CGR Vol. 39 No 2 (Spring 2021)

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ABSTRACT: A new road that Mennonites should consider in responding to the problem of technology runs through the philosophy of technology, media studies, and the ‘posthumanities.’ The author surveys work by David Wills, Adriana Cavarero, and Thomas Moynihan – scholars who dispute the notion that technological tools are morally neutral and contend that technologies both conceal, and incline us toward, politically saturated and value-laden ends. Concepts discussed include dorsality, spinal catastrophism, uprightness, inclination, and Mennonite ethics. Drawing on J. Lawrence Burkholder’s rejection of moderation in favor of the excess of love and ex-Mennonite Grace Jantzen’s critique of violence, the author offers an Anabaptist- Mennonite response to Wills, Cavarero, and Moynihan that places the problem of technology close to the problem of violence—and challenges the assumption that humanity stands safely apart from technology.

Introduction

While Mennonite responses to the problem of technology may come from the perspective of Christian theology or from technicians or practitioners in STEM fields or industry, one road not taken by Mennonites runs through the philosophy of technology and the emerging fields of media studies and the ‘posthumanities.’ This is the path I take below while tracing deep connections between humanity, technology, ethics, and violence.

In roughly the past twenty years, thinkers who situate themselves between the study of literature, science, and the arts have suggested that technology is not as separate from humanity as modern thinking would lead us to believe. Drawing on the foundational work of technology theorists like Ernst Kapp, who argued that tools like the axe were prosthetic “organ extensions” of human body parts like the arm,[1] recent work in the interdisciplinary humanities has taken a “posthuman” turn that resists assuming that the category of the “human” should be the dominant point of reference in relation to “technology” and “animality.”[2] For example, in the 1990s French philosopher Bernard Stiegler undertook a multivolume project called TechnicsandTime,which sees technology and humanity as being deeply intertwined in a process he called “the invention of the human.”[3] For Stiegler, the invention of the human implies both that humans invent technology and that technology has inventive and formative effects on humanity, and furthermore that there can be no pure separation of the two categories.

Rather than simplistically dividing the “human” user from the neutral or instrumental domain of tools and “technology,” several thinkers taking the posthuman turn now consider the human body itself to be profoundly technological, especially because the body is already involved in the activities of techne, craft, and making, well before external tools arrive on the scene. Below I survey three exemplary figures in this liminal philosophical discourse who— seemingly unbeknownst to each other—have shown how technology is related to the ethics of inclination: David Wills, Adriana Cavarero, and Thomas Moynihan. The survey will show how each thinker shares a concern for how technology cannot be separated from the human body and its many inclinations. Following an analysis of how each thinker understands humanity and technology to be inextricably intertwined, I provide one Anabaptist Mennonite response to their work that places the problems of technology close to the problems of violence. Overall, I seek to challenge the notion that humanity stands safely apart from technology, and this entails rethinking established definitions of technology that contrast it with humanity. Definitions that rest upon instrumental divisions between means and ends or causes and effects, where the human being uses technological tools that are morally neutral, are exactly what these three thinkers are disputing when they explore how technologies both conceal, and incline us toward, politically saturated and value-laden ends.

Dorsality

David Wills situates his work in a “technological turn” that is really a “turn into a technology that was always there.”[4] By playing with the resonances of terms like ‘turning back,’ Wills disputes the notion that technology is defined by novelty and suggests instead that it is the human spinal column or characteristic of “dorsality” that is the original technology. The articulations, twists, and turns of the spine are movements that Wills understands to be deeply technological. Defining the human as “a someone who turns,” he argues that “there is technology as soon as there are limbs, as soon as there is bending of those limbs, as soon as there is any articulation at all.”[5] Lest we worry that Wills is engaging in a semantic bait-and-switch where a pre-existing and stable definition of technology is changed to suit his purposes, we should note that his argument hinges on the idea that the word ‘technology’ refers to very concrete acts of crafting and making that cannot be adequately theorized by separating a neutral tool from the human user.

"As soon as there is articulation, the human has rounded the technological bend, the technological turn has occurred, and there is no more simple human. Which for all intents and purposes means there never was any simple human."[6]

Wills argues against the notion that there is an original humanity upon which technology is imposed or from which it is extended. Rather than thinking about humanity and technology as separate categories that come into contact with each other and require moderate forms of mediation, “we should think technology beyond the confines of a human-mechanical relation” and instead as a “bending outside itself deep within itself.”[7] Throughout the rest of his complex and layered exploration of literary and philosophical texts from Friedrich Nietzsche to Jacques Derrida, Wills traces a history of dorsality as “that which, from behind, from or in the back of the human, turns (it) into something technological” and in so doing points to departures, deviations, divergences, and differences from the image of a straight and narrow path.[8]

Although Wills’s work is significantly richer and more layered than I can account for in this article, I can gesture toward the ways that Wills rejects simple definitions of technology that would categorically separate human nature from technological tool use. If we follow his inclinations, we can see that the term ‘technology’ does not name something that begins with the computer or the internet, or even with the stone knife or opposable thumb. Instead, technological forms of crafting, using, and making began with the human body, specifically the spine that allows human beings to bend over and pick up tools, and also allows us to turn back from walking along particular narrative paths between birth and death. For Wills, the term ‘technology’ points toward the myriad ways that human inclinations become prosthetically extended by both amputating from and adding to the body.[9]

Inclinations

Political resonances within the study of technology and the body grow stronger when we turn to the work of Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, whose Inclinations:A Critique of Rectitude also focuses on the articulations of the spine and the theme of inclination.[10] Although Cavarero may not initially seem to be a philosopher of technology, we need only apply Wills’s insight— that the body’s spinal inclinations are never separate from technological acts of crafting and making—in order to see that Cavarero’s work on rectitude contributes to the study of technology. Similar to Wills’s approach to dorsality, Cavarero argues that the word ‘inclination’ “points to a geometrical imaginary” that is both the domain of “an I whose position is straight and vertical” and a confluence of righteousness and rectitude.[11] More clearly than Wills, she argues that the geometrical uprightness of the body has everything to do with ethics. The spine and straight back represent not only a confluence of the human and the technological (Wills), but also a kind of rectitude that seeks to dignify certain behaviors and rectify others (Cavarero), and thereby constructs a normative social habitus that provides members with prescriptive definitions of technology, moderation, and violence.

Throughout Inclinations, Cavarero sets forth  a  “postural  ethics” that questions the apprehensiveness about the concept of inclination that traditional philosophers tend to show. She shows how erotic and artistic inclinations are passions that threaten dominant philosophical perspectives which fear the disordering and excessive inclinations of love. She writes that “the most frequent and feared inclination, love, is an attack against the self ’s balance” and therefore threatens ways of understanding the self that want to keep it in a state of stasis or equilibrium.[12] For her, the concept of inclination is ethically and ontologically significant because it points to how the most basic faculties of human attention are reflected in bodily form.

Throughout her reflections on art, literature, philosophy, and religion, Cavarero rejects patriarchal structures of inclination that desire to regulate women’s bodies, and critiques Immanuel Kant’s rejection of children despite his notion of inclination (Neigung) as affection and desire.[13] Surveying figures as disparate as Virginia Woolf and Plato, Cavarero’s work fits loosely within the posthuman turn because she rejects the essential division between human and animal that animates postural ethics. Her basic notion that the problem of the inclination of the body is intertwined with the problems of morality, ethics, attention, and desire is most clearly expressed as she turns from Thomas Hobbes and Elias Canetti to Hannah Arendt and her concept of “natality.”[14]

Opposing the idea that mortality defines humanity, Arendt argues that natality— the fact that we are born—should be central to our understanding of the human condition. Rather than focusing on the fact that we will all die, she suggests that our ontological condition of being in the world should remind us that we “are not born in order to die but in order to begin.”[15] Arendt attempts to point a way beyond natural labor and productive work, and toward the good life as defined by actions that are not reducible to technological mediation, all while suggesting instead that natality and birth are essential for this kind of vitaactiva. Cavarero’s insight is that Arendt owes her conceptions to two Christian ideas—the messianic coming of the Christ child, and Augustine’s commentary on creation—and that this lineage is meaningful for political action.[16]

Cavarero shows how refocusing on natality rather than mortality overturns the linear notion that life is defined by a straight line heading toward death. Rather, the act of interrupting such a linear heading with a re- emphasis on birth (natality) reconfigures our inclinations by a miraculous shattering of predictable circularity.[17] Cavarero challenges Arendt’s seeming disregard for “mothers, nannies, and children” and sets forth a feminist “Schemata for a Postural Ethics” that argues that “Maternal inclination could work as a module for a different, more disruptive, and revolutionary geometry whose aim is to rethink the very core of community.”[18]

Cavarero’s feminist ethics of natality relies upon the idea that human inclination is as much about instrumental and technological means and ends as it is about narrative and ontological beginnings and ends. But the relationship between beginnings and ends that mortality and natality represent is not just metaphysically significant; it is historically and temporally significant as well. The narration of a life between the beginning and the end is structured by theopolitical ways of periodizing the time between natality (birth) and mortality (death).[19] How we imagine our bodily and technological inclinations in this interim period often depends upon influential technical terms and images. This connection between the inclinations of the spine and the technological making of history is taken up by Thomas Moynihan, an emerging voice in a new scholarly field called “future studies.”[20]

Spinal Catastrophism

In SpinalCatastrophism:A Secret History, Moynihan presents a dizzying historical catalogue of analogical connections between the human spine and natural history.[21] Contesting the idea that philosophical genealogies must be linear accounts of reasonable causes and effects, he suggests that instead of classical arguments that rely upon the suspicious unmasking of causes mistaken for reasons, there is another way to think about time and history based on a “hypergenealogy.”[22] Rather than thinking about history as being accountable to linearly ordered and reasonable explanations of events, Moynihan wants to re-narrate natural history in a way that privileges making rather than discovering.[23] We ought to “allow thought of the world to become a worldmaker,” while asking “What could be more historical than creation?”[24] For him, we do not discover history. We make it.

Moynihan’s work rests upon a basic idea seen already in Wills and Cavarero. While revisiting the relationship between planet and person, one of Moynihan’s central contentions is that “we are able to orient ourselves upon Earth’s mundane sphere only because of thecontingentfactof our vertical posture, our orthograde backbone.”[25] Like Wills and Cavarero, he too considers the spine to be far more important for thinking about technology, ethics, and history than is usually the case. Moynihan’s secret history suggests a deep figural connection between the spine, the earth, and the use of tools for human ends. He writes that “the human spine’s axis traces a continuation of Earth’s own radius” and furthermore that the uprightness of the spine and our “ability to exert cognizance and control on a planetary scale results from the same species-specific peculiarity as its [humanity’s] susceptibility to back pain.”[26] More playful and humorous than many academic texts seeking to understand humanity and technology, Moynihan’s book is dedicated to his scoliosis, a joke that if taken seriously can lead us further down the twisted path taken by these three thinkers: the same characteristic that allows human beings to exert technological power over space and time also makes them vulnerable to pain.

This reorientation of the terms of human nature and history leads Moynihan to conclude after much exploration that memory is held in the body and that history is held in objects. These two insights oppose the popular conception that ‘technology’ refers to neutral tools which reflect and respond to human desires without reciprocal influence. He concludes that “ever since we realised that the universe is one colossal chronometer – and every object an hourglass – the meaning of ‘inside’ and ‘out’ has never been the same....”[27] For Moynihan, space and time are not categories that can be abstracted from each other. Instead, they are deeply linked because spatial objects hold time within them. By playing with temporal indicators and mixing past and future tense, he gestures toward the central question that we began with: What should be the relationship between humanity and technology?

For Wills, Cavarero, and Moynihan there is no straightforward way of asking this question by dividing humanity and technology in two. These thinkers contend that it is too simple to consider humanity to be the subject and technology to be the object, or to think of humanity as a given and technology as something made. Rephrased, Moynihan’s caution is that we do not always know how to divide a human interior from a technological exterior, because the two are always being mediated by spinal means.

Uprightness,  Inclination,  and  Ethics

By disrupting clean dualisms commonly used to think about humanity and technology, and by challenging the desire for a definition of technology that satisfies instrumental desires, the three thinkers surveyed above reveal something essential about technology and humanity that those in the Anabaptist Mennonite tradition should respond to. Too often theological perspectives on technology remain comfortably within the discipline and do not feel obliged to respond to the claims of philosophical or secular thinkers. Below I attempt to provide one response to these three thinkers that also troubles the distinction between the religious and secular from a Mennonite subject-position.

What unites the works of Wills, Cavarero, and Moynihan is not only the notion that the spine is a technological part of the body or that we cannot divide up the world so easily by using the two terms ‘humanity’ and ‘technology,’ but also that our dorsality, inclination, and spinality are not morally neutral or reducible to linear and causal relationships between means and ends. It is tempting to think of technologies and tools as merely objects available for use by human beings that come with no pre-given moral orientation. However, if we stop thinking of technology in hard distinction from humanity, we can begin to see that technologies are in fact morally loaded and value laden. Tools and technologies teach us how to use them and they incline us toward forms of both instrumental use and violent abuse.

For  evidence  of  the  deep  connections  between  spinal  posture, technology, and ethics, we need only look to the work of French historian Georges Vigarello, who clearly traces the historical linkage between physical uprightness and moral rectitude from the sixteenth century onward.[28] The legacies of pedagogy, manners, propriety, and deportment rely upon the idea that posture both reflects and influences morality. We do not even need the connections that Vigarello draws to see the coercive and implicit ways that morality is both reflected and enforced through the regulation of the body. The very notion of propriety is based upon the idea that the physical act of standing up straight is linked with moral uprightness. The problem of posture takes center stage in most attempts—historical and contemporary— to be proper, unoffensive, and upright. Vigarello traces the history of this connection by showing its influence on the 16th-sixteenth century invention of ‘civility,’ a term used in our notion of civil society despite its connection with histories of slavery, violence, and colonial rule.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Vigarello argues, posture was a key indicator of moral standing. Citing the stigma associated with the hunched back and the connection between admonitions to sit up straight and the project of western education, he shows that there is no history of the body without a history of epistemology: “Sixteenth-century pedagogy could not avoid the general tendency of that century’s epistemology: duplication and similarity. In its proportions the body must evoke relationships that go beyond it.”[29] For him, “the body, just like uprightness, is ‘caught’ in a web of categories dominated by moral expectations.”[30]

An Anabaptist-Mennonite Response

How can the Anabaptist-Mennonite tradition  respond  to  the  problems and questions of technology if, as I am arguing, technology is not separate from =humanity, the body, or morality? Perhaps better! It is easy to think of technology as belonging to an external and instrumental domain that is value-neutral. But if we place technology at a distance, we can easily avoid the ways that tools and technologies both reflect and influence human interests, values, and desires. When we separate a technological exterior from a human interior, tools simply do what we want them to do, and technology is outside us and does not call us to be introspective about human nature and morality. But Wills, Cavarero, and Moynihan show that this false division between humanity and technology only obscures how we are already technologically entangled by virtue of having a spine. The moral and ethical stakes of the connection between technological tools and the human body become clearer still when we consider that the history of propriety and deportment is also connected to a violent civilizing process by which some behaviors and peoples were subjected to oppressive postures of slavery and servitude. Calls to be civil, to be upright, and to be righteous are propped up by histories of erect posture and the condemnation and forcible containment of those deemed to be crooked, bent, queer, and so forth.

If  the  problems  of  technology  cannot  be  sectioned  off  into  the domain of neutral tools, and if technology is instead related to how we carry our bodies and what turns we make between birth and death, then an Anabaptist-Mennonite response must consider how these terms are mediated while opposing the violent articulations that have often defined the confluence of technology and humanity. By resituating the problem of technology in relation to bodies and their morally saturated articulations, we can ask our basic question again, but differently: What human-technological articulations and mediations are violent? What violent articulations should we refuse? How can we work toward peace when, as French philosopher Jacques Derrida says, “Violence appears with articulation”?[31]

Derrida’s provocative assertion should prompt us to consider how pacifist desires to be separate from violence can miss how even the most innocuous inclinations and articulations of the spine contain within themselves both histories and possibilities of violent action. When I refer to violence here, I am thinking not of the typical violations of the body used as exemplars of the concept of violence (like war and murder) but of the norms and values defining the boundaries that are said to be crossed when violence is done. Violence is always defined in relation to value-laden boundaries and their transgression, so what matters for all definitions of violence is what normative boundaries are taken to be violated when violence is done.[32]

However, rather than speak from  a  theological  subject  position that would require a very different epistemology from that of my sources above, I will give an Anabaptist-Mennonite response that critiques violence by drawing from the minor philosophical and humanistic tradition within Mennonite thought.[33]Although examples of the humanist strain in Mennonite thinking include Clarence Bauman’s combination of Anabaptism and humanism,[34] Robert Friedmann’s existential Anabaptism,[35] J. Lawrence Burkholder’s philosophical rejection of moderation in favor of the excess of love, and ex-Mennonite Grace Jantzen’s critique of violence, for the sake of brevity I will focus on the latter two voices to articulate a response to the violent articulations within the confluence of technology and humanity.

It is not difficult to see that something is violated, and some violence is done, by the normative prescriptions of uprightness, rectitude, and their straight and narrow path. Rigid pedagogical prescriptions to conduct oneself in an upright manner are part of a long history of rectitudinal righteousness that relies upon the notion that moderation and temperance should restrain theexcessesofhumannature(includinginclinationstowardartandtheerotic). Furthermore, the desires for clear, stable, and linear definitions of ‘humanity’ and ‘technology’ are often based upon severe and austere sensibilities that seek to curb passion and restrain unruly bodies. Although Mennonites are certainly given to the maintenance of communities by appeals to rectitude and righteousness, I now turn to one exceptional Mennonite thinker whose engagement with the philosophical tradition challenges the assumption that uprightness and straight and narrow morality are commensurate with the gospels and Jesus Christ.

In his essay “The Generosity of Love,” J. Lawrence Burkholder disputes the Aristotelean notion that the virtuous life is conducted by moderating and mediating between extremes.[36]3Burkholder points out that some interpret the writer of Ecclesiastes in this way by arguing that moderation is the meaning of those verses that suggest there is a time for everything. But against Aristotle’s “golden mean” and against an interpretation of Ecclesiastes 3:1-4 as a limitation on excess, Burkholder suggests that there is no biblical basis for living the moderate life that mediates between two stable extremes. Instead, both radical politics and the imitation of Christ demand excessive and generous forms of love and mutual aid. Contrasting Aristotle’s limited and limiting philiawith the unlimited excess of Christ’s agape, Burkholder calls his readers to a boundless love that is both the “final norm of Christian ethics” but also something profoundly human.[37] He points to the excesses of giving, forgiving, and hoping, and calls readers to have unreasonable hopes for the future. His faith that “hopes all things” is not bound to existing reasons and facts but instead “penetrates the world of facts to detect and create living possibilities.”[38]

Burkholder resists seeing the world as defined by set relations of normativity, and he  concludes that “the world is neither a closed system of causality nor a purely human drama of will and flesh and blood (‘human all too human’).”[39]   This places him in continuity with the ‘posthuman’ thinkers surveyed above, because he opposes forms of mediation that try to take temperate middle-paths between supposedly opposed terms. For Wills, Cavarero, and Moynihan important dorsal, rectitudinal, and spinal inclinations challenge simple divisions between humanity and technology. Similarly, Burkholder’s refusal of approaches that dignify ‘both-sides’ or seek a golden mean align him with these thinkers because he refuses to construe his religious and political values as a search for moderation between extremes.

Burkholder considers the world to  belong  to  God  and  asserts that God “turns the night of despair into the dawn of a new day,” but he admits that this kind of hope is “intemperate.” Whereas this unbalanced and excessive temperance hopes only in “some things,” he argues that love hopes in “all things” while “depending on God.”[40] But not all Mennonites have remained within the fold of this hope. For some ex-Mennonites the answer to the regulating demands of rectitude and propriety are too violent to stay within ecclesial bounds. Grace Jantzen, who grew up in a Mennonite Brethren church but later became a Quaker, articulates a different critique of uprightness and rectitudinal righteousness, from outside of the bounds of the Christian church and Mennonite identity—although she retains some admiration for the peace church tradition in her late work.

Summarized well in her 2002 article, “Roots of Violence, Seeds of Peace,” Jantzen’s final project Death and the Displacement of Beauty explained how violence persists in the common-sense world of the cultural habitus.[41] Her argument, which draws upon Arendt and Cavarero, is that we should refocus our understanding of human nature on natality rather than allow the obsession with death govern our thinking. Rather than define humanity by mortality (that we will all die), Jantzen initiates a careful process of focusing on natality (that we all have been born) without seeking to displace or replace one term with the other. Deeply resonant with the Mennonite commitment to peace and justice, Jantzen challenges Derrida’s notion that even the most basic articulations are violent.[42] Her work centers on addressing the roots of violence in our everyday ways of thinking, while planting seeds of peace by emphasizing newness, creativity, birth, and the positive status of difference. She moves beyond Arendt and Cavarero by critiquing the long legacy of violence in the history of the western world. She argues against appeals to human nature that make violence seem natural, normal, and neutral, and does so in a way that, like Burkholder, refuses to simply mediate between established oppositions. For Jantzen, humanity is not defined by either a peaceable or violent nature, and this means that peace and violence are mediated in her work in ways that reject the violent displacement of one term by another. Elsewhere I argue that the unique contribution of her late work lies in her ability to challenge violence without repeating violent patterns of displacement that consider things, concepts, and ideas to exist in zero-sum terms or at the expense of each other.[43] Such a perspective would benefit Mennonite responses to technology—particularly those that see technology as an enemy or other that supposedly threatens to displace theological values.

Like Burkholder, Jantzen does not see either opposition or moderation between extremes as appropriate goals for those who want to resist violence or work for peace. Against neutral mediations that seek to find something positive in both sides of a political argument, and against polarizing desires to choose sides and defend them, her work is defined by a careful mediation of key terms like ‘natality’ and ‘mortality’ through which she refocuses and re-emphasizes our attention to birth and beauty without ignoring the realities of death and violence. Both Jantzen and Burkholder articulate interesting and exceptional Mennonite-related positions that chart a third way apart from either-or ways of thinking. What is exceptional is that they do not take recourse to mediating positions that try to stand in the middle, and they avoid the temptation to synthesize opposing terms or positions in ways that deny their real difference. Instead, Jantzen and Burkholder give indications of an Anabaptist Mennonite humanism that responds to the problems of technology without moderation or displacement.

Conclusion

The histories of humanity and technology are inextricably intertwined. They are not even one entity but multiple and complex. For Wills, dorsality enjoins us to look back and see that we have never been without technology. We cannot put ourselves at a safe analytical distance from technology that would free us from considering human nature in tandem with the problem of technology. For Cavarero, the historical equation of rectitude and righteousness requires a postural ethics that opposes rigid and linear ways of thinking about life narratives between birth and death. Cavarero’s inclinations indicate that something is lost when our conception of human life is bound to linear narratives of progress and providence, or circular narratives of habit and routine. Better that our stories would be interrupted by birth, even messianic birth. Moynihan too disputes the assumption that natural history can be explained by linear and teleological narrations of events that cleanly attribute meaning to the past by seeing causes as reasons. His revision of genealogical critique shows that the history of human action relies upon the same reason that we can have back pain: the spinal column. Each thinker surveyed in the first part of this article points to the fact that the catastrophic violence that humanity has wreaked upon itself and the world is not separate from human technéand making because we have always made instrumental and technological use of ourselves and others. The history of the regulation of the body by training the spine to be straight, and the intertwining of rectitude and righteousness, show that the technologies of power used to keep people in line are not different from the technologies of violence used to wage war.

The Mennonite humanism represented by Burkholder and Jantzen opposes the violent inclinations of humanity-technology. Burkholder’s excessive love bears a striking resemblance to Cavarero’s interruptive love wherein new birth exceeds linear and cyclical visions of time and history. Jantzen’s emphasis on natality extends Cavarero’s revision of Arendt and refuses to use displacement or linear succession in attempts to solve the problems of violence. Both Burkholder’s challenge to moderation and Jantzen’s argument for a non-displacing emphasis on natality give key resources for thinking about our violent inclinations, and in closing I draw from their work the following two questions.

First, is moderation the best guide for the use of technology? Many popular approaches suggest engaging with technology in moderation. But if the real problem is not found in mediating between the two stable categories of humanity and technology, but in examining how human-technological confluences and articulations do violence, then perhaps the focus on moderation does not provide what we need. For Mennonites who seek to follow the gospels, Burkholder shows how the excessive love of Christ does not translate into a moderate and conciliatory approach to moral problems that neutrally mediates between extremes or dualisms. Instead, it is all about excessive and generous forms of love that hopes in all things.

Second, are the images of erect posture or the straight and narrow path the best ways to imagine the good life? Given how rectitude and the rhetoric of uprightness have been used to violently coerce people into rigid and codified systems of both religious and secular morality, is it not incumbent upon those who concern themselves with Mennonite life and technological problems to question whether things can or should be made straight?

The history of humanity and technology cannot be told in a straightforward and linear fashion that keeps humanity on one side and technology on the other. Why then should the narration of a life story, and its periodization by theological and political means, rely on linear images that put life in the service of death by emphasizing mortality at the expense of natality? Perhaps it is time to give up the straight and narrow path and be honest that life is rarely conducted linearly, and furthermore to retire the terminology of uprightness because of its intimations of respectability that avoid the scandalous excesses of Christian love.

In light of the technological insights of Wills, Cavarero, and Moynihan, and in conclusion, I suggest that we may find it instructive to think deeply about the distinctive third ways of Burkholder and Jantzen that mediate between entangled terms; articulate, and extend beyond, the desire for moderation and displacement; and challenge the notion that our humanity and technology can be divided so cleanly.*

MaxwellKennelis a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, and the author of Postsecular History: Political Theology and the Politics of Time (PalgraveMacmillan,2022).

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ABSTRACT: The legacy of debates on the ethics of technology is long, but the pace at which technologies are harming humans and the planet is accelerating. This article begins by offering an overview of new technologies not originally built as weapons that can be weaponized to cause great harm, and then surveys Anabaptist and peacebuilding ethics that can inform how individuals and communities use technology. Next, the author describes how these ethics can be operationalized to design technologies that anticipate harms and facilitate empathy, dialogue, and deliberation. The article closes by naming specific “tech ethics” emerging from Anabaptism and peacebuilding.

Introduction

In the 1600s, early Anabaptist leader Jacob Ammann instructed his followers to reject the use of buttons to fasten clothing. Armed forces used shiny button on their uniforms. Ammann believed the technology of buttons was a prideful, secular mark. Ammann’s followers, now called Amish, were instructed to use hook and fastener to bind clothing, which they continue to do today. The Anabaptist Amish, who became known as Häftlers(hook- and-eyers), split with the Anabaptist Mennonites, who were known as the Knöpflers(button people).

New technologies pride themselves on connecting humanity. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook (now Meta), describes the technology company’s goal as “a social mission to make the world more open and connected.”[1] These technologies are like shiny buttons on a military uniform, a mark of secular life with the illusion of connecting the social fabric. While the decorative brass military button was mostly for show, Facebook is less benign. While it does connect people across the planet, it also increases addiction and depression, spreads disinformation, false conspiracies, and hate, and undermines democratic elections. Repressive governments hire troll armies to use social media to attack human rights activists. Facebook is a weapon of mass destruction causing a “techtonic shift” in human relations.[2] How do Anabaptists today determine how to relate to new technologies

like Facebook? This paper begins with a brief overview of new technologies that were not built as weapons but can be weaponized to cause great harm. Next, the paper provides a broad overview of Anabaptist and peacebuilding ethics that can inform how individuals and communities use technology. The paper then describes how these ethics can be operationalized also by engineers working to design new technologies. The paper closes with a list of the tech ethics emerging from Anabaptism and peacebuilding.

Weaponizable Technologies

The legacy of debates on the ethics of technology is long. But the pace at which technologies are harming humans and the planet is accelerating. Before exploring Anabaptist and peacebuilding ethics related to technology, it is important to first appreciate the scope and scale of harms related to technology.

Technology is a potent force in human history. Nuclear technologies provide energy sources but also weapons to kill. The US military funded and helped to build the internet, with the goal of improving communication and coordination in times of crisis, and using digital surveillance on foreign publics.[3] Technologies such as Google, online markets like Amazon, and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter were designed for non- military, civilian use. People use social media to communicate with family and friends, to spread messages of peace and coexistence, to offer webinars on women’s empowerment or preventing gang violence, and to create a sense of shared experience around the world. However, people can also weaponized these technologies to mobilize hate, spread disinformation, organize gang fights, distribute violent pornography, and recruit new members to violent extremist groups. New technologies are low cost and widely accessible, which democratize access to these weapons of mass destruction. Cyber warfare attacks can destroy national health, energy, or transportation infrastructure with little to no warning.[4]

Weaponizable technology such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are unleashing a “post-truth era” where false and inflammatory posts  on  social  media  travel  faster  and  further  than  truth,  distorting political processes and polarizing already divided societies. Social media platforms like Facebook profit from surveilling every individual user and creating databanks of psychometric data useful for commercial and political advertisers wanting to target specific audiences to sell their ideas or products.[5]

Artificial  intelligence  has  already  exacerbated  surveillance  and systemic racism and discrimination against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). Some scholars describe this as a “super threat” against marginalized groups.[6] In RaceAfterTechnology, Ruha Benjamin explain how bias and oppression are built into so many of the algorithms technology companies use to optimize profits.[7]   States like Russia, China, and Iran are using social media to surveil and repress democracy activists in their own  countries  with  troll  armies.  Digital  authoritarianism  is  increasing, particularly during the pandemic as government-backed mass surveillance and repression has increased.[8]

New technologies are vastly changing the ways humans communicate and gather information. Compared to legacy media such as radio, television, or print news, a message on social media can travel faster, reaching millions of people around the planet instantaneously. Whereas legacy media’s gatekeepers filter public information, digital technologies enable a single person to instantly post a false message about Covid-19 to millions of people across the world. People can use digital technology to post a message on any topic with near total freedom of content, unhampered by editors and with no or low cost.[9] These technologies also allow technology companies and governments to track users’ locations, friends, interests, and digital activities. Some governments have used the pandemic to greatly increase social media surveillance and repression of political opponents.[10]

The most popular social media platforms operate on “surveillance capitalism;” a profit model based on extracting private information and selling it to advertisers.[11] Access to most social media platforms is free because users are the product, not the client. Political and corporate advertisers pay platforms for access to users. Platforms collect information from them about their interests and identities. The more information a platform can gather about users, the more they profit. Advertisers are able to target audiences more receptive to their ideas or products, making advertising on social media more effective than on legacy media. Platform designers use neuroscience and psychological research to keep users on platforms longer with emotionally engaging colors and buttons and algorithms that show users sensational content. Some scholars argue social media addiction is built into the design. Algorithms on social media platforms show targeted users highly emotional material such as hate speech, disinformation and conspiracy theories because this material may capture their attention.[12]

Anabaptist Theology Relevant to Technology

People in many religious traditions have wrestled with how to respond to new technologies. Anabaptist ethics toward technology emerge from a repressive historical context. Anabaptists attempted to read both Hebrew and Christian scriptures to inform a theology that reflected more of Jesus’ teachings and less of the Empire Christianity reflected in both Catholic and Protestant theologies. Anabaptists rejected the widespread notion that belief alone was sufficient. For them, scriptures informed both theological beliefs and practical ethics for living in the world. Anabaptist theology and ethics are relevant to technology in at least three ways.

First, Anabaptists demanded the “priesthood of all believers,” which was a sort of self-determination to interpret the scriptures. They rejected the  authority  of  both  Protestant  and  Catholic  leaders,  believing  these leaders’ interests in holding political power distorted their interpretation of scripture. Anabaptists believed individuals should decide for themselves what they believed and not be forcibly baptized as infants. Anabaptists get their name from their opposition to infant baptism and their insistence on adult baptism, as only adults may decide for themselves what they believe and if they want to follow Jesus’ teachings. Anabaptists demanded agency and empowerment to read the scriptures, to do their own theology to interpret them, and to determine the ethical implications of scriptures in their life. This ethic of human agency has relevance for assessing technologies today, because new weaponizable technologies, described in the next section, too often undermine human capacities by attempting to manipulate and surveil.

Second, Anabaptists developed an ethic of nonconformity to the  world. They questioned political and religious authorities but trusted the Anabaptist  community  and  its  process  of  deliberation  and  dialogue  to make decisions on both theology and ethics. Anabaptists came to see the outside world as a threat to their church. This countercultural status plays out differently among different types of Anabaptists, as is discussed below. Mennonite pacifism and peacebuilding based on the ethic of enemy love and doing good to others continues quietly around the world despite its resistance to the methods of modern state warfare. This ethic of nonconformity has relevance for how people use technologies today, recognizing that collective action is necessary to address the growing tide of disinformation and hateful

rhetoric on social media technologies.

Third, Anabaptist theology emphasized Jesus’ teachings in Matthew 5-7 on loving enemies and doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. Anabaptists believed this teaching needed to be translated into their lives by refusing to harm others and refusing to fight on behalf of the church. Anabaptist theology on these texts has evolved over the centuries from nonresistance, a refusal to fight in state wars, to an embrace of pacifism, which is more than just a refusal to fight. Pacifism is literally an active love of peace. Some Anabaptists have pursued the practical implications of Matthew 5-7 to call for nonviolent action to address injustice and active peacemaking to prevent or reduce violent conflict. Mennonite peacebuilding and conflict transformation emerged from this evolution of Anabaptist theology and ethics of loving enemies and doing good. The peacebuilding field centers this ethic by seeking inclusion and empowerment to ensure that all people have dignity and agency. This ethic of building peace has relevance for designing technologies today that could build social cohesion and reduce polarization between groups.

Anabaptist and Peacebuilding Approaches to Tech Ethics

Anabaptists apply these three ethics in distinct ways. Each of these offers insight and is relevant to applying Anabaptist ethics to technology.

First, some conservative Anabaptists, such as the Amish and Bruderhof, apply a strict review of any new technology to evaluate its impact on the community before the technology is adopted for use. They seek to be faithful through practicing nonconformity by separating  themselves from society, and judge technologies in part by the impact they will have on secularizing their community or breaking their internal relationships with each other. These ‘plain’ Anabaptists are not naïve, or anti-technology Luddites. They are careful and prefer to choose technologies only with the test of time to decide whether they will benefit or harm their communities. While television is forbidden, washing machines may be allowed. While owning cars is forbidden, hiring someone else for transportation to the hospital is not. Some technologies impact the community’s need for collective work together, while others do not. The community decides which technologies are accepted and which are not. The Amish and Bruderhof approach to technology can be described as “Go slow, be careful, and check with the community.”[13]

Second, some progressive branches of Anabaptist Mennonites have tended to adopt new technologies without intensive community review but rather with a more individualized ethic that evaluates potential harms or unintended consequences of technology. Mennonites concerned about living simply and environmental sustainability, for example, may eschew expensive cars in favor of bicycles. Some Mennonites judge technologies based on their impacts on the wider human community. A Mennonite-based organization known as Project Ploughshares, for example, grew out of concerns for the impact of technological warfare such as nuclear weapons.

Third, conservative and progressive Anabaptists participate in peacebuilding, defined here as efforts to build bridges across social divisions and to foster social cohesion and social justice.[14] Mennonites, Amish, and Bruderhof often emphasize Jesus’ teachings on loving enemies and refusing to use violence against others, despite significant departures from this ethic related to German Nationalism, Nazism, antisemitism, and racism found in the Anabaptist community.[15] The Amish have a record of forgiveness of those who have attacked their community. The Bruderhof have supported reconciliation movements in a variety of countries. Mennonites have an active peace and justice ministry, and academic programs in peacebuilding. Anabaptist ethics are also reflected in the field of peacebuilding. These ethics are not unique to Anabaptist peacebuilding. There is nothing exclusively Anabaptist or Christian about building relationships and peace between people. Peacebuilding is the work of all religions.

As noted earlier, the Latin root of the word “religion” communicates the social function of religion to connect people. Technology companies like Facebook say they also have this mission to “connect the world.” Peacebuilding brings an ethic that technology should serve humanity and should build social cohesion. Social cohesion builds public trust in the legitimacy of institutions and community norms and laws. For example, Anabaptist-affiliated Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo hosts the “Peacetech Living-Learning Community” where students study ethical frameworks focused on how the design and evaluation of technologies impacts human relationships and communities.

Peacebuilding insists that there are no humans with more value than others. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, classism, ageism, homophobia, and all other forms of discrimination degrade human agency and dignity. For Anabaptists, a theology of peacebuilding denounces these offences but commits to active work toward full human dignity for all. Peacebuilding pays attention to and advocates for the well-being of the oppressed. This ethic is relevant to technology by insisting that it should protect human dignity. For example, researchers have written extensively about how technology algorithms at Google or Amazon seem to reinforce racism and denigrate human dignity.[16]

Peacebuilding walks toward conflict and difference, not away from it. Peacebuilding begins with active listening to an opponent. Anabaptists point to this ethic as stemming from Jesus’s modeling and teaching to love those who are different from us or do us harm. Jesus did not live within the purity paradigm that kept others away from people considered “unpure,” such as people of different ethnic groups, women, tax collectors, and prostitutes. Listening and acknowledging another person’s experiences changes the dynamics of conflict, creating an opening for transformation. These ethics have relevance to the ways people are using new technologies to cause harm. Technology should enable listening and social justice for all. Peacebuilding groups such as Build Up are experimenting with how to use technologies to support efforts to help people listen to and engage with people who are different.[17]

Applying Tech Ethics

Technology companies have at least three ethical responsibilities related to peacebuilding and Anabaptist ethics discussed in this article. First, technology companies are responsible for  anticipating  possible  harms that might occur as a result of the design of their products. Second, they are responsible for designing products that serve the good of humanity. Third, they are accountable for harms that occur as a result of intentional or unintentional product design.

These three ethics form the core of a new field of “peace engineering,” which is an emerging nexus between technology, engineering, and peacebuilding. Whether designing a social media platform, a city, a building, a healthcare system, or a mask to wear during a pandemic, new technologies and inventions impact relationships between people.[18] Peace engineering uses an interdisciplinary approach that employs “the application of science and engineering principles to promote and support peace,” as defined by the International Federation of Educational Engineering Societies (IFEES). Engineers themselves developed the concept of peace engineering[19] as they witnessed the unintended impacts of their efforts, and they envisioned what engineering might look like if it set out to have positive impacts on human relations.[20] A new engineered product or technology can alter the dynamics of a community, either creating  more conflict or improving intergroup relationships. The primary goals of peace engineering are to create new products or technologies that prevent, mitigate, and help people recover from violence and support sustainable community well-being.

Designing Technologies that Anticipate Harms

The first ethic of any innovation is to anticipate potential harms. All human behavior may cause unintentional harm. The fields of medicine and humanitarian assistance, for example, invest significant resources in assessment and planning to avoid unintended consequences. The concepts of “do no harm” shape medical ethics as well as many other fields. The concept of “conflict sensitivity” refers to the use of assessment tools to anticipate how a new program or technology might negatively impact a particular context. Conflict sensitivity starts by analyzing the local context (such as the country in which a social media platform operates) to anticipate ways the platform may be abused or contribute to social divisions or violence within that context. Social media companies can use conflict assessment tools to advance their capacity for conflict sensitivity.

Design principles can anticipate and attempt to reduce harms with assessment tools to design new technologies that take into consideration these questions: Who are the stakeholders who will be affected by a new technology? What in the wider context might be affected by it? What are potential unintended impacts of it? What can be done to minimize potential harmful impacts of an engineered solution? These questions reflect the Anabaptist ethics of human agency and dignity by including more voices in assessing technology impacts on human relationships.

A variety of organizations are producing ethical guidelines for technology companies to assess their impacts. For example, the UN has produced a series of reports that relate human rights laws to technology products. The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University directs a program on Ethics in Technology Practice and publishes “ethics toolkits” aimed at technology companies.[21] The Toda Peace Institute in partnership with JustPeace Labs produced a review of ethical guidelines for PeaceTech.[22]

Designing Technologies that Facilitate Empathy, Dialogue, and Deliberation

No engineering project is neutral. Engineers typically design products with principles such as profitability, ease of use, improving quality of life, cost effectiveness, and visual attractiveness. As corporations often focus on profit with little care for other impacts of their products, a socially responsible business community has emerged to promote a “triple bottom line” that includes assessing the impact of a product on “people, planet and profit.”[23] Peace engineering introduces two additional sets of design principles: to reduce violent conflict, and to maximize social cohesion or “peace.” These principles reflect the Anabaptist ethics of human agency, dignity, and enemy love.

Peacebuilders also have recognized the limits of their practice. If the design of a social media platform can dramatically increase or decrease levels of violence, peace, and social cohesion, then peacebuilders need to be talking with tech engineers. Paul Heidebrecht at Conrad Grebel University College’s Kindred Credit Union Centre for Peace Advancement notes that the innovation process itself is a critical location for bringing ethics to technology design. The culture, norms, and process of innovation is a critical location for engaging engineers and entrepreneurs about ethics. Reflecting on the “tech for good” industry, Heidebrecht rightly asks how to define what is good for society and who has the power to evaluate what is good.[24]

The Center for Humane Technology (CHT) aims to inspire “humane design” of social media technology. CHT is encouraging a “design renaissance” that emphasizes “non-extraction-based design decisions and business models” that might empower people to manage their attention toward activities that benefit the social good, both personal and collective. Unlike social media platforms that have a profit motive to keep users on the platform longer, companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Samsung that make the devices that run social media platforms could design safeguards for human security since their profit model does not depend upon users sharing information online. Technology companies can design their products to protect our minds and society, and to enhance human capacity for “time well spent” rather than distraction.[25]

Peace engineering design principles begin with conflict analysis or assessment.[26] Conflict analysis provides a structured research method to determine who holds a stake in a new technology, what interests motivate them, what forms of power they leverage with or over other stakeholders, what grievances or interests they aim to address, and when and where they are affected by a new technology. Design principles for maximizing social cohesion and peace include the following questions: What divisions already exist within the community or society that will be impacted by a new technology? How will a new technology impact those most marginalized in a society? How can a new technology help to foster social cohesion, human rights, and dignity of each member of the community? How can a new technology help to promote a shared vision and increase social cohesion?

To answer some of these questions, technology companies could consult with experts who specialize in peacebuilding, facilitation, dialogue, and social cohesion.[27] Social media platforms can be designed or redesigned to better serve humanity. Technology companies can use their vast power, resources, and influence to distribute digital media literacy products to educate, socialize, and remind people of key lessons. Such literacy can also take the form of national programs, radio spots, television spots, and public service campaigns on topics such as responding to fact-checking, regulating emotions, confronting hate speech, and depolarizing by listening and building rapport before seeking to persuade.[28]

Accountability  for  Harms

Who holds technology companies accountable for harms to society? The companies and their shareholders are ultimately responsible for preventing and addressing harms. Some technology companies are working toward ethical frameworks. Microsoft’s “Digital Peace Now” campaign urges governments to protect human rights. Microsoft’s Digital Civility campaign asks tech users to sign onto four principles: live the golden rule; respect differences; pause before replying; and stand up for [oneself] and others.[29]

But without civil society and government oversight, technology companies may not be motivated to hold themselves accountable for public harms. Some governments are actively seeking to address social media threats with new regulations and initiatives to support digital literacy. The scale of social media threats requires a global regulatory policy and framework to address the relatively unchecked power of technology companies. Some governments are using new cyber laws to further repress civil society. Government regulation should ensure global humanitarian principles for digital space so that any new legislation is respectful of human rights and freedom of expression.

The Center for Humane Technology (CHT) is developing proposals for governments to put “attention extraction on their balance sheets and create better protections for consumers.”[30] Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin argues that social media companies should be treated as “information fiduciaries” to protect and care for the public’s access to accurate information.[31] The need for regulation is gaining traction. French President Emmanuel Macron, Microsoft, and other technology companies launched the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace.[32] Microsoft is calling for a Digital Geneva Convention that would create new international rules to protect the public from state threats in cyberspace.[33] Others call for a Digital Social Contract.[34]

Social media companies could be required to acquire a government license to operate. Increased regulation might require that technology companies fund a “risk audit” for operating in every country. The companies’ ignorance often seems paired with an arrogance about not knowing what they do not know. A risk audit would require extensive consultations to listen to a wide range of stakeholders with diverse experiences and abilities to anticipate negative impacts. Governments could participate in calculating and pricing  insurance premiums  for  social media  companies  based on the financial impact and risk of chaos, violence, and political instability stemming from their business. Regulation might include user protections and requirements for hotlines to respond to crises such as posts threatening violence. Some countries have already brought lawsuits against social media companies as a result of company failures to comply with legal standards.

Governments could also tax social media companies  based  on their impact on violence or democratic institutions. Legislators could justify taxation because social media platforms spread social and political “information pollution” or disinformation that undermines social relationships and political institutions. Taxes could be channeled to fund not- for-profit offline news sources, including public-access news, information “trusts,” and civic media. Just as polluting corporations have to pay taxes toward funds that go to clean up air and water pollution, social media companies could be taxed for their contribution to information pollution, since a functioning democracy requires information.[35]

Civil Society’s Digital Peacebuilding

Civil  society  is  already  implementing  peacebuilding  ethics  to  address threats from new social media technologies. Some civil society groups are promoting digital media literacy to help the public use technology with a greater understanding of how it works and how to detect disinformation. For example, the peacebuilding NGO Search for Common Ground developed a “cyberguardian” program in Sri Lanka to promote empower youth to combat hate speech online.[36] Some civil society groups are developing memes, bots, or digital content that fosters greater social cohesion. For example, the Toda Peace Institute’s Digital Peace Factory offered cash prizes for the public to create memes that supported social cohesion during the 2020 US election.[37]

Civil society can also be involved in helping to ensure that technology contributes to the public good. The peacebuilding organization Build Up is experimenting with depolarization initiatives on Twitter and Facebook in their program called The Commons.[38] In western Europe, tens of thousands of volunteer “upstanders” support victims of digital harassment and misogynist, racist, and anti-immigrant hate speech in the #IchBinHier (#Iamhere) civil society movement.[39] In Latvia, Lithuania, and Ukraine, civil society movements counter Russian troll farms that plant false and divisive stories on social media. Russia’s goal is to undermine democratic institutions and increase polarization. Lithuania’s volunteer citizen army of “Elves” works together to protect themselves against Russian “industrial-scale disinformation.”[40] These are just a sampling of the many ways civil society peacebuilding groups are innovating responses to digital threats.

Conclusion

This article has identified how Anabaptist theology and peacebuilding ethics are relevant for addressing technological threats to human health and safety, and has reviewed several specific ethics to consider:

1. Ensure a tech ethic of human agency to ensure that technologies do not undermine human capacities by attempting to manipulate and surveil.
2. Practice an individual and community ethic of nonconformity by evaluating potential harms or unintended consequences of technology and to evaluate its impact on the community before the technology is adopted for use.
3. Commit to a tech ethic of building peace today fosters relationships, dignity, and builds social cohesion to reduce polarization between groups.

The final section of the article has argued that these ethics can be operationalized by designing technologies that anticipate harms and facilitate empathy, dialogue, and deliberations, and by holding technology companies accountable for the harms that do happen. Like the shiny buttons on military uniforms, new technologies appeal to the human desire for social affirmation and recognition. Humans seem to love new gadgets, especially ones that make life easier or more enjoyable. But when problems of addiction, hate speech, polarization, and violent extremism first started showing up on social media, some observers rushed to argue that the problems of these technologies could be fixed with more technology. While this may be true in part, humans are not likely to prevent these harms through technology alone.*

LisaSchirchis the Richard G. Starmann, Sr. Professor of the Practice in Peace Studies, at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, as of July 1, 2022. She is also a Senior Research Fellow for the Toda Peace Institute, Tokyo, Japan.

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