seem completely harmless: what could possibly be the problem with a website in which grandma can share photos of her cat? And while the dark underbelly of these platforms has violent real-world consequences – like the rise of antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred – the solution is primarily imagined as a matter of dealing with ‘bad actors’ rather than anything intrinsically problematic with the platforms themselves.

Jobs here draws a straight-line comparison between the bicycle and the PC. As far as Jobs is concerned, there is no quantitative difference in kind between the two tools.

The second idea is related but somewhat different: Advocates of modern technology will suggest that humanity has been using technology ever since there were humans and therefore all this modern technology is not really anything to worry about. “Yes, modern technology looks scary,” someone might say, “but it’s really nothing to worry about, humans have been using tools since the Stone Age don’t you know!” This view proposes that because hammers are technology, and all technology is the same, there is, therefore, no difference between a hammer and the internet, or between the internet and a cyborg.

This second idea tends to be accompanied by an emphasis on the slow and steady evolution of technology and by highlighting the fact that at every major technological advancement there have been naysayers decrying the latest innovation. (Even Plato was suspicious of writing when that was invented). Taken as part of a very long view of human history, the technological innovations of the last 100 years seem to be a normal and natural part of the evolution of our species which has always set itself apart from the rest of the animal kingdom in its use of technology.

Steve Jobs gives a good example of this in an interview he gave about the development PC:

“I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condors used the least energy to move a kilometer. And humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list… not too proud of a showing for the crown of creation… But then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a human on a bicycle blew the condor away – completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me… It’s the most remarkable tool we’ve ever come up with… It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds”

Notice that Jobs here draws a straight-line comparison between the bicycle and the PC. As far as Jobs is concerned, there is no quantitative difference in kind between the two tools: one is more complex than the other but otherwise, they are just technologies that expand human capacity. “A Bicycle for our minds” is a fascinating way to describe a computer because it implies that nothing about our minds will be changed, they’ll just be a little bit faster.

And yet, despite the attempts of thought leaders like Jobs to convince us that modern technology is entirely benign, many of us are left with a natural suspicion that there is more going on. As a priest in the Church of England, I often have conversations with parishioners and members of the public who are looking for language or a framework which describes the instinctive recognition that something has changed at some point (fairly recently) about the nature of the technology that we use, or the way that it influences our lives. That modern technology is not simply the natural extension of the sorts of tools that humans have been using since the Stone Age and that modern technology is not neutral but in significant ways has already had an effect regardless of how we might use it. How do we respond to such articulate and thoughtful people such as Steve Jobs who make a compelling case that modern technology is neutral and natural?

I often have conversations with parishioners who are looking for language or a framework which describes the instinctive recognition that something has changed about the nature of the technology that we use, or the way that it influences our lives.

Thinking back to that moment with my son when he giggles and I take a photo of him, at first glance it seems completely innocuous. But what resources are available if I did want to think more carefully about that moment (and the many like it) which suffuse my daily life? Thankfully there is a growing body of literature from philosophers and theologians who are thinking about the impact of modern technology on the human condition. In the next two articles I would like to introduce the work of Martin Heidegger, outline his criticism of modern technology, showing how he challenges the idea that technology is simply a natural extension of human capacity or a neutral tool.

Heidegger is a complex character in philosophy and in Western history. There is no getting around the fact that he was a supporter of the Nazi Party during the second world war. His politics have been widely condemned and rightly so, nevertheless, his insights on the nature of modern technology continue to this day to provide insights that are useful. His claim is that modern technology essentially and inevitably changes our relationship with the world in which we live and even with ourselves. It is this claim, and Heidegger’s suggested solution, that I will unpack in the next two articles.