Belief: Are One-Eyed Cylons Myopic?
Dilbert: Wow! According to my computer simulation, it should be possible to create new life forms from common household chemicals. Dogbert: This raises some thorny issues. Dilbert: You mean legal, ethical, and religious issues? Dogbert: I was thinking about parking spaces.
—Scott Adams, Dilbert comic strip, May 31, 1989
In South Korea, Samsung devices have something called DMB, digital multimedia broadcasting, built into them. They have retractable antennas that, once extended, allow them to receive satellite television signals. That, combined with the big screens the company’s devices usually have, explains why Koreans prefer to buy local. Besides actually communicating with people, commuters can watch TV while on the subway. Nearly three-quarters of the phones used in the country—an incredibly high market share anywhere in the world—are Samsung as a result.
The Venerable Noh Yu, however, is no ordinary commuter. He’s a Buddhist monk and the deputy director of the office of missionary activities of the Jogye Order, a sect that traces its roots back to the religion’s first arrival in Korea more than three hundred years ago. As a monk in the most wired society in the world, he’s in a prime position to opine about the intersection of technology and religion. But I’m more fascinated by the iPhone he pulled from a pocket hidden in his gray and orange robe.
He explains that he deeply considered his decision to carry the TV-antenna-less device. “Apple is a company where the focus is on apps,” he tells me through an interpreter. “Samsung is a company where the focus is on the model. It’s a difference of emphasis between the two companies. Samsung has a series of models that come out very frequently and the focus is on getting people to upgrade to the next model each time. But a smartphone is a device where you don’t have to upgrade to the next model. You can just upgrade to the next app. The point is upgrading your app, not upgrading your phone.”1
What he says makes sense. As the category leader, Apple tends to get the best applications designed for its products first. Samsung phones, which use Google’s rival Android operating system, generally get those same apps later—if at all. “Koreans see it differently,” Noh Yu continues. “They think, in general, that to be a smart user of smartphones, you have to get the new model. But that’s not the point at all. The point is having a model and being a smart user of the apps on the model. It’s not about changing the phone.”
His views and his preference shouldn’t be surprising. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, the man who shepherded the iPhone into existence, was Buddhist, after all. His spiritual sensibilities permeated his approach to products, which is one reason the company was so successful under his watch. He made easy-to-use, harmonious technology of which the ubiquitous computing types, whom we met at the beginning of this book, dream. Noh Yu however, apologizes mildly for his choice of phone. He’s no less a patriot than the next South Korean, and he generally likes Samsung, but Apple’s phone serves his needs better.
If anyone knows about the wisdom of phones and technology in general, it’s him. The Jogye Order—dually housed in a grand, colorful temple in the heart of Seoul for spiritual matters and a small office building next to it for administrative purposes—designs smartphone apps to spread Buddhist teachings and raise awareness of events and activities. They outsource the technical design of the apps, but the Order itself produces the content.
South Korea is the most wired (and wireless) country in the world, with some of the most advanced telecommunications networks going. It’s a global power in robotics, and the country’s two biggest companies, Samsung and LG, are also worldwide electronics leaders, from televisions to tablets. If somewhere in space aliens are studying humanity’s technological prowess to decide when to make contact, they surely have their eye on South Korea, where even the monks are tech savvy.
Noh Yu says that, although technology isn’t in his religion’s nature, the Order must nevertheless adapt to such advancement or risk being left behind, which is why it decided to create apps. “Buddhism is a religion that has always tried to accept and embrace the particular characteristics of the time in which people are living,” he says between sips of tea. “There has been a change from the age of the Internet to the age of the smartphone. Buddhism perceives a need to adapt to that change and to accept those cultural developments, so the development of the apps is part of an effort to adapt to the times and make it more accessible and relevant to people today.”
But is technology affecting the very essence of religion and spirituality and in the larger sense what people believe about themselves and the world? Websites and apps that provide information and act as recruitment tools are one thing, but is technology helping with the core purposes and values of religion or Buddhism specifically in this case?
“Technology will not have any effect on the Jogye Order or Buddhism in general in the sense that Buddhism is not seeking to change the outside world, but rather the world of the heart,” he explains firmly. “There are ways in which technology affects us emotionally and those ways are usually negative. Technology makes people lonelier, they become more distant from each other.”
His assessment cuts to the heart of the past few chapters. Technology is making the world a better place in terms of rising prosperity, better living conditions, increasing opportunities, and declining conflict, but its deeper effects on us as individuals aren’t as obviously benign. As we saw in the previous two chapters, Noh Yu may be right when he suggests that technology is making us withdraw from one another, seeking ever more intimate relationships and deeper levels of privacy.
In that sense, it’s hard to say we’re coming to know ourselves better and, therefore, becoming better people as a result. By most definitions, “better” would cover improvements in such fundamentally “good” characteristics as love, friendship, loyalty, selflessness, caring, and compassion. So then, if all this technological progress isn’t leading to improvements in those areas, what’s the point of it all? Is a world where everyone lives for two hundred years and is gainfully employed all that desirable if we’re all becoming miserable, selfish, soulless curmudgeons?
It’s difficult if not impossible to measure these intangible qualities, so it’s equally hard to come to any definitive conclusions. But let’s take a look and see what we can discover.
GOD BLESS THE USA
Religion is a good place to start since all of the world’s big, spiritual organizations generally encourage adherents to know themselves as well as some over-arching god, and to practice overall “goodness.” It’s also relatively easy to measure religion itself.
Religious belief began in the time of Blarg as a simple means for explaining the inexplicable, which was at the time pretty much everything. Those crippling intestinal pains that kept our intrepid caveman home and away from the grind of hunting and gathering? Obviously the work of some evil, unseen entity. The lightning that crashed down onto the tree and set it on fire? Clearly the result of some sandal-wearing dude on a cloud tossing electrical bolts at the Earth. Parking on driveways and driving on parkways? Must be the work of the Devil.
As humanity evolved and societies formed, thinking became more complex and reason took hold. As priestly castes collected and organized beliefs, religion morphed into the embodiment of shared cultural values, a central repository both for inexplicable and supernatural events and for rules that promoted societal order and betterment. In many cases, religion inspired law and vice versa. The ten commandments, for example, tell us it was neither socially logical nor acceptable to steal from or kill one’s neighbor. For a great stretch of recorded human history, religion and law indivisibly intertwined, from the Roman Empire—where the emperor also headed the state religion—through to the divine right of kings. That’s still the case in some parts of the world today. Religion now varies in its nature and, depending on the country, spans this spectrum of development. In the most primitive societies, religion still acts as the primary explanatory force of natural occurrences. In theocracies, it’s the governing body. In many advanced countries, it’s less a congregation of the faithful than a community group.
But we shouldn’t underestimate religion’s power as a cohesive force. My family, for example, is Polish, and without religion—the Catholic Church specifically—the concept of “Poland” may have ceased to exist long ago. Carved up by neighboring powers and wiped entirely from the map three times, Poland—along with its customs, language, and traditions—might have been assimilated by its conquerors over the centuries and ultimately faded away had the Church not preserved the idea of it. When Poland coalesced again geographically and politically, the nation was still culturally intact. That does much to explain why the country is so predominantly Catholic today—more than 85 percent of the populace—and why, even though I’m not religious, I can see the positives of such an organization.
Religion’s negative side tends to come to the fore in places where it has been strictly institutionalized, which includes Europe through much of its history as well as large parts of the current Middle East. In such cases, it was or is a tool for explaining, maintaining, and enforcing social orders. Why are people poor and suffering? Because God wills it! In its later incarnations, religion often justifies or disguises the perfectly explainable failings of human nature. That goes double for the untold death and deep suffering it has caused. Dangling the carrot of the afterlife to the masses offered an exchange for their obedience and misery. Sure, you might have to eat dirt now, but after you die you’ll be drinking mead from golden chalices and golfing all day, every day.
Nevertheless, as prosperity has grown over the past few centuries, religion has seen a marked decline in advanced countries. As just a few examples, over the second half of the twentieth century, belief in God declined by a third in Sweden, a fifth in Australia, and about 7 percent in Canada.2 Researchers have gone beyond calling this a correlation to declaring it a full-on causality, where the growth of prosperity definitively leads to a decline in religious belief.
The numbers back up such claims. Close to half of people living in agrarian societies say they attend church at least once a week compared to just a fifth in advanced societies. In nations where per capita income falls below two thousand dollars a year, about 95 percent of the population say that religion plays an important role in their lives. Bangladesh leads the pack, with a 99 percent affirmative response rate—and life is probably pretty tough for that outlying heathen 1 percent.3 In countries where per capita income falls above twenty-five thousand dollars or more, the percentage is half that.
By this measure, Estonia is the least religious country in the world. Only 16 percent of people there say religion is important. But Estonia’s championship in this category is not entirely fair since the Soviet Union banned religion there for many decades. Adjusted for totalitarianism, the crown really belongs to the kingdom of Sweden, which counts only 17 percent of its populace as religious despite having no restrictions on beliefs. On the flip side, according to WIN-Gallup’s 2012 International Religiosity and Atheism Index, the top ten most religious countries—where people self-identified as such—all had per capita income of less than fourteen thousand dollars, with Ghana, Nigeria, and Armenia leading the pack.
“It’s only popular in societies that . . . have enough rate of dysfunction that people are anxious about their daily lives, so they’re looking to the gods for help in their daily lives,” says paleontologist Gregory Paul. Religion thus directly measures a society’s stability and prevails most in places where life is tough in terms of conflict, health, and poverty. “It’s not fear of death that drives people to be religious, and it’s not a God gene or a God module in the brain or some sort of connection with the gods,” says Paul. “It’s basically a psychological coping mechanism.”4
In poorer countries, religious institutions tend to provide essential services such as education, as well as social networks that help people cope with trauma. “Religion becomes less central as people’s lives become less vulnerable to the constant threat of death, disease and misfortune,” write sociologist Pippa Norris and political scientist Ronald Inglehart in Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. “As lives gradually become more comfortable and secure, people in more affluent societies usually grow increasingly indifferent to religious values, more skeptical of supernatural beliefs and less willing to become actively engaged in religious institutions.”
But two outliers buck this rule: China and the United States. China, although advancing quickly, still has relatively low per capita income—less than eight thousand dollars per year—yet it also rates very low in many religiosity measures. It’s technically the least religious country in WIN-Gallup polls, with only 14 percent of the population identifying as such. But we know why: The Chinese government, at the height of its totalitarianism phase in the 1960s and 1970s, effectively outlawed religion and destroyed many places of worship. Only in recent years has the Communist party there relaxed restrictions, allowing for traditionally Chinese religions such as Buddhism to make a resurgence. But increasing prosperity is countering religious growth. In fact, China’s leaders have criticized their own society for being too secular. Talk about irony.
The United States is a more interesting case because it’s one of the world’s wealthiest nations, yet it also ranks high in religiosity. More than 80 percent of Americans say they believe in God and always have, a shockingly high number compared to, say, France at 29 percent or Britain at 36 percent. Almost a quarter of Americans say they attend religious service once a week, compared to just 5 percent in France and 10 percent in Britain.5 Proof of the phenomenon also lies in the election speeches of just about any American politician: God is almost always invoked.
Sociologists say that, although the results look surprising, they do add up and correlate. Religion flourishes in places of turmoil, uncertainty, and especially poverty. The most religious of the states in the union—Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina—are also among the poorest. The least religious—Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine—are among the wealthiest. The United States also has the highest level of inequality among developed nations. As we’ll see in the next chapter, this metric deeply affects general happiness and hopes for the future. “We have fifty to sixty million people without health insurance; we have the highest child poverty rates of the industrialized democratic world; the greatest gap between rich and poor of the industrialized democratic world; we have increasing inequality and, voilà, we also have a strongly religious society . . . That can’t be accidental,” says Pitzer College sociology professor Phil Zuckerman.6
Religion will continue to decline in proportion to the growth of prosperity and equality. Northwestern University engineering and math professors Daniel Abrams and Haley Yaple have created a model projecting the decline of religion. After studying competition for membership between various social groups in eighty-five religious and nonreligious societies, they concluded that extinction is inevitable. “The model indicates that in these societies the perceived utility of religious non-affiliation is greater than that of adhering to a religion, and therefore predicts continued growth of non-affiliation, tending toward the disappearance of religion.”7
People shy away from religion in developed countries for additional reasons. Among them is displeasure with doctrines that don’t change for centuries. Unlike the Jogye Order, some large religions aren’t willing to adapt to changing times and surroundings, frustrating many would-be adherents to the point of exit.
Many people are surprised to learn that Anne Rice, our vampire novelist from chapter three, is quite religious. Aside from her best-known work, she has written several books about the adventures of Jesus Christ. But she also counts herself among disillusioned believers who have no kind words to say about organized religion. “I have a great faith in God and great personal devotion to Jesus Christ, but not to the Christian belief system, not to any theological system made up years after Jesus left the Earth that argues all kinds of things about which he said nothing,” she tells me. “Many people feel that way today. They have their devotion to Jesus and their faith in God, but they are way past listening to any church rant to them about how they shouldn’t use artificial birth control or they shouldn’t go to their gay brother’s same-sex wedding. We’re through with that nonsense, a lot of us. We’re just not going to take that kind of superstitious dictation.”8
For the purposes of our analysis of religion and spirituality, she says it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Individuals can be both secular and spiritual without having to belong to an organization. It’s possible to subscribe to some of the loftier goals prescribed by religions without having to adhere to their more questionable positions. “I wouldn’t equate secularism with the loss of spirituality, not by any means,” she says. “The secular people I know have been deeply spiritual and deeply concerned with morality. They have always had conscience and deep profound values. Many of us, in getting away from religion, have defined ourselves at times as secular, but that does not mean we don’t have deep values and a deep spiritual life. Churches don’t own spirituality.”
Shane Schick, a friend and fellow journalist, worked with me at Computer Dealer News. I left for jobs at various newspapers while he stayed and ultimately took over the place. I learned only in recent years via Facebook that he’s always been religious. We met for coffee so I could ask how he reconciled those two aspects of himself, his professional side—which deals with science, technology, and the advance of reason—and his spiritual side, which believes in the unprovable. His answers were surprising.
Like me, Shane was born into a Roman Catholic family, and he went to a Catholic school. But for him, church and religious life were about providing service to the community. He recalls proudly how his grandparents rebuilt the doors on their local church. It wasn’t until he went to college that he realized he lived in a secular world. He fell out of religion somewhat during those years, until he met his wife-to-be (online). At the time, she was earning a master’s degree in theology. “I don’t know how other men would react, but that attracted me immediately,” he says with a laugh.
They hit it off, but they encountered a potential roadblock: She was Anglican. It didn’t turn out to be an issue in the end since he found that their two Christian sects were actually hewed quite closely to each other. He came to prefer Anglicanism, so he switched. “Anglicans treat themselves a little more like a work in progress,” he says. “There’s a lot of questioning. I enjoy that. I find it accommodates doubt a little better.”9
That, in a nutshell, is how he reconciles being a devout Christian and a technology journalist at the same time. The first makes him better at the second. He explains that he specializes in advising his readers—generally business executives looking to make decisions about which technologies to pursue for investment—on good and bad bets. To do that, he needs to cast doubt on the endless stream of products that vendors foist on him. “I think you need a healthy skepticism,” he says. “If I was someone who immediately got obsessed with every new gadget, I think that would be a disservice. You can’t be strategic if you just uniformly go with whatever hype is coming out of the mouths of consultants. That dubiousness is important.”
Technology journalism is rife with fanboy-ism, so never mind Jesus—having doubt as your co-pilot is a good idea in this line of work.
When it comes to religion, though, it seems contradictory. “Aren’t doubt and faith opposites?” I ask. Not necessarily, Shane replies. “The enemy of faith is not really doubt, it’s more indifference or apathy.” Religion for him isn’t about blind devotion but about seeking answers. You can only do that if you ask more questions.
Our conversation was verging into Yoda-isms, which probably isn’t surprising given the subject matter. It’s also a little amazing that Shane is able to have such a lucid conversation. We’re sitting in a Starbucks with his infant daughter literally crawling all over him. I ask how he can manage articulating coherent thoughts while this is going on. “This is nothing,” he replies, Zen-like, and continues.
“I can’t prove God exists or half the things that Christians believe in,” he says. “At the same time, I do believe technology can bring us closer to some answers. Technology at its core is a pursuit of truth. Faith is similar. They are just interpreted differently and have different expectations placed on them.”
He illustrates the point with an apples-to-apples comparison. “If you’re in a room with a bunch of people looking at a software report, you can’t be sure of everything that’s in there. But as a team, you can still make decisions because you take it on faith.” A fascinating point.
We veer back to discussing why people are turning away from religion, and here Shane suggests another, largely technologically driven reason: the rapid and huge growth of individualism. The exponential increase of communications and self-expression that we saw in chapter five, the corresponding withdrawal of the self in chapter six, and the ever-increasing desire for privacy in the previous chapter all point toward the same development: People increasingly are identifying themselves as individuals. They are putting themselves “out there” more than ever before, but they are also devoting more energy to building and maintaining their own identities, separate from the hordes. It’s the paradox of the Internet age, writ large: In a world growing larger every day, it’s becoming increasingly important for people to establish their own small place in it. “Our culture is also one that is pulling away from a sense of community in general,” Shane says. “Forget organized religion, what happened to the Kiwanis and the Legion and all those things that everybody used to belong to? They barely exist anymore except for old people. Our culture is far more individualized. We’re not really joiners anymore.”
Underlining the point is the sea change that’s happening with what people are choosing to do with themselves after they die. Cremations are on the rise in many countries for a number of interlinked reasons, starting with the globalization discussed in chapter two. People increasingly are buying cheaper coffins made in China, which is causing profit margin decline among service providers in the West. That’s causing the industry itself to contract. In the United States, nearly twenty thousand funeral homes operated in 2011, about 10 percent fewer than a decade earlier.10 Tied to this trend is our increasing mobility, which gives rise to a number of questions when a death occurs. When someone dies now, is she buried in the town where she was born or where she spent most of her time? What happens if her family wants to move away from the chosen burial location—do they take the body with them or leave it where it is? Even if the urn is buried, cremation solves these dilemmas because it makes people’s remains more mobile as well. “People are less rooted in a community than they were a generation ago,” says Patrick Lynch, president of Lynch & Sons Funeral Directors in Detroit. “People raised their families in a community then stayed and died there, but baby boomers move from city to city and from job to job. With cremation you have more portability.”11
Fewer individuals are finding that it makes sense to go through the often exorbitant expense to have a big funeral, even though cremation goes against traditional beliefs in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths. The Catholic Church, for one, outlawed cremation until 1963 and continues to urge its adherents to stick with burials. Still, in the United States, logical economics triumph over the country’s relatively high religiosity in this area. In 1985, only about 15 percent of deaths were followed by cremation, a number that had risen to around 40 percent by 2012.12 But the US lags considerably behind many other advanced nations, which isn’t surprising given its strong religiosity. The countries of Scandinavia, as well as Canada and the United Kingdom all surpass 70 percent, and land-starved Japan cremates almost everyone. Cremation typically costs only a few hundred dollars, as opposed to the thousands required by funerals, so many families and individuals find it’s not worth having a lavish ceremony, religion be damned.
THE PARADOX OF ANSWERS
Buddhism, which emphasizes the annihilation of the self, generally favors cremation over burial, but back in Seoul the Venerable Noh Yu isn’t so sure whether growing individualism is a good thing or if it’s making people better. He became a monk to escape the secular world and the “cycle of life and the pain and suffering that people experience as they live.” Only by abandoning the technologically driven, secularly prosperous world did he himself become a better person. Technology makes our lives more convenient, but then we become trapped within that convenience and lose sight of what really matters. He describes the process of taking a photograph. As discussed in chapter five, it used to require significant effort, but, now that we can take instantaneous pictures with our phones any time we want, they’re not as meaningful. We store thousands of them on computer servers and never look at them, whereas in the past we might pay twenty dollars to print one, frame it, and hang it on the wall, where we’d look at it every day and potentially contemplate it or remember how we felt when it was taken.
In that way, technology can’t help us come to know ourselves because it distracts us from that deep contemplation, he says. Aside from mood-altering drugs, technology cannot change or control or fix our feelings. “When you were coming here today, you could decide, ‘Are you going to come or not?,’ ” he says. “Technology can help you get here, but it can’t help you decide whether or not you’re going to come.”
He clearly has given this topic a lot of thought, but that’s what people who meditate do. “You’re also losing yourself because it’s through the people that we’re close to that we’re able to understand ourselves. How they react to us, how they see us, what they say to us—you can see that as a mirror of the self. That’s something that’s forfeited as we head in that direction,” he says.
“When you deal with people around us and close to us, you have to accept them for who they are. There are going to be differences, incompatibilities, but those are things we have to overcome. It’s a crucial part of human relationships and it’s something that doesn’t happen in relationships that develop only online. You can’t live with people online. It lacks the true nature of acceptance.”
In one of those incompatibilities, he and I have a difference of opinion in how the seeking of answers happens. If science, and therefore technology, is advancing exponentially, won’t it eventually answer all of the universe’s questions? When that happens, won’t the mathematical prediction of religion’s extinction come to pass?
Both Noh Yu and my friend Shane had the same response. Science is indeed answering questions at an accelerating pace, but it inevitably produces more questions. Noh Yu brings up the placebo effect. Medicine can solve certain health problems, but individuals seemingly heal themselves of certain ailments if they believe they’re taking something that will make them better. “What’s the scientific principle behind that?” he asks. “The nature of the soul is very complicated, and in the end it can never be wholly explained or analyzed.” Shane mentions other historic discoveries, such as when we figured out the Earth wasn’t flat, or when we split the atom. “We thought that we had made the ultimate discovery, yet there was more,” he says. “There are some philosophical questions that were debated thousands of years ago that are still being debated today. They’re just not easily answered and maybe can’t be answered.”
It seems that questions, like answers, also multiply according to Moore’s Law.
THE UNIVERSAL ALARM CLOCK
Futurist inventor Ray Kurzweil, whom we met in chapter one, is one of the biggest adherents to science on the planet. He believes everything in the universe—including people and our souls—is a pattern waiting to be discovered and explained. Once that happens, all answers will be laid bare. As neuroscience advances and the brain is understood more fully, he’s confident that we’ll learn everything about what makes us human: not just what makes us tick, but also our personalities and the very essence of our beings. Once a pattern is understood, it can be replicated and then duplicated. Theoretically, this can happen in other “substrates,” his fancy word for bodies or platforms.
In plainer English, once we figure out the patterns that make up our personalities—and therefore our core being or soul, as it were—we’ll be able to copy them and upload them into our choice of sources: a biologically cloned body, a mechanical robot, a virtual world on a computer server, or some hybrid of all of the above. In any case, we’ll be able to live forever.
Singulartarians such as Kurzweil also believe that as computers surpass human intelligence—around the year 2045 according to their interpretation of Moore’s Law—it’s only a matter of time before they expand to become the essence of the universe itself. By this estimation, we’re in the third-last epoch of evolution, where technology is prevalent in the form of hardware and software. The next epoch, which will begin once we cross the Singularity threshold, will be the merging of human intelligence with technology. If you can’t beat ’em, you have to join ’em. The benefits of slowly but surely merging our brains with technology will become increasingly apparent. If you think that suggestion’s nuts, try avoiding Google for a month. It will become clear just how many of our brain functions we’ve off-loaded to technology already. Joining more fully with technology on a biological level will also help keep that same technology from wiping us out in a Terminator-style Armageddon.
In the final epoch, the universe “wakes up” as all matter and energy are infused with hybrid human-machine intelligence. What happens then? That’s when things get interesting and loop back to the question of God and the answers of the universe. “One thing we may do is to engineer new universes,” Kurzweil says. “Similarly, our universe may be the creation of some super-intelligences in another universe. In that case, there was an intelligent designer of our universe—that designer would be the evolved intelligence of some other universe that created ours.”13
On a less meta-cosmic scale, we’re getting closer to answering the question of just who we are, and it’s happening outside religion and religious belief—maybe even in spite of it. The evidence, gleaned over the past four chapters, is convincing. Communication between people and their own individual expression, whether through status updates and photos or self-made music, videos, and games, is exploding. So is the scale on which we socialize technologically. At the same time, we’re also withdrawing into ourselves, valuing our privacy and intimate connections more. We’re also pulling away from long-held institutions such as marriage and religion. These aren’t just superficial developments; they indicate that we’ve entered a new Golden Age of individualism. You might consider that a bad development—by which we’re becoming the sort of miserable, selfish, soulless curmudgeons I invoked at the beginning of this chapter—but as the next chapter illustrates, this is in fact a good thing.