Nasr's Lament

Nasr sees modern technology as the major cause of destruction of the environment and as having debilitating effects on the spiritual health of mankind. His solution is to return to a simpler past, a near primitive existence, as dictated by the Koran, where man's handiwork really was 'hand work', and not machine work. This sentimental, idealistic lament is serioulsy flawed. We can't turn back. He seems naively amazed that when technology offers wealth, power, and conveniences, Muslims everywhere want in on the action. To counter their enthusiasum, Nasr points out that the quality of life has gone down, and not up with modern technology and the only way back is to embrace the traditional technologies that still exist (ceramics, carpet weaving, sari sewing and comb making etc.). When i talk to my grandparents or even my parents of a generation ago, it is very clear that life has gotten a whole lot more comfortable - from the clothes we wear to the way we get around to the houses we live in to the food we eat. Of course not all is a bed of roses - clothes as status symbols, impossible traffic ills, tainted food stuffs, environmental degradation - but with all these setbacks we are still living longer and healthier lives due to modern technology. Much like the North American Amish and the aboriginals, who do engage in stratagies to slow down the growth of technologies by limiting its use, Nasr is pleading for Muslims to see the devil in modern technology (which he claims comes mostly from the West) and to rise above their inferiorty complex and embrace the past while limiting their use of modern conveniences. But these stall tactices will eventually give way to the modern world as they gradually reappraise what limited use entails, allowing more and more modern conveniences into their lives. I know of no technology that has not started out as something only for the wealthy and the elite to eventually trickle down and be available to all at affordable cost.

I do agree with his argument that technology is not neutral in its effects on mankind and the world. But simplistic whitewashing of technology as either all bad or all good is not the answer. The bad effects are giving us some pause to think about how we treat the environment and to come up with new, greener solutions. Along these lines i agree with Nasr that modern technology should be more aligned with its environment. There should be a more synergestic approach to the implimentation and use of technology - there are no simple solutions and there should not be a one-technology-fits-all-situations mentality. Nasr's final plea that Muslims gain a better "awarness of what modern technology entails and develop a more discerning attitude toward it", seems like solid advice that we all should abide by.

Strange Bedfellows and Ideological Log-jams

I read with great interest the Islamic Era Science Time Line. Clearly science was a major part of Islamic history: alchemy, free libraries, mathematics, medicine, philosophy. It has been well documented that in recent history, at least from the time of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (1281-1923), there has been a sharp decline in the involvement of Muslim countries during their secular regimes in development and research of the “sciences, innovation, book publishing, art and literature”. As well, Islamic politics in Muslim countries are depicted as trigger happy and intolerant when it comes to any form of dissent and ruthlessly literal in their interpretation of the Koran, leading to authoritarian nonsense such as forbidding male doctors to attend to female patients and banning music on public transport. Islamic principles and laws based on the Koran (which I have never read) seem to make strange bedfellows with science. In my mind the Koran limits human activity, limits the boundaries of reason and hems in any attempt to understand the universe except through the irrationality of the mystical. Their universe is already, always has been, delineated and authoritatively defined by the word of God. The Islamic claim that humans can not even contemplate the mysteries of the universe is, in the world scientific community, refuted every day with advancements in every field of scientific enquiry, especially in biotechnology and nanotechnology (that’s not to say that this progress is all good – global warming, the toxic air and water of the world are mainly problems of scientific hubris and Western capitalist/consumptive greed).

It is a sad fact that Islam concentrates great attention and money on military R&D, while many of their countries suffer poverty and horrendous food shortages: “For many Islamists, achieving independence from Western nations, defense and national security are higher priorities than the Islamic duty to care for society’s poorest”. On the other hand, the poor and the needy are neglected in wealthy Westernized countries as well, although agencies and institutions are democratically working at ‘ground zero’ in genuine attempts to ameliorate the plight of so many that fall through the cracks of a harsh and unforgiving society.

I sympathize with the Islamic wish to govern their own countries, their own way, without the help or support or interjection of Western ideas and ideals, but it would be in their best interest to encourage independence and freedom of thought instead of an intolerant, literal, blind obeisance to the ancient Koran which inevitably allows the world, even Third-World countries, to outpace them in social, political and educational advancements: “How literally they interpret the Koran will clearly influence how the new Islamist governments regulate science and technology.”

It was encouraging to read about the Muslim Brotherhood’s Egyptian scholar, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, who supports critical thinking and self-criticism. He worries that Islamist opposition movements are “too literalist and are not doing enough to encourage independent thinking using reason”, thinking which they fear will weaken the Islamic teachings. If they truly believe in the limitless, omnipotent knowledge and mystery of their God then they should have nothing to fear. Clearly an Islamic purist mindset that only functions in ancient shared histories and traditions could create a repressive atmosphere. Already there are reports of crack downs on reformist movements and restrictions on female university admissions, for example. In an interview with Mostafa Moin, a doctor and medical researcher who has served in Iran’s government, he does not see Islam as ‘anti-science’ but he is concerned that “superficial, narrow-minded and non-democratic interpretations of Islam – and the political behaviour of certain traditional administrators – risk having a negative impact on both scientific development and social reforms in Iran.”

David Nobel talked about Western enlightenment science and technology which entailed both pious service to and a devout effort at identification with divinity through reason and rationality. The philosophical, sociological, technological logjam between the West and the East now may be as simple or complex as the difference between Western belief in technological determinism, whereby our cultural values, social structures are determined by technical forces, and Islamic tradition that views culture, society and religion as determinates of economic, social and political arrangements. Both East and West attempt to construct a unitary reality, a reductionism that views and corrals identifies negating how ones’ reflexive perspective of the embodiments of individualism, community and society can coexist. The big difference I see is how the individual is treated and legitimized. The Islamic Muslim is born into his community and is assigned a certain role or social stigmatization (caste system), a priori, that contains and restrains him/her – much like in medieval times when you where born either a serf or a Lord, your destiny already prescribed and there was no climbing up the managerial ladder. The logic of this is that the community, religious or otherwise, makes the individual. In the West there is this, arguably false, notion that you can legitimized yourself through self assertiveness (many Muslims would view selfish individualism, of using other’s to gain self-realization, as transcendentally egregious), allowing you a modicum of freedom to invent your own person, your own destiny, and therefore it’s the individual that creates the community, the social matrix, and not the reverse.

It was Haraway in her “Cyborg Manifesto” that said “Abstraction rules in knowledge, Domination rules in practice.” The closed boundaries of dominant Western and Islamic practiced ideals are at odds, both mired in essentialism and authoritarian hierarchies that dominate and squelch true ways and means to paths of knowledge that should involve scientific, socio-political and religious commingling. The ideological monster in both camps is technological and sociological myopia. I share Roxanne Euben’s cogent, albeit optimistic thoughts in her “Counternarrative of Shared Ambivalence” where she hopes for a unified epistemology, an inextricable co-meshing of reason and revelation that enables the interlacing of Western and Eastern ideologies, flattening out dominate and hierarchical influences of religious, patriarchal, political and socio-economical structures, making them more attuned to egalitarian sensitivities. .

Second Life

In our postmodern, posthuman environment - the breaking up, fracturing, and decentralizing of the self - we often blurr the line between what is human and nonhuman. This intentional blurring is a ruse to help mitigate our failures as humanistic human beings. By failures I'm thinking of a world that promotes and privilages violence, insensitivity to others and indifference to life itself. Mark Taylor in "The disappearance of the Self" claims that the "identity of the self is synthetic rather than simple". Among the myriad synthesized components of the self are the self-conscious acts of remembering and the internalized/externalized forces of time and space. Importantly, time is but one time - the present. The present is comprised of past-present (memory), present-present(sight), and future-present(expectation). He follows that if the self is made up of time and time is but a 'trace', then in a posthumanist turn the self is erased and the search for ourselves is our inevitable individual journeys to our deaths. Whereas Taylor writes about the entanglement of the self with time, space, and God, Hayles in "My Mother was a Computer" writes about the entanglement of the human and the non-human, specifically "human bodies, cultures, and artifacts entwined with intelligent machines". Hayles attempts to resist the sci-fi writer's vision of a postbiological world where the human mind and the self have the exponentially expanded powers necessary to create a "participatory universe", although she does acknowledge that in the near future we will see significant convergences between humans and intelligent machines even while we exist "both in the world and of it".

When we look at posthumanist attempts at entwining humans with machines, I'm always amused. We have cars, appliances and entertainment toys that talk to us in very unhuman, monosylabic tones. We have robots that look and move like humans rife with arthritis. That's not to say that eventually through biotech and computation we will not create 'humachines', cyborgs and clones, but at this moment our attempts, in my view, look and sound pretty pathetic. And when you look at computer web sites, like "Second Life", where you can create and participate in a virtual reality world it certainly makes me think that even though we attempt to marry machines and the human it is an essence of humaness in these technological assemblies that is the most crucial component. Maybe Posthumanism asks not"Who is a person? (more a psychological investigation that enbodies our humaness)" but "What and How is a person? (more a phyisiological, biological, technological investigation)", in an attempt to conjoin the human selves with the non-human, creating a destabalizing effect, unavoidably highlighting the differences and simultaneously searching for the similarities.

I guess the mechanical hand at the top of this post serves to not only show an early, rather humourous, limited view of the melding of human and machine, but also to give one a sense of pause. The hand with the palm facing up is a signal to stop. Lets stop and reflect on our apparent willingness to become our machines, giving up in the process our unique, ambiguous, fragile natures indelibly embedded in our differences of identities as human beings.

Michael