Ethics: Good Tech/ Bad Tech?

Is any new technology good news or bad news? How would we know anyway? What anchorpoints do we need for the ethics of Tech? Here is a toolbox of critical questions to ask of new tech, produced by one of the world’s leading Christian Ethicists, Jacques Ellul. Many thanks to John Halton for the link:

76 Questions to ask of any new technoogy

by Jacques Ellul

Ecological
What are its effects on the health of the planet and of the person?
Does it preserve or destroy biodiversity?
Does it preserve or reduce ecosystem integrity?
What are its effects on the land?
What are its effects on wildlife?
How much, and what kind of waste does it generate?
Does it incorporate the principles of ecological design?
Does it break the bond of renewal between humans and nature?
Does it preserve or reduce cultural diversity?
What is the totality of its effects, its "ecology"?

Social
Does it serve community?
Does it empower community members?
How does it affect our perception of our needs?
Is it consistent with the creation of a communal, human economy?
What are its effects on relationships?
Does it undermine conviviality?
Does it undermine traditional forms of community?
How does it affect our way of seeing and experiencing the world?
Does it foster a diversity of forms of knowledge?
Does it build on, or contribute to, the renewal of traditional forms of knowledge?
Does it serve to commodity knowledge or relationships?
To what extent does it redefine reality?
Does it erase a sense of time and history?
What is its potential to become addictive?

Practical
What does it make?
Who does it benefit?
What is its purpose?
Where was it produced?
Where is it used?
Where must it go when it's broken or obsolete?
How expensive is it?
Can it be repaired?
By an ordinary person?

Moral
What values does its use foster?
What is gained by its use?
What are its effects beyond its utility to the individual?
What is lost in using it?
What are its effects on the least advantaged in society?

Ethical
How complicated is it?
What does it allow us to ignore?
To what extent does it distance agent from effect?
Can we assume personal, or communal responsibility for its effects?
Can its effects be directly apprehended?
What ancillary technologies does it require?
What behavior might it make possible in the future?
What other technologies might it make possible?
Does it alter our sense of time and relationships in ways conducive to nihilism?

Vocational
What is its impact on craft?
Does it reduce, deaden, or enhance human creativity?
Is it the least imposing technology available for the task?
Does it replace, or does it aid human hands and human beings?
Can it be responsive to organic circumstance?
Does it depress or enhance the quality of goods?
Does it depress or enhance the meaning of work?

Metaphysical
What aspect of the inner self does it reflect?
Does it express love?
Does it express rage?
What aspect of our past does it reflect?
Does it reflect cyclical or linear thinking?

Political
Does it concentrate or equalize power?
Does it require, or institute a knowledge elite?
It is totalitarian?
Does it require a bureaucracy for its perpetuation?
What legal empowerments does it require?
Does it undermine traditional moral authority?
Does it require military defense?
Does it enhance, or serve military purposes?
How does it affect warfare?
Is it massifying?
Is it consistent with the creation of a global economy?
Does it empower transnational corporations?
What kind of capital does it require?

Aesthetic
Is it ugly?
Does it cause ugliness?
What noise does it make?
What pace does it set?
How does it affect the quality of life (as distinct from the standard of living)?

I don't supppose any conceivable technology is going to pass the test 76/0 — Does the technology of the wheel, for example, undermine conviviality or enhance it? But these are interesting dimensions of any tech, and set an agenda for understanding what we are letting ourselves in for before we get there.

I’d also want to point out that these questions are of far more limited usefulness as pass/fail things, than with the word “How” added to the beginning of most lines. In other words it’s a tool for assessing the probable qualitative impact, not just deciding whether to stick your thumbs up or down. This is useful because experience indicates that most of the time, your thumbs down won't matter anyway...

Nail Your Colours to the Fußboden

Kitting up for the Bremen Kirchentag, I notice one essential for non-flaky Christians everywhere — Die Luthersocke.

Each pair bears the immortal slogan — “Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. (Here I stand. I can do nothing else)”

Available to all in five colours (not only Anglicans), it’s a sure-fire way for clergy everywhere to prove their Standhaftigkeit and disprove idiotic allegations that they aren’t resolute enough. Good for lazy so-and-so’s, too. Your own personal Diet of Worms to go (or not, as the case may be). The Boy can now nail his feet to the burning deck, whence all but he have fled. God helps those who help themselves for 7 Euros, here. Amen.

Living strategy for learning in Oakley

Whole School Planning sounds dreary, but I had a slightly transcendent experience of how it can be done in a really well led school when I went to Oakley last week, an ancient but scattered village best known to 20th century history as the place the Great Train Robbers hid their takings. Children at the Oakley C of E Combined School were brilliant, bubbly and tremendous fun. Questions included “Who made God?” and “how did Jesus come to life again?” as well as the usual ones about Max the Cat and our children.

This school is, humanly speaking, an ideal size of about 100. Everybody really knows everybody else and it feels as though people really do muck in together here to get the best out of each other. The school is wonderfully well in with the village, both historically, and in creative contemporary ways. I noticed the school had arranged with builders of some new houses locally for small groups of children to go and visit regularly and see how houses are built — brilliant! I’d love to have done that when I was 8/9/10!

I was impressed by the Christian learning going on. Year 5 children had been working on Chagall images of the Crucifixion, producing their own, countering the tendency in lesser schools to telescope holy week into an Easter Bunny thang.

The School Council has also been working and consulting on a school prayer for everyone, and there has been really good sustained work to build children’s environmental awarenss in an Eco-school. David Kaboleh, local Vicar, is a frequent and friendly visitor. I liked the kindness tree where various good deeds were recorded, shared and celebrated as leaves on a tree.

I did see something I’ve not seen before, however, behind the Staff room door, with its elegant Simian theme. Jo Garlick and colleagues work closely together, to deliver their school improvement plan. There’s nothing crypto about learning strategy — it's there for everyone to see in the hall. But the staff have a mini version of the School Improvement Plan on the staff room wall. People, including children, use post-its when they undertake work, different colours for different groups (children, staff, governors, parents) and stick them into the whole scheme of what’s going on.

By doing this everybody can relate what they’re doing in the here and now to the broader strategy.

• Everybody can see that they’re part of the whole work of the school, and how.
  
  
• Everybody can see where the gaps are, in any given term.
  

This may sound like some boring bureaucratic thing, but it’s a brilliantly simple idea, that might be effective in all sorts of places (Churches?), and it really seems to work. It shows you can tie everything together strategically without being heavy handed, to keep things moving forward in a really deightful but also highly effective small school.

Keep those Meetings sweet, now...

As the Annual Parochial Church Meetings deadline of 30 April approaches, I detect slightly raised anxiety levels among colleagues. As far as in everybody lies, I recommend a light touch. If people must be contentious give them custard pies and even contentious can be fun. We all need a bit of inspiration for our APCM’s, so here it is:
Remember, everyone should be home by 21·30, latest. When people begin to take themselves too seriously, Pelagianism crouches by the door. Remember at all times what St Thomas Aquinas said — “Unmitigated seriousness betokens a Lack of Virtue.”

In the Loop: Fake Hawk Down

Imagine, if you can, a world of soundbite politics where the machinery of power is operated by vacillating professional politicians, out of their depth, jumping to the whims of ruthless, feral spin doctors. Everyone is trying to use everyone else, but they don’t quite know what for, making it up as they go along, riding the tiger of inter-departmental politics, sending the whole world to smash in vain attempts to save their faces.

Armando Iannucci’s comedy presents history as pure cockup rather than conspiracy. Imagine Burn after Reading writ large & lurid across UK/US corridors of power, a blow-up version of AI’s The Thick of It. It easily translates to world stage and big screen.

The Big Plot of the film may not actually quite convince, perhaps because the Blair/Bush figures are a bit too far behind the curtain, but the tactical delivery system is absolutely first rate. Brace yourself for some of the foulest-mouthed comments ever committed to celluloid, remembering they are only just a little bit North of the way some among our burgeoning class of political special advisers seem to express themselves.

Peter Capaldi’s Alistair Campbell character is a riot of egotism, obscenity and ambition. Not-so-steadycam shots and quick pans add pace and a well-judged smidgin of documentary atmosphere to the whole absurd business, in a non-annoying way. Laugh at the ludicrous, but remember that penning a tale about sexing up information to order with entire disregard for truth, morality, or the human beings involved, did not call for much invention from Mr Iannucci.


It’s good to see a movie driven by a sharp script, not CGI. Lines are delivered pretty much perfectly, although some may wonder how someone as gormless as Tom Hollander’s Minister of Overseas Development made it anywhere beyond kindergarten. There are visual gags too, including a memorable moment when Mimi Kennedy (no relation) accidentally transforms herself in the Ladies’ rest room from jaded State Department senior into a Frankenstein monster. James Gandolfini richly deserves a chestful of medals for his portrayal of a big chunky but dove-ish five star general — “When you’ve been to war once you don’t want to go there again — like France...”

Perhaps we’re just a sarcastic bunch in High Wycombe, but the belly laughs rolled around the auditorium in a way I haven’t seen them do in a long while. It’s strange to live in a place where such a portrayal of our politicians and their advisers inspires knowing looks rather than depair, but if Mr Campbell & his chums really didn’t want to go down in history this way, as they are doing, their obvious remedy at the time would have been to stop behaving in ways that inspired it. Sleep tight tonight.

Now that April’s here...

St George’s Day Flags are out around Great Missenden; including on the Church, where I knew it was going up because Lucy is tower captain, and got the call as usual last week. The whole effect was, well, as the Roald Dahl Centre proclaimed, Flushbunkingly Gloriumptious.

The English Church has done St George in style ever since he came onshore to England during the Crusades.

About 600 years ago, for example, an unknown artist painted this gentleman on the walls at Little Kemble — one of my favourite medieval small Churches around here, where I had the great honour of reading the passion on Good Friday, and sometimes snicker out and take a Prayer Book 8.00 servce.

In American movies the English make good conmen, toffs, idiots and butlers. Here at home, if you get the flags out, it conjures up lager louts, flags in cars during the World Cup, Reliant Robin drivers in pork pie hats, old maids cycling to early communion through the mist, and warm beer. You could add fondness for animal charities, language and literature, poor customer service and toy plumbing.

There’s also Fleet Street patriotism — essentially unhistorical, churned out by the yard and presided over by sleazy old hypocrites who bang on about patriotism whilst pretending to live abroad so that the country itself can run on everyone else’s taxes.

I hope people also think being English is something to do with fairness, scientific curiousity, a quirky passion for personal freedom, amateurism, tolerance, justice for the underdog, tradition and evolution, pragmatism, and creativity.
Attempts to define England in racist terms are ludicrous, because the basic fact about this island is that its culture and languauge have been made, and are still being made, by wave on wave of foreign immigrants — Romans, Germans, French, Jews, Dutch, French, Russians, Chinese, Afro-Caribbeans and Asians to name but a few of the most obvious and prominent since 54BC.

We are all what Draco Malfoy would call Mudbloods. I speak as a Hungarian Scot with only a mere dash of English: This qualifies me to be be fervently patriotic about this country in a way others may aspire to, but only Hungarians, and perhaps Ugandans, actually achieve. I was brought up on George Mikes (“Continentals have sex: the English have hot water bottles....”). It’s surely a good thing to feel rooted and confident about who you are, especially if that gives a platform upon which to be generous, just and creative. If opportunity presents, I may be able to ask the children I’m seeing in a Bucks school later today what it means to them...

Yom haShoah: Living Memory

International Holocaust Memorial Day has in recent years been observed on January 27, the date troops entered the camps. In Israel, Yom haShoah is timed around the anniversary of the rising in the Warsaw Ghetto of 1943, but its closeness to Pesach can lead to some variation. I was immensely honoured and moved to be a guest at the Council of Christians and Jews celebration of Yom haShoah yesterday in Oxford. The Oxford Jewish Congregation is a vibrant and extrordinary outfit which encompasses a wide range of expressions of Jewish practice under one roof.

Proceedings began with the simple but compelling voice of Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, played on the cello by Lynton Appel — music reflecting traditional chant from the eve of the Day of Atonement. Another unforgettable part of the evening was an address by Ruth Shire, a refugee from Nazi Germany, evacuated with other children in 1937. Ruth put everything in historical perspective, briefly, then told her story — of living with a family near Oxford, of the internment of her father during the war, and of the life she had built in this country.

Ruth’s story reminded us that amidst evil, the kindness of strangers and the resilience of the human spirit make for an everlasting remembrance. Her simple words reminded us that we all have stories that can bless us or curse us, by informing the decisions we make and the attitudes we take. Worst of all is to travel in ignorance of one’s own story. This being a Jewish community, there was, of course, a prodigious family party afterwards.

The memorial included the recitation together of the Kaddish, two minutes silence and the lighting of candles around which we placed stones. In Bible times graves were marked by cairns. Placing stones on them was a way of making them more permanent. Stones do not fade like flowers, and bear witness that others have visited and not forgotten. It was immensely significant to leave stones for those millions who were denied the basic dignity of a grave — an expression of the respect they were denied by their persecutors.

It is important to focus on the historical aspect of this, all the more as time passes. However it added a very special additional dimension to be a guest within a resonant community, in which memory is not a museum piece, but living consciousness. The evening was not simply about feeling sad, but also about identifying with those who died and those who suffer injustice and genocide in the world today:

We remember those who died in the Holocaust,
when madness ruled and evil dwelt on earth. We remember those of whom we know, and those whose very names are lost.

We cherish the memory of those who died as martyrs, those who died resisting, and those who died in terror.

We mourn for all that died with them; their goodness and their wisdom, which could have done so much to enoble and enrich humanity. We mourn for the genius and the wit that died, the learning and the laughter that were lost.

We stand in gratitude for their simple, decent lives. Their spiritual resistance remains an enduring testimony to a community where light persisted in darkness. Each person was unique, and we remember them all in love and compassion.

We salute those who had the courage to stand outside the mob, to save us, and to suffer with us. They too are God’s witnesses, and a source of hope when we are tempted to despair.

Because of the suffering, may such times never come again, and may their sacrifice not be in vain. In our daily fight against cruelty and prejudice, tyranny and persecution, their memory gives us strength.

In silence we remember those who sanctified God’s name.

Many thanks to Alison Ryde for the picture of candles and stones afterwards, and to the community of the Oxford Jewish Centre for their generosity and hard work.