No .0075 : Book Reviews
Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age
Reviewed by Michael G. Barnhart Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York, Published on the Buddhist Channel, Feb 3, 2005


New York (USA) -- Perhaps one of the most interesting, paradoxical, and-in Peter Hershock's way of thinking, in Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age-- predictable aspects of the digital "revolution" is the degree to which information technology becomes less a means to an end and more an end in itself.

Take, for example, the humble phenomenon of the "tech no-bore." Such people, having acquired some new electronic gizmo, spend all their time talking about the thing, especially savoring such conversations with like-minded techno-bores, who go on in equal and endless length about their latest toys. Rather than becoming a tool for organizing one's affairs, the digital assistant becomes one's main affair. Or, consider the case of the Internet. Although the "Web" is supposed to put us in touch with each other, say, by making e-mail possible, we find ourselves either unable to cope with the avalanche of mail that comes over the portal and thus unable to respond to it all (or at all), or we spend much more time on our mail than we ever did, thus making the mail itself a nuisance and consequently much less useful than formerly.Of course, none of this is unique to computers and the digital workplace. The same complaints have been voiced in regard to cars, television (and radio, too), modern medicine, and industrialization-in fact, the whole gamut of innovations that we label "technology." Indeed, although information technology is Hershock's main target, it represents only the perfection of a form that has been developing for some time and which he often refers to with the phrase "technologies of control." That is, cars, televisions, blenders, can openers, and computers are tools that are put to use in order to make our lives easier; they accomplish this purpose by putting some element of the world, some range of things, more directly under our control and, importantly, by limiting our involvement with them as well. We make things more tractable, more subject to our wanting (as distinct, Hershock says, from our desiring, which involves an element of respect for the desired), and thus more an extension of ourselves rather than obdurate and resistant things. For example, insofar as a sledgehammer makes breaking rocks easier, it makes rocks and their sizes and shapes more a function of our will, less a reflection of their nature, and distances us also from the material thing. To touch a rock with one's hands is an entirely different experience, a much more intimate experience than touching it with a hammer. In a curious way, says Hershock, the rock becomes more "iconic." In other words, it becomes more representation-our representation-and less a thing-in-itself. The computer and its screen "icons" simply push this envelope to its logical end, reducing all things to "buttons" that can be pushed at will, as our wants dictate.The more things become iconic, the more they become an extension of our will. But the more they become an extension of our will, the more they become "us." That is, insofar as I successfully "technologize" my world, the more my world becomes simply a reflection of what I want. The situation is not so different from that of the absolute dictator who purges all dissenting voices from his or her realm. The realm becomes the leader-Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany, for example. And as we well know from Orwell, such power corrupts absolutely and completely, corrupts both the ruler and the ruled, reducing citizens and ruler to an infantile level. Two related phenomena attend such a development, Hershock tells us: narcissism and nihilism. We become more narcissistic because we become more obsessed with our wants as a reflection of our world. We become more nihilistic because our world of wants is intrinsically meaningless: it reflects what we want, not why we want it, no larger purpose. In short, we become trapped in our own individuality, the lone consumer pointing and clicking at the screen of iconic wants. Modern information technology "colonizes our consciousness" just as the technology of industrialization and imperialism colonized the "vernacular" worlds of traditional African and Asian peoples. As thoroughly colonized and solipsistic techno-bores, captivated by our own technology, we become capable only of increasingly narrow conversations with like-minded others infatuated with (Oh Dear!) even more dazzling toys than our own. Quick! Click on an upgrade!Hershock's point here is that from a Buddhist perspective all this should appear profoundly troubling. Why? True freedom eludes us. The more we have of what we want, the more we want. We are never free of want, and therefore we are never free. We lose what Hershock calls our "creative virtuosity" and our "dramatic interdependence" with others and with reality itself. Everything becomes a postmodern sign of ourselves, and this is truly an impoverished way to live. Buddhism, Hershock tells us, is primarily concerned with assisting us in the effort to connect with others, to appreciate spontaneously things as they are, not just as we want them to be, because Buddhism teaches liberation from the ego as the only path out of suffering. (Actually, Hershock dislikes the term "suffering" as a translation of dukkha, preferring "troubling," which he interprets as "things going out of kilter" [108]). Although technology attempts to remedy our suffering (the "out of kilter" nature of things) by making things more tractable, from a Buddhist perspective this simply intensifies the problem. We do not suffer because of things. We suffer because we want things to be a certain way, in light of who we take ourselves to be, what our needs and wants are-in short, because of our ego. Consequently, Buddhist "technology," or meditative practice, is aimed not at controlling things, or at control at all for that matter, but at the self, at unfixating the self's concern with itself. As a consequence, Buddhism runs completely against the grain of modern technological fixes for our problems. As Hershock puts it, Buddhism aims at affecting the narrative structure in which we understand our lives, at making that narrative structure more responsive to the interdependent world of which we are a part, not at making the world more responsive to our narrative structure. The narcissism and nihilism that invariably accompany a technological perspective are an anathema to a committed Buddhist."So, what can we do?" we ask. Two sorts of responses are ruled out: neither a technological response nor a "green" response will relieve our suffering. That is, it is fruitless to rely on technology to relieve suffering, because technology is driven by want, and wanting an end to our suffering is still wanting. More computer access is more access to things, as anyone who has "surfed the Net" will tell you. Of course, one might argue that there are wants and then there are needs. Sometimes the Net meets certain needs, such as for access to health experts that are locally unavailable. For, say, a villager in a far-flung location, this could mean the difference between good medical advice and none at all. Or how about the networking and sharing that social activists in very different parts of the Globe are able to achieve by virtue of computer networks. Hershock's response is that although these may be "useful" purposes to which networks can be put, we risk certain philosophical assumptions that, from a Buddhist standpoint, are not worth making. This point also explains Hershock's curious hostility to "the greening of technology," that is, using technology solely for socially and environmentally conscientious purposes.Specifically what Hershock takes aim at is what he calls "the moral transparency" thesis. This is the point of view that claims technology-in-itself is morally transparent, as having no moral significance when considered apart from the uses we make of it. Such an attitude ignores the colonizing effect technology has on our consciousness. It grabs our attention by providing the setting in which we focus on things-and, again, that setting is defined as one of control and iconic reduction, where things become mere symbols of what we want out of them. The technological setting itself conveys such a value to things, and, in Buddhist terms, this is an egocentric value. Consequently, any technological involvement with things, including a "green" one that picks the "right" technologies and their uses, will fail to challenge the mentality of control, what one might call "the dictatorship of wants."Not surprisingly, therefore, .Philosophy East and WestVol. 51, No. 3 (July 2001)pp. 414-418Copyright 2001 by University of Hawaii PressReinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age. By Peter D. Hershock. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 308.NOTES[1] For example, see political scientist Ronald Inglehart's Modernization and Post-- modernization: Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). [back to text][2] See Shunryu Suzuki's collected talks Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (New York: Weatherhill, 1970), pp. 121-122. [back to text]