Father John Staudenmaier: University of Detroit-Mercy, Detroit, MI, 16th of April 2001.

Father John Staudenmaier: I am inclined myself to think of electricity in terms of a larger cultural context, you might say the people who felt it worth their while to invest their money and their expertise and their time and energy in electrical research and development. I‘m thinking particularly of the 19th century and the 20th of course. Those people didn‘t come by this by accident, I think, or perhaps I could put it another way, it would be better to make sense of their motivation for being so concerned about electrical systems and then later electronic systems by saying, what is it about the culture of europe- northern europe and western europe in particular- that gave people the predilection for this kind of technology?

MH: what was the predilection?

FJS: Well I think that the emerging, and I mean by that in the last twenty years, the emerging history of the enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries in europe in particular. Call attention to the european intellectual leaders after roughly the thirty years war, so the time of Decartes and then Leibnitz and then Newton, you find an increasing mistrust for the sensual, the experimental, the local, the topical. These are considered to be suspect and deceptive and so you are seeking some kind of a frame of reference that gives you trustworthy knowledge and trustworthy public policy. Some people say that it is the carnage (Gemetzel) of the thirty years war when you have people motivated by religeous belief doing terrible things to one another and one another‘s children for years and to zap the energy of people to believe that you can join the local and the sensual and the personal and the immediate and the experimential with the public and the policy world. And so you begin to say, is there not some way in which you can create a world that is cleansed of passion, cleansed of bias, cleansed of superstition and so on. And out of this search it seems to me you begin to have the cultural context that generates the investment in for example precision measurement - to have measurement that is precise and clean where the bounderies between one and two are crisp and well defined, ah! this will somehow get us free from carnage, butchery and so on. That mentality, I think, precedes the major investments that we call the industrial revolution and the scientific instrumentation break-throughs in terms of precision by 50, 70 years. So you could perhaps say that european intellectual leadership became afraid of the dark and then began to say: there must be a way to conquer the dark. Since the dark is bad, the dark, the emotional, the sensate, the experimential, the adhoc.
So I incline to believe that all of the research that leads to electrification as growing out of that cultural context that says that precision needs to overcome the imprecise.

MH: do we re-enter an age of darkness today?

FJS: Oh indeed, I think you can see since, I suppose you could say since the enthusiasms of World War II began to loosen their grip - say 1970, somewhere in their - you begin to see an increasing number of people, especially young people but not exclusively who say there must be something more than crisp, clear, strategic, systemic thinking, there has to be something more than this. And so you have the birth of all sorts of cult movements, some of them pretty grim, some of them silly, some of them trapping back into ancient traditions of mystical wisdom both from the east and from the west. It is not an accident that Buddhism has become much more popular in the west than it was 50 years ago. I don‘t think, I don‘t think that was an accident. Nor is it an accident that the Christian tradition of monastic contemplation, the keeping of the rythmic hours of the day in the office of the Christian church has become much more popular with a fair number of people than it was say 50 years ago. Those things probably say or at least I think they say, they suggest to me that the idea of the society being able to find it‘s complete meaning and purpose and happiness and so on in ever more precise and finely callibrated systems of greater complexity, those systems that we depend on, that they are the entire meaning of human progress, I think that begins to be more suspect to people.

MH: Have these suspicians a comparible force as the enthusiasms of people like Siemens, Edison, Rathenau and others?

FJS: It is a very good question whether all the interest that you see in small groups and cult like groups, this growing interest in the mystical and the contempletive, whether this is a genuine large cultural movement or whether it is an epiphenomina and you might say a small growth on the side of the great elefant which is the enlightenment project. That‘s a good question and I think it‘s too early to know this. I am impressed with the tremendous underlying commitment in this society that I am a citizen of towards the precise, the predictable, the clear, the strategic. I don‘t think that that‘s gone away at all. So I watch these developments of people looking for something more than that and I say this is interesting and it may be very important and it‘s too early to know this.

MH: Does electricity produce it‘s own values that are not dicussable?

FJS: Well, I wouldn‘t put it that way. I would go the other way which I was doing a minute ago. I don‘t myself incline towards an interpretation that says for example, here we have electric light and power systems after roughly 1880. They begin to become popular, they extend by 1930 most homes in the west that have a reasonable ammount of money have electric light and power systems in their homes. And you can say, ah, so now we have the utility system generating and distribution of power, we have various use of this power in people‘s homes, in industry and in the public order. And I don‘t myself then say, and this set of systems, the electric utility system and all the things that go with it creates a mentality. I don‘t like the word creates in such a sentence. I rather would say the same mentality that made all these investments in all this research and development over such a long period of time so important to so many people, that mentality evolves of course and is enhanced by the capacities that electric power and light systems give people, certainly that. It makes some kinds of behavior a little easier to do and other kinds of behavior a little more difficult. And so in that sense it influences people over time, yes. But I would say that people already brought with them a certain mentality. So I tend to go back and forth between cultural world view and mentality and values and priorities and the technologies that emerged from it and then that reinforce and then that after a while begin to inhibit things and so on. I see it more as a back and forth between artifacts and harder to pin down (as) cultural world view, something like that.
Now I would say something like this, if you were to ask: is there a long term influence on the way human beings understand there lives because of electric lights, very good light available twenty four hours of the day. I‘d say yeah, I think there probably is a causal connection there that you could argue and I do. You could say that since every culture prior to the coming of electric light and power systems had to deal with a time of very dim light, call it the night. Everybody dealt with it except the very rich who could afford many candles, so the very very rich could have pretty good light at night if they wanted to pay the money. But the vast bulk of human beings understood that the world was divided into the time of good light and the time of not very good light. Because of that everyone knew that there were some things you did when the light was good and other things you could do when the light wasn‘t so good and some things that you did at night went better in dim light than they did in bright light.
So people begin without ever thinking about it, you grow up understanding that there are the things of the light and the things of the dark and you have to get good at both because both are with you every single day.
What happens when you get to a culture that doesn‘t have to put up with bad light, doesn‘t have to? You might say ever. What happens to the things of the dim light that people took for granted, I‘m thinking of the things that people did at night. Sleeping, resting, dreaming, story telling, sex and just quiet sort of sitting quietly not actively planning and thinking hard. What happens to that whole array of activities in a culture when you can do the things of the light, the crisp clear sharp focused work. You can do it at midnight or at three a.m. or at five a.m. I don‘t know. I have some questions about it. I wonder whether people don‘t assume pretty easily that they ought to be able to get to clarity quickly. That unclarity, ambiguity, uncertainty are somehow or other defective states rather than normal states. I think that might be a liability that we suffer in this culture. That we are impatient with ambiguity and with unclarity and unpredictability. We‘re not good at that. We don‘t like it. And somehow we feel vaguely that there is something to blame when we are in a state of uncertainty. So if I‘m right about that then the rush to clarity might be a rush past an essential dimension of human consciousness which is to move from a time of clarity into a time of uncertainty, through the time of uncertainty until some new clarity emerges again. We might not be so good at that when we are talking about relationships with one another, about long-term politics, about corporate strategy. We might be pretty twitchy when we are in windows of uncertainty.
I think that might be an effect of a technology.

MH: Don't you think it's alright that the electronic media are the storytellers of today?

FJS: Well my own inclination is to say that at every time and period, every culture has its own graces and temptations, its own strengths and liabilities. And it doesn‘t do a whole lot of good for people living in the present world to worry about whether they are better or worse than some people who lived a thousand years ago some place. But it is shrewdfull to say what are the strengths and liabilities of the period in which we live. And one way you get at that is by comparing it with other periods. It‘s a healthy thing it seems to me to say what are the things that make it possible to live noble, rich, kind, warm, playful human lives today as opposed to a thousand years ago. Those are fruitfull questions it seems to me. Clearly one thing that we citizens of the late 20th and early 21st century value highly are all the capacities for creativity that come with the systems we now have available to us. Those include transportation systems and media systems and scientific and medical ones. Those things matter to us deeply and we have a feeling because of them all, I suppose, you could say that human beings are capable of making a difference in their world, that people are capable of creativity probably on a level that people a thousand years ago did not imagine or didn‘t think about.
So you could argue that the gift of the sense of possibility which is a very real part of contemporary living, comes from the precision of systems and the fact that the people working on these systems improve them, strengthen them, push them so that they are continually changing so that you have to keep readjusting to the capacities of these systems. You could argue that that makes for an ongoing stimulation of the imagination which is a terrific thing. I think that makes lots of sense to me. You could also argue we are more subject to overload because of it. There is a gentleman from MIT whose name I forget now who called this data smog. And we‘re all burdened by it and we all know it. We all know we get too much information, that we are easily jaded, that we are tempted to cynicism and things of this sort and that we‘re not just sure where to find stillness in the life that we live. It‘s one of the burdens of living in this world. And if you were to compare the way humans live now to the way humans lived pre-electricity you get some benefits of comparison by doing this, it seems to me. But I don‘t think you get benefit by saying in some sense, ah there‘s was either a terrible time or a golden age. I think it‘s just human beings have the challenges of their own era.

MH: Even though, isn't there a deeper cultural impact of electricity, concerning our daily life, our bodies?

FJS: You know a thing that I think is true of all electrical systems is the radical difference between moving at the speed of light and moving at the speed of bodies. That‘s a big difference. And there is something true that has changed with the coming of electrical systems and I think it‘s a fun thing to think about too, to ask how much are human organisms, that would be us with bodies, we‘re moving you might say cognitively in a motion at the speed of blood. We move at the speed that our blood moves through our body and that our neural systems relate things and we move at the paces of our hormones. That‘s the manner in which the human animal moves and thinks and feels and savours and makes decisions. But an awful lot of the world that you and I live in now is moving at the speed of light. Whether we‘re talking about communication systems that allow me to talk to someone in europe as if we were sitting across a table or we‘re talking about a very complex network of electrical power distribution that allows people to take in data on demand shifts in the grid and where you can get your supplies from in the grid so that you avoid blackouts. Those kinds of movements of information or you‘re talking about a computer database that can track my criminal record from a driving violation in a database that can say you‘re wanted in the state of Conneticut even though you‘ve just run a stop light in Wisconsin. Those kinds of things, all of them have this one thing in common and that is that because you can now move signals at the speed of light through various media you can do a lot of things very very very much faster than human beings could ever do them before. And I think one of the really intriguing questions to be asked about this is: how good are people, whose bodies are the home of their consciousness, how good are people at maintaining the speed of light in their networked relationships of information shifting. That‘s a very good set of questions it seems to me.

MH: What was then the remarkable advantage of a non-electrified world?

FJS: I think one notable change between a world without electrification and the current world is that people were stuck, everyone was stuck with down time, quiet time, non purposeful time because that was what the night was. We are not stuck with that anymore so probably what most people do in order to keep a balance in their lives is that they must somehow or another create protected times. Times with boundries around them, ritual boundries typically inside of which they try not to be so purposeful, they try not to be in such a hurry. Vacations, a relatively new phenomina in the west, and vacations are meant to be such a thing. Not everybody manages it of course. They take vacations and they are as strategic on vacation as they are elsewhere but the idea of a vacation is to stay out of my life or our life we will take this time, we will make it protected, we won‘t take our cell phone with to the beach. We will have time when we are not interruptable. Some people manage that some people don‘t. There are cell phones at the beach but you can imagine the challenge of adulthood in the culture that we live in I think as being a challenge to find times inside of which we are not moving at such a pace of decision making and you might say not being so networked, not being so busy processing information.

MH: Have you already practiced your suggestions?

FJS: No, I do not find this easy. I think it is one of the challenges of adulthood. I myself have inserted into my week about an hour and a half every Sunday evening with four other Jesuits with whom I live and we call it story telling time. And we simply tell each other how our week was. We tell ups and downs. But we don‘t tell just big stories, we tell little stories. I‘m inclined to think that if you don‘t have some forums inside of which you can tell unimportant stories the stories don‘t get told and people begin to feel vaguely unknown because no one wants to listen to the little things. If I come home and say my doctor told me I have cancer and I will be dead in two weeks everyone will listen to my story. That story will break through other people‘s systems for the time being but if I come home and say there was someone on the freeway passing by who looked so sad to me that I myself grew sad as I drove on. That‘s a little tiny story. Will that one get told if we‘re all busy? No, probably not. But if we do not tell each other unimportant stories over time something begins to get lost. That‘s a claim that I would make, that this is an essential requirement of adulthood, that we know and believe that there is a place in which my stories, little and big, are important. And where other people‘s little stories are important to me. That I think is an essential of adulthood and if I‘m right about this then people will have to find their way to that stuff despite cell phones and pagers and getting the stock options at the Hong Kong market on my palm pilot. Sometimes I must set these things aside and make spaces.

MH: Can one therefore speak of a "compulsing networking", which is spoon-feeding our life, as we're not able to lead our lives anymore?

FJS: If I think of the difference between when I am living with what I‘ll call a networked, electrified world, where my pace is working at a systems pace and parts of my life where I‘ve managed to live other than that. I‘m inclined to think that what happens is that when I‘m in a networked mentality I‘m looking for every opportunity and I‘m trying very hard to miss none of them. So I have my systems of communication and information processing ready to move as quickly and adeptly as I can manage. But I work at having times in my life where I‘m not interested in processing information, where I‘m interested in being present. One way to talk about that I suppose is to say that sometimes I don‘t move by clock time, I don‘t pay attention to the passing of time and I manage to find my way inside the event that‘s going on at the moment and the event tells me the time rather than my clock tells me the time. I think everybody has those moments when they as they say forget about time. And I don‘t think it‘s really that we forget about time it‘s that we have a different pace of time in those moments. The event tells us that it isn‘t mature yet, that we must stay with the conversation or the party isn‘t over yet or the book that I‘m reading has gripped me so that I am inside the reading of the book and I loose track of clock time for a while. Well, I‘m inclined to think that I‘ve got plenty of clock time in my life, much of my life I am very programmed and very strategic and I think I‘m a fairly common adult in this. So I work at having times when I pause. Sometimes even in the middle of the busy day I pause and I try to pay attention to things that are happening that aren‘t on my schedule. I learned something with a code of a people, the Lakota, with whom I lived for some time, it isn‘t exactly a teaching, it‘s a more of a mind set and it is a feeling that if I know how to pause when say I‘m walking across a grassy area, if I can pause in the right fashion I can hear the different sounds made by the grass as it grows and the sound made by a tree as it grows and another tree as it grows. And if I can get to the point where I‘m in an inner state where I‘m somehow paying attention to the frequencies of grass which grows at a much different pace than a tree. I‘m outside my own frames for a while and I‘m a little healthier when I return to my own frames, I have reletavized my own schedule. I think we need to do that and I work at that discipline. And I suspect a lot of other people do too.

MH: Do you see - outside of your personal environment - a chance to get over this permanent "stand-by-mode"?

FJS: I give quite a few workshops abot electricity to pretty ordinary people and my experience routinely is that most people have not thought hard in their explicit consciousness about how they relate to electricity. But their feelings about electricity are very close to the surface and are not hard to touch at all. People understand their own emotions quite perceptively I think about both the sense of opportunity and command that electric technologies give them, that sense of power and energy and they also understand about the sense of drivenness and the danger of getting lost in the pace of things. They understand both of those like that when you call them to the surface. Now that‘s an interesting thing to me. I think it is also true about automobiles, about computers, I think it is beginning to be true about food, it‘s not too far away about water, I mean I think most people still don‘t know they have a lot of emotion about water systems. Cleaning water and moving water and so on. I think that the effect of electricity and about cars are much closer to people‘s awareness than let‘s say the effect about food and water are although they‘re getting much more conscious these days. But I have a sense of us citizens of the 20th and 21st century is that all of us have deeply emotional relationships with all these technologies but it‘s hard work to find the words to articulate them to ourselves and therefore to step back and think about them. And I see that as one of the things that I like to do. I like to try and find helpful words to connect people to their own effective experience about the technologies that are important to their lives. I do that.

MH: Can't we use electrical systems for non-purposeful more contemplative or even meditative activities?

FJS: I think sometimes people understand electricity as a contemplative dimension of their lives. I think sometimes some people, especially young people who like their play of images and like their capacity if they have enough band width to pull images and juxtapose images. I think they‘re doing something contemplative there and you might call it imaginative play. I don‘t suppose that electricity has to be any more distracting than sitting by a fire in the dark at 8 o‘clock at night when there is no electric lights can be distrcting too. You can dose off and be distracted from your life. I think adults can be distracted and part of the discipline of life I think is learning when is being distracted ok and when should you try to focus, or when should you do this, when does distraction get destructive and when does distraction just rest. Those are the kinds of good questions and I think that if we were to apply those to the manner in which we relate to electrical systems they‘d be healthy.

MH: A final question on the future of high-tech-systems. Facing vanishing resources to produce high amounts of electricity, do we envisage rather an apocalyptic end to these electrical systems instead of a smooth transformation?

FJS: Whether there‘s going to be a catastrophic resolution of system tensions you might say. I don‘t know that there‘s a correct prediction about that question at this stage. Surely there are some pressures growing in the world. The ammount of electricity we are using is a growing pressure. The ammount of waste disposal that the human beings are requiring for their various systems that‘s a great pressure. The scarcity of fresh water, of dringking water is a growing pressure. What will happen because of these pressures is too early to know. It could get pretty nasty it seems to me. It already is very nasty in some parts of the world. The great inequity in the world is not the digital divide it is the water, the drinking water divide, I think.