Louis C. K. does not like smartphones. The comedian recently explained why he won’t give his daughter one. “Kids are mean, and it’s ‘cause they’re trying it out.” If his daughter tries out being mean to another child in person, she will see the hurt she causes in the other child’s face. “They see the kid’s face scrunch up and they go, ‘Oh, that doesn’t feel good to make a person do that.’” But when children are mean to someone via text message, “…then they just go, ‘mmm, that was fun, I like that.’” Children must learn to be empathetic, and smartphones, by keeping them from seeing the pain their words cause, interrupt this learning process.

This comedian has touched on a serious issue, but not a new one. Over two hundred years ago, Jean-Jacques Rousseau made a similar observation; he argued that it is largely the human capacity for pity—which he described as a feeling of repugnance experienced when witnessing suffering in others—that renders us capable of political life. In Discourse on The Origin of Inequality, Rousseau argued that our social virtues flow from the sense of pity. “What are generosity, mercy, and humanity, if not pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in general?” When we see someone in pain, we experience a sense of revulsion. When we recognize that something we have done has caused the pain, we don’t do the same thing again.

Many modern technologies were created to alleviate human pain and suffering. Agricultural technologies help us grow bountiful crops to feed the hungry. Medical technologies provide medicines to cure the sick. Improvements in food safety and sanitation technologies keep people from getting sick in the first place. Few of us would want to live in a world without these technologies; however, the blessings provided by modern technologies are mixed. They free us from many of the limitations and privations that have plagued humanity throughout history, but these limitations and privations play an important role in connecting us to one another. We respond to others in need by sharing food and shelter, by caring for the sick, by offering companionship to the lonely. Technology frees us from our own neediness, but also from our responsibility to respond to the needs of others. As Aristotle taught, the city comes into existence for the sake of mere life, but it exists for the sake of the good life. Human community begins because we need each other; human communion begins to draw us toward the good.

Many of the essays in this issue explore these concerns about technology in our lives. In “Ah, yes. Yes. It Has Come Again,” Eric Miller demonstrates how Wendell Berry has depicted the distant and impersonal forces of modern technological society as drawing us away from experiences of genuine human communion. After reading Christina Bieber Lake’s “The Smartest Zombie Novel You’ll Never Read,” you might just take the time to read Max Brooks’s World War Z, a book that helps us recognize how the modern hubris that we have conquered nature and subjected it to our own ends leaves us dangerously unprepared to deal with a serious crisis. In “I Remember, Therefore I Am,” Jennifer Miller finds that a recent film, Robot & Frank, shows that if we allow digital and online forms of memory to replace more personal and tangible ways of remembering, we will sacrifice an important aspect of our own, unique identities. And while Gary Fincke’s “A Meditation on Mice and Rats” is mostly about vermin, it is also about our age’s squeamishness about anything we suspect might be dirty or diseased and about the measures we take to insulate ourselves from the more unsettling aspects of reality.

Through technology, we attempt to eradicate neediness and limitation, but if we forget that we are needy and limited creatures of God, then we have forgotten who we truly are. No doubt, modern technologies have made, and will continue to make, our lives better. Technology will help us live longer and more comfortably, but the things that make life worth living are found in our neighbors and in the image of God imprinted upon them.

                                                —JPO