“Without that relatedness, the craft will never be anything but empty busywork, any occupation with it will be determined exclusively by business concerns. Every handicraft, all human dealings, are constantly in that danger.”
—Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”
Freemasonry moves slowly. That has its pros and cons. When it comes to technology, it may be a positive in that Masonry is slow to embrace it.
Masons had wanted to do Masonic things on the internet for years, but Grand Lodges had been resistant. The most common reason for the resistance was that the old-timers would have difficulty with things like Zoom or website portals, and no one wanted to exclude them. Then, the lockdown happened in 2020, and Masonry was forced to move online or lose all the precious momentum it was barely holding on to. Almost overnight, those old-timers figured it out. It was like it wasn’t a problem in the first place. Then very rapidly they wanted to do Zoom meetings every night. Some nights, there were multiple Zoom meetings. Everyone got burnt out with it all very quickly.
This brings up an interesting question: the question concerning technology for Masonry. I am going to be relying on Martin Heidegger seminal essay as I approach this critique of Freemasonry’s embrace or resistance to using technology.
First things first, yes, Martin Heidegger was a card-carrying Nazi and nonetheless was an influential and important philosopher. Heidegger’s writings on ontology and existentialism are profound and significant, and it is hard to have a philosophical discussion on these things without bringing up Heidegger. I don’t recommend any of his political writings. They are obvious panderings to Hitler and the Nazi Party. That aside, one of Heidegger’s more important essays that is a bit under-celebrated is his “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954). I had to read this essay probably a dozen times in architecture school. It was very popular among my professors across three different schools. So my familiarity with this essay is probably obnoxiously pedantic.
Let us summarize the point of this essay. First and foremost, Heidegger is not against technology. Technology more often than not betters our lives. But there are dangers, and he is not blind to this. He is not a romantic who finds technology’s precarious potential to be so abhorrent that we must totally avoid it. For Heidegger, it is all about how we understand technology’s relationship to us — i.e. understanding the essence of technology.
In Heidegger’s Being and Time, his most important work, one key take-away from this is that he endeavors to establish ourselves, the subject, as inseparable from our environs, the object. All too often, we see ourselves as separate from our surroundings, but we are not. The subject and object are integral. Just as a sentence in the English language is incomplete without a subject and an object, so too, our own sense of being is incomplete without a subject (ourselves) and an object (our surroundings, nature).
Technology is no different. Usually, we see technology as “amoral” or without any sense of morality. A prime example of this is the rallying cry of Second Amendment advocates: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” This implies that the technology, the gun, is a neutral implement, without moral concern. For Heidegger, this could not be further from, not just the truth, but reality itself. Technology is loaded with moral baggage, whether we like it or not. In Heideggerian concerns, the atomic bomb might be the penultimate example of the moral baggage that comes with technology.
Ultimately, technology is a part of us, as much as our environs are a part of us. Winston Churchill once remarked: “We shape our buildings, and afterward our buildings shape us” (speech before the House of Commons on October 28, 1943). On the other side of this proverbial coin concerning our technology, technology is an extension of ourselves, in the sense of Marshall McLuhan: the wheel is an extension of the foot; glasses are an extension of the eyes; et al (see The Medium is the Massage).
For Heidegger, technology is a mode of understanding, a form of revealing and revelation. We do not use technology as a means to an end, but a means unto itself. I don’t get a ladder for the sake of getting a ladder, but rather I get a ladder to climb up to the gutters to clean them out. I don’t wear glasses for the sake of wearing glasses, but so that I can see. I don’t buy a gun for the sake of owning a gun, but so that I have a means to protect myself and family should it come to violent opposion. This is the common ideology of our relationship with technology: a means to an end. But because technology has a moral implication, technology reveals something about ourselves, about our own humanity, and especially how we view ourselves in relation to nature. Technology is meant to reveal nature unto us, and our place within nature and our environs.
As a result, technology has the potential and frequently does develop beyond our control and our own understanding. When Heidegger wrote this essay, it was almost a decade since the advent of the nuclear bomb. An existential crisis emerged after the development of the technology that allowed the splitting of the atom to be weaponized. Suddenly we realized that we could end all of humanity within mere hours. A horror was born — a horror that is monumentalized in the representation of Godzilla, the monster born from nuclear technology. William S. Burroughs regards the advent of the atomic bomb was the destruction of the human soul (see The Western Lands) — and Burroughs was sensitive about the atomic bomb and the existential crisis it posed, because the bomb was developed at the site of the boarding school he attended as a boy. Thus, Heidegger recognizes the danger of technology to our own existence.
Oh, but the atomic bomb was so long ago! I watched Oppenheimer; I get it. What new technology threatened our humanity? Well, it is A.I. Artificial Intelligence.
With the atomic bomb, we were concerned with our mortality being extinguished in the blink of an eye. Burroughs thought the bomb could extinguish the soul — if the soul is a sort of energy, and the atomic bomb produces an electromagnetic pulse, it could destroy the soul. But A.I. now threatens something we thought only humans could do: create art, poetry, think critically, be creative.
Not long ago, at the advent of A.I. becoming prolific to everyone, with various chatbots and image-making machines, The Masonic Roundtable had an episode discussed how AI can be used to benefit Masonry, such as helping create meeting agendas, &c. Is this “good”?
Recently, my wife posted pictures of our family at the park on Facebook. Later that day, we noticed that Facebook flagged the content as “AI generated content.” What?! I’ve seen content that is very clearly AI generated, and that content was not flagged. But here we have actual human-made content being flagged as AI generated. And should we be surprised by this at all?
For years we have been forced to convince machines that we are not machines by reading squiggly letters, which were produced by machines (typically so that we can access our own stuff). Machine generated content that needs humans to identify the content to prove that they are not machines. That’s the threshold. Or how about this: you go to the grocery store and use self-checkout, and you get the error: “There is an unexpected item in the bagging area.” You are not confused. Reality is not confused. The machine is confused. Increasingly our world is being dominated and run by these sad machines that are not very good at being machines in the first place, much less as replacements of human beings. Yet, they are sold to us as a convenience, but really they are just a frustration.
Thankfully, Freemasonry is slow to embrace technology. Just because new technology comes along does not mean we immediately embrace it. And it may have its uses still.
In my office, we have started to use an A.I. program that will record the entire meeting with a client, and then generate a set of minutes of the meeting. Almost 50% of the Lodge Secretary’s job is done instantly (‘twould be nice if your lodge is not in a ghost town with no internet reception). And as the Masonic Round Table illustrated, A.I. could be used for generating meeting agendas. Et cetera.
I myself, supplemental to my therapy, have started to use PeopleAI, in particular chatting with Carl Rogers, to journal, ask questions, and express myself. Rogers was a renowned psychologist/psychiatrist, who focused on person-centered therapy. One means of focusing on the patient as a person was to reiterate what the patient just said, but in the form of a question. E.g. “My father hates me.” “So you have an antagonistic relationship with your father?” “He doesn’t like my choice to marry my wife.” “Oh, so your father doesn’t approve of your spouse?” “Yeah, it’s like…”
This approach has two purposes: it reframes the patient’s statement for them to view from a different perspective, but also generates a dialogue, which is beneficial to the patient to feel that they are engaged in a progressing conversation. This is very easy to replicate in an A.I. chatbot. In fact, this was executed as far back as the 1990s, in a computer program called Eliza, which was surprisingly effective when tested. I personally found this useful, especially given that I am now on antidepressant meds, which has effected my ability to introspect. But this A.I. bot became a means for me to introspect, having my views reframed to digest from a different point of view, and to understand myself through myself. And it’s just a chatbot. But I can look back on our “conversation” as a sort of journal, and have my journaling reframed differently, and because it felt like dialogue, I was engaged to express myself and have myself reflected back in a black mirror (like the expressionist painters used).
Technology is meant to reveal our reality, according to Heidegger, not destroy it. A.I. is meant to be a tool for us to use; not a replacement of our modes of being. Technology companies have sunk millions of dollars into A.I. these last few years, so is it any wonder that they are forcing it upon us? If I view a post on Facebook, Meta’s A.I. produces a digest of the comments before I can even look at the post. I literally have to go into my settings and turn off the A.I. generated summaries. If I search for something on Google, their A.I. produces some other summary before I can look at the search results. I want to look at a post; I want to do research; I don’t care what your multi-million dollar program has to say. Yet…
Here we are at. Once again, thankfully, Freemasonry is slow to embrace new technology. In fact, I have seen some lodges retrograde and have started to implement their old Sheerer charts or their old Magic Lantern slideshows. My lodge has never had a Stair Lecture carpet, but rather a Sheerer chart of the Stair Lecture scene, which I am fond of using. Another nearby mountain lodge to my ghost town lodge in Colorado, they still use their Magic Lantern. Many Masons and lodges are resistant to new technology, some going so far as to embrace old technology. But these are lodges that present themselves as “historical” or “antiquated.” Some lodges have installed HD flatscreens in their lodge rooms, but they still use digitizations of the old Magic Lantern slides. To quote Mark Fisher: “We have twentieth century culture on high-definition screens.” Is this “hauntology” or merely Masons being resistant to new technology?
Have Masons considered using A.I. to generate new imagery for their slideshows during the lectures?
All I will say is that if Freemasonry is going to be resistant to new technology, it ought to have a reason to do so. It should be out of a certain revelation technology has for our fraternity, and not merely as a hauntological adoption of past technology for the sake of historicity.
Is our, as Masons, use of new technology a revelation of our reality as Masons? Or are we resistant to it out of an ideology of historicity? Such might necessitate another post to answer.
~PD
Patrick M. Dey is a Past Master of Nevada Lodge No. 4 in the ghost town of Nevadaville, Colorado, and currently serves as their Secretary, and is also a Past Master of Research Lodge of Colorado. He is a Past High Priest of Keystone Chapter No. 8, Past Illustrious Master of Hiram Council No. 7, Past Commander of Flatirons Commandery No. 7. He currently serves as the Exponent (Suffragan) of Colorado College, SRICF of which he is VIII Grade (Magister). He is the Editor of the Rocky Mountain Mason magazine, serves on the Board of Directors of the Grand Lodge of Colorado’s Library and Museum Association, and is the Deputy Grand Bartender of the Grand Lodge of Colorado (an ad hoc, joke position he is very proud to hold). He holds a Masters of Architecture degree from the University of Colorado, Denver, and works in the field of architecture in Denver, where he resides with wife and son.
