The Life We're Looking For (Book Review)
The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World, by Andy Crouch
I picked up this title after reading a bit of a review of it, and I'm always interested in thinking through the way in which we as humans interact with technology and the questions of us shaping tech, and tech shaping us, and then the intersection of thinking these things through in terms of faith and theology.
That's not entirely where Crouch's book goes, though I have an understanding that it's where some of his previous books go. Instead, TLWLR begins with a paradise and fall narrative. In this case, it's something like "we were born as persons longing for recognition as persons, and instead our world delivers us technology that is increasingly denying personhood".
I've come to be suspicious of books that structure themselves as "We were X and it was good, then Y happened, now we need to do Z to return to state of paradise X". Of course, not all such narratives are wrong, but it's often an overly simplistic device to pitch a problem in the world, and a solution, where the solution often sounds like "rewind 75 years"
I don't think Crouch is doing this, but the flow of writing could lead you there. For Crouch, the big problems with technology are wrapped up in Superpowers and Mammon. Superpowers are "power without effort" - when we have a capacity to do something far in excess of our normal powers, at the cost of "put[ting] essential parts of yourself on hold". We become less of a person when we have superpowers enabled by technology. But this is precisely the lure of technology. And technology is, on the whole, driven by Mammon. Crouch utilises the term for the global system of money + technology as a system which is driven by impersonalised power. And that is bad.
Crouch isn't necessarily wrong, though I wonder how he'd feel if we just called it Capitalism. It's just that until halfway through the book the vision that Crouch casts is so negative and so totalising. Then we get the pivot.
I will say, too, that for a book working within an ostensible Christian framework, there is very little explicitly of gospel and Jesus here. Not that it's entirely absent, it's there both tacitly and implicitly, but it's not the major show.
Now, to the pivot. For Crouch, reclaiming that dimension of the early movement of Jesus-followers focused precisely on persons relating to persons, is part and parcel of resisting Mammon. In this vein, Crouch gives us three alternate frames to think through. Firstly, Devices versus Instruments : how can technologies by used, by design or by habits, to promote personhood rather than deny it. Secondly, Households vs (Family). Crouch talks about the 'household' like this:
we need a place where we can exercise our fundamental capacities—a place where we can channel our emotions and longings, be known in our unique depth of self, contribute to understanding and interpreting the world, and apply our bodies’ strength and agility to worthwhile work in all three planes of physical reality. Above all, we need a place where we can invest ourselves deeply in others, come to care about their flourishing, and give ourselves away in mutual service and sacrifice in ways that secure our own identities instead of erasing them. (pp. 150-151)
Family is not necessarily the antithesis of household, but family often extends beyond the household, and families often aren't households. I have some real appreciation and real qualms about this idea of 'household' as the solution for personhood. Firstly, I think the kind of profound longing for inter-personal relationship that Crouch identifies and articulates, is a real and right longing. We do want these kinds of communities, and we do live an a world that operates with hostility against it. Secondly, though, I am not sure we can read this "off" the page of ancient history. Yes, households were a fundamental operating unit of society in a way different to modern nuclear families. However, there was a lot wrong with ancient households. And they were as much about being an economic unit as anything else. I don't know that there's a particular ancient wisdom to be found in 1st century Graeco-Roman households, that isn't found instead in asking the question, "how do we forge places like this". We might as well call them micro-communities with thick inter-personal bonds.
Thirdly, I'm keenly aware that Crouch writes very much out of the experience of someone who has experienced such households (pp152-153) in his single and married life. The taste of thick-bonded communities is a beautiful thing, but I'm very conscious that many people not only don't have that, but will find such 'households' a tantalising prospect forever out of reach. Household-making is hard work, and households being good is not a given, it's a possibility created by their constituents.
The third of Crouch's antithesis is #blessed and #charmed. And here I think Crouch is right on the money. So much of what passes as #blessed, is actually #charmed - a blissful bubble of life free from harm, sheered off from affliction, cushioned by wealth, privilege, power from the harsh realities of life. #blessed is something actually very different. What might it mean to consider afflictions as blessings? When we consider those whom Mammon finds utterly un-useful, as persons of intrinsic value?
Most of my own life has, I confess, been more charmed than blessed. I have enjoyed enormous privilege, been spared much physical and emotional suffering, and gone through a good portion of my life without great trial or difficulty. No, I have never scaled great heights of success or fame - I suspect God knows that either would do great harm to my soul. This portion of the book caused me to reflect a great deal on how I myself relate to those whom the world ignores, whom Mammon discards, whom we all to readily overlook. How can I learn better myself not to overlook them, but to be a person among persons.
At the end of all this, the question this book left me with was exactly that, "what might it mean to strive to see others as persons, and to diligently task myself with being present in the moment to others as a fully relational person treating others as persons?"