The personal computer brings power to the people. The information revolution will bring the human race into a new age of equality, progress, freedom and understanding. The personal computer will revive and transform democracy. A new age is dawning, the information age. The power of the microchip can free us from the shackles of time and space. Knowledge is freedom.
Sound familiar? The personal computer promises to bring the human race to new heights of progress. The rhetoric that surrounds the industry would lead us to believe that the introduction of the PC had the moral force of The Great Awakening. The increase in available information would transform us into freer, healthier, more productive, and more affluent individuals and nations.
The PC has the capacity to enhance many human activities. I myself make my living and spend some of my leisure time using computers. It has been a very useful production tool and has allowed me to do many things I would never have been able to do without it.
The PC excels especially in information-related functions, such as organizing, analyzing and storing. The computer can almost replace a human being in these fields. The computer can also be an aid at higher levels of human activity, such as synthesis, teaching and creativity. It is less likely, however, to replace a human person in these activities.
The human mind, however, is not limited to information-related, or even creative functions. Two distinctive human characteristics are totally beyond the capabilities of the microchip, so much so that the computer can barely be of any assistance at all. Indeed, because the computer makes so much information available to a person and aids in the increase of knowledge, it threatens our full development as humans. If we spend so much of our time collecting, analyzing and organizing data, we fail to use the most humanizing faculties of them all: wisdom and love.
Wisdom is a kind of non-conceptual knowledge that leads to right judgment and action. Its source is ultimately not from ourselves but from a source beyond ourselves; the source of all wisdom. Wisdom is best achieved not by frenzied activity, but by the disciplines of silence, meditation and contemplation. In order to open our minds to the vast inner resources of our beings and to the Ultimate Source of Reality we requires silence, stillness and leisure. The environment conducive to simply being is only possible if we stop collecting, analyzing and organizing information. We must step beyond hyperactivity and hypercreativity long enough to become aware of the significance of all that information and its relationship to our experience and to become aware that there is something beyond information and experience.
The quest for contemplative enlightenment is universal. The same human impulse led Gautama to enlightenment under the Bo tree, Jesus to temptation in the desert, and Descartes to thinking himself into existence while sitting in an easy chair.
Love—genuine love—implies a person-to-person relationship. It also implies actual human-to-human contact and direct, personal action. That is why political activity, although essential, is not at the heart of the Christian response to injustice. Instead, as Dorothy Day, Catherine Doherty and Mother Teresa point out by example, we must go directly to those in need and respond to their need in person and as a person. Holiness can only be found and developed though loving.
While many things can be achieved on the computer on behalf of others, the possibilities for human contact are limited indeed. We communicate ideas on a bulletin board, or exchange information, or even organize a food drive, but we cannot actually hand a hungry person a plate of food while sitting at the computer terminal. And even if we could, the genuine, and spiritual, human-to human contact would not be there.
We live in an age in which the quest for wisdom and the response of love are threatened by the information explosion. As we scramble to acquire greater knowledge, power and wealth—even when done in the name of improvement of society—we lose sight of our higher calling and our higher capacities. Contemplation and holiness cannot be achieved in an age dominated by the dizzying growth and expansion of electronic wizardry, no matter how useful. We need to take time away from the whirlwind to think, pray, and meditate; to ask deeper questions about life, meaning, and value; and to re-establish direct and fruitful contact with God, each other and the rest of creation.
