The question, “Does technology make us smarter and more connected or stunt our minds and friendships?” presents us with something of a false choice. It assumes the potential for evil resides within a material object when, in reality, the potential for evil lies within us.
As the National Rifle Association likes to remind us: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Likewise, that smartphone can’t force you to stare at it for hours and work (or amuse) yourself like a robot. It only gives you an excuse for lack of self-discipline.
So instead of discussing the surface question, let’s focus on something more attuned to the human condition, what people really mean when considering the question at hand: Can humans really handle technology? Is it too much for us?
Clearly, for some people, the answer is “yes”: some 23 percent of American students are reportedly addicted to the Internet. Electronics definitely make it easier to indulge our worst impulses, even less-than-salacious ones like timewasting and gossip. It allows governments and companies access to vast and intimate details about our daily lives. But then, perhaps, technology only reveals to us what might otherwise remain hidden about our deepest impulses and proclivities.
As America learned with Prohibition, however, the way to conquer substance abuse is not by controlling the substance, but by controlling ourselves. Sometimes government can do this, sometimes it cannot. More likely, as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, a restrained government requires virtue already rooted in society by religion and institutions like family: “Thus whilst the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust.”
Asking whether humans can handle technology is a bit like asking whether we can handle self-government. Is the freedom vast and dangerous? Yes. Might we hurt ourselves, and others? Yes. But we might also do some great good, might ignite revolutions of hope among the downtrodden and oppressed. That possibility lies not in Twitter, iPhones, or Facebook, but in the hearts and minds employing them.
Joy Pullmann is assistant editor of The American. This post is part of a series tied to the May 11 AEI debate between Tyler Cowen and Roger Scruton on whether social media destroys human relationships.
Great and enduring ideas such as “patriotism” or “citizenship” can seem abstract when peering from my little desk in a big office in a bigger building and an even bigger city in this giant country. Perhaps that’s why,