Striving For Cosmic Diversity

A summary of:
Schultze, Q. J. (2002). Habits of the High-Tech Heart: Living Virtuously inwards the Information Age. Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, MI, USA.
Chapter half-dozen - Striving for Cosmic Diversity

The Dossier Journal writes of Kandinsky's demonstrate at the Guggenheim: "The mature operate stands on a deep organized religious belief inwards the inherent spiritual values of colors in addition to shapes, telling us that, all along, the scheme of these uncomplicated elements – non subjects – has produced the 'vibration inwards the soul' that is the dandy initial achievement of art. It is the artist’s task, Kandinsky believed, to 'set fine art free,' in addition to the ultimate project the collective formation of a 'spiritual pyramid' that would 'some twenty-four hours orbit to heaven.' Roll your eyes equally y'all volition at reaching heaven, the feeling of standing earlier these paintings is ineffable."

Schultze says, "Gelernter rightly argues that the estimator scientists who blueprint our everyday technologies should written report the liberal arts, thence that the operate of their hearts, minds, in addition to hands mightiness make artifacts of higher beauty that fill upward our lives amongst to a greater extent than joy in addition to please in addition to that inspire us to orbit higher" (161).

The principal message of this chapter is that nosotros should live on listening to people other than engineering scientific discipline developers when it comes to developing technology, because it affects us thence profoundly (in the words of Archbishop Chaput, "these things... shape the soul" (160)) that it requires a to a greater extent than collective consensus close the appropriateness of these technologies inwards our lives. We should live on quest spiritual questions. We should live on listening to the wisdom of ancient traditions. The danger is that nosotros are developing one-track minds amongst regards to the wisdom of various technologies: "As nosotros larn data rich, nosotros also tend to autumn into a moral myopia that excludes noninstrumental mental values from shaping cyber-endeavors" (142). As Paul Duguid said, "Information engineering scientific discipline has been wonderfully successful inwards many ways. But those successes convey extended its ambition without necessarily broadening its outlook. Information is nevertheless the tool for all tasks" (158). Can nosotros non retrieve a fleck to a greater extent than creatively?

What this also means, then, is that nosotros demand a "more various notion of 'knowledge workers' that includes essayists, poets, playwrights, world intellectuals, clergy, in addition to laypersons - all people who tin imagine a lodge that values non exclusively technique but also joy in addition to practiced judgment" (142). "As the Archbishop of Denver, Rev. Charles J. Chaput, puts it, the 'information highway must non bypass humanity.' We demand responsible leaders who volition 'think deeply, non only close where we're going, but why we're going there'" (159). (As a sidenote: There is an undeniable prejudice inwards lodge to favor informational in addition to technical ways of knowing over others (151). Intuition, for example, has no house inwards academic discourse; though if nosotros paused to reflect, nosotros would realize that it is exclusively because of our intuition that nosotros able to make whatever research.) Perhaps in addition to thence nosotros volition get to enquiry whether the technological values of efficiency in addition to command are actually our values.

I retrieve this quote is fairly revealing of a dissimilar work (Schultze seems to live on jumping unopen to again), namely that engineering scientific discipline is creating to a greater extent than in addition to to a greater extent than soul-destroying jobs: "One Web worker says, 'The pathetic reality is that for all the well-deserved excitement the spider web generates, working on the spider web tin live on 1 of the to the lowest degree exciting things inwards the world, similar existence a gear upward at the Normandy invasion'" (154). Why can't nosotros role engineering scientific discipline to facilitate uplifting engagements? This is my quest for the side yesteryear side iii years, anyway.