For several years, I have been meaning to read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. It seems like a book best consumed during the month of October and somehow other Octobers have escaped before I could pick it up, so I am reading it now. The story is familiar, even apart from our cultural renditions of the green hulk-like monster. Humans are just fascinated with what makes us alive, what happens when we die, and how resurrection could possibly work. The book takes up all these themes.
This week’s On the Media podcast approached these same themes when the host, Brooke Gladstone, interviewed Meghan O’Gieblyn, author of God, Human, Animal, Machine. O’Gieblyn departed from her fundamentalist, evangelical Christian upbringing and has studied ideas around technology and religion. In the interview she talks about hypotheses such as Are we living inside a computer program? (i.e. the plot of The Matrix) and Is the internet conscious? Are we conscious if our subjective thoughts and feelings cannot be proven objectively?
In many ways, our technology behaves like a God. We have digital personal assistants like Siri and Alexa who can fetch us the weather, tell us jokes, and even predict where we need to go next in our cars based on our habits and calendars. Algorithms predict everything from what kind of shopping we’re thinking of doing to how likely we are to commit a crime. If any of us were asked to explain how this technology works, we would probably have some basic understanding of data and inputs but no thorough, detailed analysis of how it works. In fact, in some cases the inventors of these technologies cannot adequately explain how their algorithmic decisions are so accurate.
The interview reminded me of these ending chapters of Job, where God confronts Job in a whirlwind. Job has been the victim of undeniable bad luck (at best) and a divine bet-gone-wrong (at worst). Having lost everything and wrestled with his friends about the reason and meaning of it all, Job finally gets his moment with God. The reader has waited 38 agonizing chapters for this moment! And what does God say?
You’re too feeble to possibly understand.
We are a species that can dream up resurrected monsters and create technology to make our shopping lists, predict our movements, and perform our calculations more quickly than our own brains. We are hardly too feeble to understand. And yet, we often do not even understand the technologies we ourselves have made. There is something to be said for the gift of wonder.
At the beginning of her interview O’Gieblyn explains how Max Weber understood disenchantment. As the scientific revolution gave us tools to explain our natural environment, concepts like spirits, fairies, and dragons were less plausible and less necessary. We could explain how things happen with science and technology. Weber counts this as a loss for humans, because although science provides us with many rational explanations it isn’t a source of meaning for us the way other belief systems are.
Wonder is a human necessity. Wonder keeps us open to new possibilities and gives us freedom to dream things that seem impossible. Wonder is what drives us to keep trying to achieve a just society and better systems. We need to wonder. God never explains Job’s grief away. God in the whirlwind encourages Job to wonder through his grief.
There will be moments when you are too feeble to understand, but it is my prayer that these moments open you up to wonder.
