Will technology give us the strong answers?

To the strong questions we face

Most of us don’t want to be bothered. We don’t want our search for happiness to have any difficulty in it. What we really want is to be given happiness on a platter. But to find what true happiness is, we must actually be willing to be disturbed, surprised, wrong in our assumptions—and cast into a very deep well of unknowing. - Adyashanti, Falling into Grace, p. 13.

In the previous post, I introduced the idea that learned ignorance, a Renaissance concept that embraces knowledge in not knowing, has potential in helping us to renegotiate our relationship to the technologies that surround us. I referred to Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ 2009 article about learned ignorance and “ecologies of knowledge”, and today I will focus on the latter notion and how it sheds light on how we relate to the various technologies that permeate everyday life.

One of Santos’ key points is about how our time is characterised by strong questions but weak answers. This observation begs the Heideggerian “question concerning technology”, or more precisely: if technologies have led us to the various current predicaments by providing a multitude of answers, have the answers not been strong ones, often enough?

How we hurt ourselves

In the context of technology, Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ arguments remind me of Philip Agre’s recollection of ‘awakening’ to what he calls critical technical practice. However, Agre’s argument is more focused on academic and professional practice rather than life outside such aspirations.

Santos argues that the notion of learned ignorance (by Nicolas De Cusa and others), and similar epistemological approaches that have been overlooked for centuries, allow perspectives of the global South to seep into the prevailing Western, global North mindset — a mindset that modernity has put forward. He writes:

My concern is to show that many of the problems confronting the world today result not only from the waste of experience that the West imposed upon the world by force, but also from the waste of experience that it imposed upon itself to sustain its own imposing upon the others. (Santos, p. 106)

The assumption of endless economic growth can be considered one of these hurts that we impose on ourselves as a society. Through colonising the globe with extractive technology, for the ideal of growth, Western forces — to which I, and likely many of you reading, belong — have hurt themselves in the process. As we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves.

Orthopaedic thinking

To explain why this is so, Santos draws from Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s notion of orthopaedic thinking. He interprets it as “the constraint and impoverishment caused by reducing the existential problems to analytical and conceptual markers that are strange to them.” (Santos, p. 110)

The idea is that orthopaedic thinking leads scientific disciplines, for example, to focus only on problems that can be formulated using their discourse — thus leaving aside anything that cannot be explained in the terms of science. In my interpretation, the expression of orthopaedic thinking in technology development tends to take the form of building more technology to address the issues that past technologies have caused. ‘Development’ in itself assumes progress through technology. Other socio-cultural approaches to tackling the issues constitute a blind spot, a ‘marker strange’ to those of us who gravitate towards technological solutions.

Santos argues that in so doing orthopaedic thinking seemingly triumphs over infinitude. It tames it with reduction and rationality, instead of arousing humility. “On the contrary, in Nicholas of Cusa infinitude is accepted as such, as consciousness of a radical ignorance.” (Santos, p. 114.)

Santos sees the consequences of orthopaedic thinking reinforced by politics which “secure the continuation of the global North’s neocolonial domination of the global South, allowing the citizens of the global North to benefit from such domination without being aware of it.” While there are numerous other examples, a recent expression of such a skewed dynamic of benefits is the ghost work behind the ‘magical’ AI tools. How strong an answer is the development of AI after all, along its current dominant paths?

Strong questions, weak answers

As a result of orthopaedic thinking taking hold, Santos discusses a related development. He terms this the prevalence of ‘weak answers’. Santos argues that our time is characterised by strong questions but weak answers. For instance, climate change has put forward strong questions, but some of our answers — e.g., greenwashing, climate change scepticism, or belief in the omnipresent power of technology to ‘fix’ climate change, are weak at best.

Weak answers enjoy credibility in the global North, whereas “in the global South, weak answers translate themselves into ideological impositions and all kinds of violence in the citizens’ daily lives, excluding the elites, the small world of the imperial South, the ‘representation’ of the global North in the global South.” (Santos, p. 110)

Writing in 2009, Santos gives a description of what we today would label ‘the meaning crisis’, following John Vervaeke and others. He asserts that the lack of prudent sets of knowledge with which to foster a decent life for everyone on the planet “appear as a set of contradictory feelings: exhaustion which does not conceal lack; unease which does not conceal injustice; anger which does not exclude hope.” (Santos, p. 111.)

Radical uncertainties

Santos calls to reject orthopaedic thinking and to consider alternatives that embrace radical uncertainty. The uncertainties come in two forms. First, there is uncertainty concerning “the inexhaustible and ungraspable diversity of social experiences in the world” that leads to an epistemological lack, i.e. that we lack knowledge to capture such diversity. At the same time, in the face of this infinitude, we have come to realise the finitude of our planet, resulting in a paradox where the potentially infinite diversity of human experience coexists within a finite physical world.

The second uncertainty has to do with the tension between 1) urgency — to address the polycrisis of climate, geopolitics, economy, etc — and 2) a long view — to regrow a civilisation in the ruins of the current one, beyond our own lifetime.

Santos proposes learned ignorance as an approach with which to address the first uncertainty; the tension between experiential diversity and planetary finitude: “To be a learned ignorant in our time is to know that the epistemological diversity of the world is potentially infinite and that each way of knowing grasps it only in a very limited manner.” (Santos, p. 115.)

Ecologies of knowledge

The other largely forgotten tradition from early modernity he champions is Blaise Pascal’s wager: a wager according to which whether we bet on the existence or non-existence of God, we are better off acting as if God and salvation exists, because then we are acting according to virtues that cultivate an ethical stance to oneself and others.

The traditions created by Nicholas of Cusa and Pascal are the South of the North, as it were, and are thus better prepared than any other to learn from the global South and collaborate with it towards building epistemologies capable of offering credible alternatives to orthopedic thinking. (Santos, p. 114.)

Santos then arrives at the notions of ecologies of knowledge and intercultural knowing: “if the truth exists only in the search for truth, knowledge exists only as ecology of knowledge.” (Santos, p. 117.)

Ecologies of knowledge transcend orthopaedic thinking in radically combining different traditions and ways of knowing: “The concern with preserving biodiversity may lead to an ecology combining scientific, peasant or indigenous knowledge.” (Santos, p. 117.) This kind of ‘artisanship of practices’ embraces the unlimited diversity of epistemological premises and acknowledges the context where they are put to use.

This would bring respite to the second uncertainty between urgency and the long view - if we start living according to virtues, and embrace the ecology of knowledge, it will pay off beyond our knowledge of what will happen in our lifetime. “[T]he ecology of knowledge turns all ways of knowing into experimental ways of knowing”, Santos (p. 118) writes.

But what does all this have to do with technology?

The way I see it, the ecology of knowledge helps us to consider technologies in relation to other phenomena rather than as seemingly isolated, deterministic forces, driven by humans and imposed on the relations.

With such a view, technologies are results of the relations, i.e. how we exist in relation to the world and its infinite diversity that we cannot ever grasp. Inspired by Iain McGilchrist’s prime dictum, I propose that through technologies, we attend to the world in a certain way, but our mode of attention shapes what we can know about the world. The more we filter and manipulate the world through and with help of technologies, the less we know about what we don’t see through them or produce using them.

For example, while modern communication technologies enable us to cross vast distances, they simultaneously disable other forms of expression and relating. While the global supply chains bring everything imaginable to our doorsteps, they simultaneously hide their origins. While generative AI demonstrates for us connections and patterns in a vast amount of data we could not see ourselves, it takes away the embodied and experimental process of looking at that data.

Nature provides strong answers

These developments are very far from how Kevin Kelly has described “a world without much technology”:

This world without much technology provided “enough.” There was leisure and satisfying work for humans. Happiness, too. Without technology beyond stone implements, the rhythms and patterns of nature were immediate. Nature ruled your hunger and set your course. Nature was so vast, so bountiful, and so close, few humans could separate from it. The attunement with the natural world felt divine. - Kevin Kelly: What Technology Wants, p. 573.

I am not advocating a return to the Stone Age, just to be clear. Yet, nature provides strong answers. If our predominant relationship to the world — of extracting, manipulating, consuming — were to change towards cultivating, caretaking, and sharing, then the qualities of the technologies we build are bound to change as well.

Then we might just have the strong answers.

Thank you for reading.

With love and kindness,

Aki