In a previous essay, I suggested that intensive use of technology, and especially digital technology, makes it more difficult to be a Christian. There is a widespread myth out there that the only “moral” or “spiritual” questions about technology are how we use it. On the contrary, I argued, it is not possible anymore to use technology without it using us: tool use always habituates us into being particular kinds of people. And in our day, I suggested, technology use shapes our character in a way that is contrary to the formation demanded by the Gospel.
Here I want to continue to build a picture of the significance of technology for Christians, and how we might respond to it faithfully. For while it is true that technology reorganizes each of us morally and spiritually, it has also reorganized and continues to reorganize society from top to bottom, again in ways harmful to the Church.
Below I want to highlight specifically the role technology has in the ongoing breakdown of any kind of strong community life in Western cultures, by undermining what Catholic social teaching calls local solidarity and subsidiarity at almost every point. To do this we will take a look (first) at characteristics of healthy communities and (then) the role that technology has played in an unprecedented restructuring of society, bringing us to the increasingly rootless, fragmented, and lonely forms of life we inhabit today. This story will require a little background work before we come (in the last section) to the special significance of technology itself. So if you are wondering, as we go along, what all this has to do with a smartphone—hold on, we are getting there.
Before diving in, it is worth acknowledging that, from a conventional American political perspective, much of the following may seem by turns strikingly liberal or strikingly conservative. Yet this is just one more indication that these labels have worn out their usefulness. For the account I give arises directly from the Church’s social tradition, and is broadly consonant with thinkers as diverse as Dorothy Day, Wendy Brown, Wendell Berry, and Mahatma Gandhi. It is neither the conservative argument that government and institutions are curtailing our economic freedom nor the liberal argument that reform is necessary to fix a broken system, but the longstanding contention of Catholic social teaching that local economies are the only alternative to social atomization.
Healthy Communities
Coming to an adequate grasp of our current situation requires that we first give a minimal account of key characteristics of healthy communities. The first thing we have to recognize here is that the social bonds of any given community must exist within that community. If they do not—if the basis of its togetherness comes from somewhere else—then that “somewhere else” is their true community.
For example, in a workplace, often groups of friends develop. Yet such groups are not independent communities, but are held together by a commitment to a common employer, rather than directly to each other. The company is the real community. So, when someone takes a different job, it is likely that person will leave the friend group. If they do not, it is because the group has found something besides the company to unite them—say, love of music or local beer.
Whatever it is, for the group to hold together, there must be something of personal interest, resulting in intentional and active participation. In traditional Catholic language, this is called the common good. It is the centripetal force—the social bond—of any community. Like a sports team or a brigade of soldiers, common goods mean that everyone in the community has an interest in everyone else, because they all have an active, personal interest in the same objective(s). Common goods are the glue of healthy communities. They are the basis of what the Church calls “solidarity”—social unity—among people.
For human beings, the core of the common good has always been shared and local work of some kind or another, usually centered around the production of the necessities of life. A strong community, in other words, is one that provides for many of its own goods and services: food, medicine, transportation, tools, entertainment, education, clothing, housing, etc. In this way, healthy communities have real practical things to do together, so that the things that make life go around are goods produced internally—the community provides them for itself.
For instance, I regularly hear stories from an older generation about farm life in rural Minnesota 75 years ago. Though each family owned their own property, making a living off the land was consciously a community effort. No one could get along without the regular participation of one’s neighbors and extended family. This ranged from planting or harvesting or slaughtering to sharing tools (no one owned everything they needed) to building projects to financial help in hard times to apprenticing each other’s children.
Though certainly such communities were not without their dysfunction— as no human endeavors are—these corporate projects provided social unity. Local work and social solidarity could not be separated. Until relatively recently, such local economies have been characteristic of almost all communities.
Catholic social teaching has (perhaps inelegantly) called this localism “subsidiarity.” This is the principle that the vital functions of communities should first be sustained at small and adjacent levels before they are taken over by more remote collectivities. Problems should be solved by those closest to them; the means of production as much as possible should be possessed and utilized by those who will consume the products; we should not neglect our geographical neighbors in our concern for those across the globe; as much of a rural community’s food should be grown from its own land as possible, and imports should only supplement unavoidable deficiencies; a homeless person should be taken in by her parish or neighborhood before she is referred to the municipal shelter.
Such localism means that the pursuit of the common good itself is always both local and characterized by what is sometimes called personalism. It is both of those things because to come to know a community’s true common good, one must be intimately and so locally involved with its people. This is because every place and its people are almost infinitely complex. To personally get to know it is the only way to know it at all. You cannot engage the common good from a distance, or by pushing buttons, or by a few abstract categories. You must live in it. This means that true solutions to social problems will have to come from within, and not without—from the people themselves. They will have to engage each other in the flesh, in the complexity of local life. Such personalism is deep in the heart of the Catholic social tradition.
Strong communities, then, are engaged in an innumerable variety of what you might call local “projects,” aimed at providing for their common life and enhancing their common good: agriculture, homeschool co-ops, family businesses, parish schools, community gardens, time-banks, credit unions, and a thousand other examples of people working together in the flesh towards a tangible common good. Such projects are the glue that keeps people bound together.
Work, under these circumstances, is itself always personal. I have a friend who, after working for many years as a banker, has recently taken up as the butcher of a small farming town, and does most of the butchering in the area. He commented to me about the difference it makes when what you do all day is for your friends, close acquaintances, and neighbors. There is an added sense of responsibility, along with a knowledge that the “customers” that you have are the same people you will have over for dinner. Doing a good job is therefore part of your “social life.”
In a community where everyone is working for each other in this way, a unique place is created to which you concretely and tangibly belong, by the practical things that you do for each other. It is a place precisely by not being any other place, and that in part because of the irreplaceable relationships that local work involves. Such places provide a tangible sense of rootedness; their people have settled identities which are developed in conversation with communities and tradition, rather than having to come up with them and impose them on themselves.
Life in these local circumstances tends to form a united whole. “Education” is no longer a process of obtaining “book smarts” that have little to do with our neighbors, or that have to be “applied” to real life, but is the apprenticeship sufficient to be familiar with the tradition, history and skills required to engage in and carry on to the next generation the projects that constitute the community.
Likewise, “moral development” is not just something that happens in Sunday school, the Boy Scouts, or in an ethics class, much less by memorizing a set of rules, and less still by coming up with our own code of conduct. Rather, “becoming a good person” is just another aspect of growing up, coming to take one’s part in the community, and so acquiring the character necessary to the jobs one will have to do to contribute to the common good.
In such a place “entertainment” is not a distraction from the drudgery of labor that has nothing to do with the rest of life, but is of a piece with the fascination, humor, and pleasure that is part of the projects and social bonds of the communities themselves: the telling of stories, musical and artistic expression, meals, drinks, conversation, reading and writing, dancing.
In such communities, in other words, to live is to work, and to work is to live. We are constantly surrounded by people and things we are familiar with. Aunt Betty made that dress, and it reminds me of her love; I made this desk, I am proud of it, and it makes me think of my father, who taught me how. We grew this food; it was a tough summer, but eating it is immensely satisfying.
We are describing a world, in other words, in which we have the right kinds of dependence and independence. We are dependent upon friends, family, and neighbors in a way that creates social bonds, makes us secure, and provides a sort of built-in insurance. Yet we are independent in terms of having a healthy amount of agency and authority over our own lives. We can provide for ourselves and our community. It is not a world without many problems, sins, or evil. But it is a world that people understand, in which they willy-nilly belong and contribute, have friends, and most often maintain their sanity.
It can be tempting to smile at all this as a quaint throwback to Leave It To Beaver. Yet, as we will see, it is likely only our own largely unprecedented way of life that motivates this reaction. It is important to remember that this “old-fashioned” way of life was, until very recently, simply what most people in history meant by human life. It is also what people still mean by human life all over the world, largely in non-Western and countless subsistence cultures.
Outsourcing Social Bonds
So, what happened to strong communities? There are many factors, but a big one is that we increasingly developed an economy where production takes place outside of or external to local communities. For the last 200 years, increasingly food, medicine, childcare, transportation, tools, entertainment, education, clothing, eldercare, housing, and the like, have come to be provided outside families, neighborhoods, cities, and parishes.
As we will see, this is intimately related to the development of technology. But the point for now is that when production becomes non-local, this amounts to outsourcing the community’s social bonds. Today little is provided “in house” anymore, and so there is little need for cooperation, dependence, friendship, or the common good. We have lost the glue that holds us together, and we have lost our sense of shared identity. We might happen to live next to each other, but we do not have to know one another anymore, so, very often, we do not.
The flip side of this is that as we have ceased to be members of local communities, we have simultaneously become members of the external, institutionalized providers of goods and services that have displaced the once-local economies. We no longer get our goods and services from sources internal to our communities, and so we have to get them elsewhere. In other words, we no longer need families, parishes, neighborhoods, cooperatives and Jerry the town butcher; we need banks, Target, health care, social workers, Amazon, and auto service centers. Such goods and services have (sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally) displaced local common goods by radically monopolizing the sources of daily living. By their very definition they do not facilitate us working together, but are designed exactly as a replacement for shared projects. Because of this, our membership in them keeps us fragmented from one another.
But these new “memberships” are very different from our old ones. What it means to be a “member” of Amazon or Target is not what it means to be a member of a local community. To get our food at Target involves an entirely different form of life than to get our food from our fields or even from the farmer’s market. The former involves very little of the flesh-and-blood relationships, personalism, common goods, friendships, or any of that right kind of dependence or independence characteristic of local community. Now the relations are flipped: we become independent of our neighbors, and dependent on external providers.
Of central importance here is that when you or I become “members” of (say) Target, that does not put us in any direct relationship to one another. Rather, each individual as an individual enters into a relationship with the whole Target system. In a local community, by contrast, perhaps you and I and ten other people used to be united by the fact that we all eat vegetables, because we all helped make our local crop of them. But now, because most vegetables come from stores like Target, the social bond made by our vegetable eating binds each of us only to Target and not at all to each other. We are kept isolated like spokes on a bicycle wheel: we all touch the hub but never each other. When this happens in every area of life, it creates a society of atomized individuals.
Of course, this does not just happen with stores like Target. Most of our social bonds today are becoming of this kind. And many of these so-called “communities” are in fact more impersonal, have fewer common goods, and so are more isolating than Big Box Stores. A world of Amazon, electronic money management, insurance companies, and social media means that “community” is increasingly being re-defined by membership in invisible bureaucracies and legal entities that apply everywhere but exist nowhere in particular.
The basic rationale of this non-local economy is to do our work—provide for our necessities—more efficiently than we can for ourselves. Accordingly, our ability to engage our world independently has atrophied. In time, we have increasingly come to look on our institutionalized providers as—in a way what they have really become—the only solution to any problem, even our only way of getting something done. We become a people who can only act through systems.
Our mindset and actions reflect this. For example, if we want to be involved in our local scene—say, to revitalize a neighborhood or engage a homeless encampment—the first thing we think to do is look to the professionals. We instantly think of involving more social workers, lobbyists, doctors, mental health workers, or housing experts. What else would we do but get people “connected,” as we say, to the right services?
Yet, even with the best of intentions, these services often unwittingly weaken the very communities we were trying to strengthen, by leading them further from their own personalist pursuit of the common good and toward a growing dependence on the outside services. A homeless encampment or an impoverished neighborhood is not allowed to define and explore their own problems; those problems are defined ahead of time and then remedied in the impersonal terms of agencies whose very expertise is defined in terms of offering analyses and solutions that work in every situation. Yet this means that the personalism and proximity required to grasp a common good is excluded from the outset.
And so, inevitably, our institutionalized services tend to pluck people out of their local communities—even if they leave them geographically in the same place—and graft their lives onto themselves as systems that manage large parts of those lives for them. Once again, then, we lose our common good, our glue. And so it is that communities grow weak as systems grow strong.
I have been laying out the deep structural change at the heart of modern social history. It is hard to overstate the significance of this unprecedented shift, so let me state it again as concisely as I can. Human social bonds are mostly a function of the production of the goods, services, and culture necessary for a society to flourish. To relocate such production almost entirely outside a community is to strip that community of its social bonds. This we have largely done, destroying most of our local communities. We have then sustained the lives of their former members by technological goods and services, making us dependent members of new sorts of pseudo-communities.
Historically, this is one of the most revolutionary changes in the structure of any human society. We have never lived like this before. Yet it feels natural to us, since we are so used to it—like fish who do not notice the water. So by now we all have our sense of normal almost entirely determined by perhaps the greatest oxymoron history has produced: non-local community.
A Society of Radical Monopolies
But we can go deeper. I mentioned above that today’s corporations and institutions “radically monopolize” the production of the things we need for daily living. Let me explain and expand on the phrase a little bit.
We all know what a monopoly is: the dominance of the market for a product by exclusion of all competitors. A radical monopoly goes even further: it is the dominance of an aspect of life by the exclusion of the ability to provide it from the local community. For example, if Apple were the only brand of computer in town, that would be a monopoly. When you need a smartphone to have a social life, that is a radical monopoly. If Aldi were the only place for groceries, that would be a monopoly. When you can only get your food from grocery stores, that is a radical monopoly. And this is what has happened in virtually every aspect of our lives.
A few more examples:
Care for our bodies: from time immemorial local cultures have made use of their own traditional arts of suffering and treating illness, much of which they engaged in quite skillfully even before modern medicine. Today, the health care industry has almost completely displaced such traditional wisdom and left us almost completely dependent on its own models, diagnoses, and cures.
Transportation: our bodies are naturally mobile. For all of history people have gotten around on foot, horse, or bicycle. But for the last 100 years our infrastructure has been so constructed that it is difficult to move without paved roads, cars, oil, and the jungle of institutions that stand behind them.
Insurance: historically, people have been secured against the vicissitudes of fate and financial catastrophe, as they still are today in many non-Western cultures, by duties of neighborliness, norms of solidarity, strict family obligations, and traditions of hospitality. Today, by contrast, even the closest of friends and family relations take care of each other only when recourse to the insurance company fails.
Education: throughout history most real learning has happened willingly, as part of a community, or by spontaneous interest, and in all these cases at very little cost. By contrast, today it is widely assumed that critical thinking and a stable moral temperament are available only to those who are supervised through the compulsory consumption of a standardized curriculum.
And let me again underline the two significant examples with which we started. Food: human beings have always procured most of their food locally, and with significant amounts of neighborly cooperation. Today this can be done only with great effort, and only by those well-off enough to afford the additional expense, time, and travel necessary.
And, finally, communication: it is increasingly difficult to be part of any community of friends at all, much less function in society, without the capabilities of a smart phone. Our “social” life now depends on it.
And now consider the cumulative practical difference the introduction of these radical monopolies has made in the shape of our daily lives. Perhaps one way to put it is that, for us, without commercial and institutional support, it is increasingly difficult for us to be sick, secure, to learn, eat, talk, or move.
Yet perhaps the most significant consequence of the radical monopolies is the way they permanently isolate us from one another. For they are the institutional embodiment of externalized means of production, and therefore of externalized social bonds. So the situation we have gotten ourselves into is one in which we are permanently isolated from one another by the very institutions we have created to make our bodily (and often psychological) lives possible. Because our productive lives are external to local communities, we have only the thinnest common goods holding us together. Yet the catch-22 is that, because we are now dependent on the radical monopolies for our daily life, they make it extremely hard for us to re-form any alternative, internal, local social bonds. Thus we cannot live without them, but we cannot live together with them.
Taylorism
All of this is directly relevant for the Church in a variety of ways. One of the most important is that, as I have said elsewhere at greater length, we can only be Christians as a community of Christians, and so forces assaulting solidarity will always also be assaulting the Church. I will have more to say about this in a subsequent article, but at this point I want to draw our attention to the way that these forces are in large part the forces of technology. In this section, then, I will outline how the basic dynamic of technological development, what is sometimes called “Taylorism,” has been the engine that has driven these structural changes in society.
“Taylorism” takes its name from Fredrick Taylor, famous for pioneering the “scientific” management of workflow in factories in order to assure maximum output. His idea was to quantify and regulate each motion with the strictest precision, knowing what each worker was doing at each moment, and incentivizing compliance. Universal surveillance mechanisms insured against deviance, and constant data collection was always laying the groundwork for the next efficiency innovation.
Most of Taylor’s ideas sound very familiar today, and that is why they are still so relevant. Each smallest move in Taylor’s factory was quantified, analyzed, evaluated, and then manipulated to maximize profitability. The factory thus became one always-evolving machine, and the workers are just one part of it. Personal creativity and intelligence are minimized, and only allowed as they serve the ever-tightening canons of efficiency, usually defined by the bottom line.
Though we have in some ways moved beyond the factory age today, we have certainly not moved beyond Taylorism. On the contrary, we have totalized it. Our computer-based industrial economy is Taylorism beyond Taylor’s wildest dreams. Precision, calculation and surveillance are now possible at a level increasingly coextensive with society itself. Taylorism—making processes and tools as efficient as possible—simply is the inner logic of the development of technology. It is what we are trying to do whenever we come up with the newest phone, app, or surgical instrument.
One important result of this is our ongoing attempt to turn everything around us into a statistic. When you are trying to maximize material and economic efficiency, the result will be to quantify everything, to make it calculatable, measurable—to make a world of countable “things” as much as possible—so you can manipulate and manage it. And it is not just material production anymore. Today as much of life as possible, including the human being—our psychology, moods, desires, travel habits, interests, education, tastes, consumer histories, religious traditions—are quantified (especially with the help of the internet) in order to be subsumed into the never-ending mission of finding yet another faster, cheaper, easier technique.
We could give ten thousand examples of this, for they are largely coextensive with society itself. With very few exceptions, no matter what industry you work in today, most of your time is spent on this kind of “efficiency” work. It is the common dynamic that connects the earliest industrial workshops’ division of labor to the factory age, and later to military, medical, aerospace and electronic developments, to the earliest computers, the internet and the digital revolution, right up to AI.
The smartphone is the obvious cultural centerpiece of Taylorism in our midst. It is (so far) the crowning glory of two centuries of Taylorism, and we Taylorize our world with it more every second. We have all become factory foremen at work and at home, and it is not too much of an exaggeration to see our entire society precisely as a high-tech version of one of Taylor’s factories. It never stops—there are plenty of apps that even help you Taylorize your sleep.
This ceaseless advance of technological development is what has resulted in the radical monopolies. They are the logical result of this slow application of Taylorism to every part of society. For Taylorism works by the logic of specialization, just like in a factory: the division of tasks and the “outsourcing” of those functions to wherever they can be done most efficiently. And this is what the radical monopolies are—different parts of our lives handled by outsourced specialists. They are outsourced not least so that they can be done in massive quantities, to aid efficiency. And so they are always done elsewhere—outside the home, neighborhood, or local community. But, again, when we have to do things this way, we also have to be isolated from one another.
* * *
The basic contention of this essay has been that the structural dynamics of our society inevitably lead to social fragmentation and the breakdown of strong communities. In this way, technological development has stood in direct conflict with the Catholic social principles of personalism, subsidiarity, solidarity, and the common good. This has had a predictably negative effect on the Church, imperiling the countless tasks we can only achieve as a body, and leaving Christians as lonely and isolated as the rest of the world. We will take a closer look at this in a future article, including things Christians can do now to begin to live intentionally in the midst of this reality. This will include, unsurprisingly, the renewal of local living as a part of recovering the possibility of real community, and Christian community in particular. But before we come to that, we have to look in more detail at what is perhaps the most radical monopoly today, and the most obvious social characteristic of our age: the digital revolution. Stay tuned.
