In The Gospel of Steve Jobs[1], Andy Crouch discusses Jobs’s influence on contemporary culture as the shepherding of a flock of secular sheep. Crouch wrote the article in January of 2011 when Jobs went on medical leave, and draws out a theme largely unexplored by the media frenzy after his death: what does Jobs’ popularity say (if anything) about secular culture? For Crouch, secularism is “just not enough,” and the article reads as a defense of this thesis, with Jobs’ as the target for secularism’s misgivings. He quotes at length Jobs highly regarded Commencement Speech at Stanford (2003), where Jobs articulates a vision of success based on personal intuition, creativity, and determination:
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Crouch goes on to make a straw-man of this ethos, by questioning the weight this message would carry in times of tragedy. His point is simple: Jobs’ message of personal freedom and expression leaves out a vision of human life that includes intangibles, and any way to explain human suffering.
What Crouch fails to seriously consider is that Jobs’ technological vision was not influential just because it was profitable or individualistic, but because it was connecting. While greater connectivity does not always lead to moral good (i.e. decreasing privacy, social isolation), it has led to mass waves of democritization across the Middle East. Crouch closes in on fascinating territory, and then retreats into religious moralism (we are better off to believe in the unknown, materialist culture has no account of moral questions).
Crouch is trying to expose how our veneration of Apple’s products and emphasis on personal expression borders on worship. One could easily counter that people have had individual music libraries, photo albums, and books for centuries, and our awe of each new iPad is merely its trendiness. But I think that his point goes deeper: technology has enabled us to exert a far greater control over how we access, process, and use information. Perhaps by constantly manipulating our world at rapid speed, we are less likely to slow down enough to reach at the intangibles of grace, redemption, or progress.
There seems to be two dominant responses to Jobs’ new age vision of personal intuition and power: to soak it up, or reject it as threatening more traditional values. But why are these mutually exclusive? Why can’t a Christian acknowledge the power of our creativity, while paying deference to the source of it? As a committed Buddhist, I am able to acknowledge both my capacity for positive change, and the underlying illusion of this construction of reality. The secular/religious divide is important insofar as it exposes powerful questions of how technology shapes our identities, capacity for reflective thought, and connection to human beings.
[1] http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2011/januaryweb-only/gospelstevejobs.html
This is a thought-provoking investigation of the nature of what might be called the Secular vision and Jobs’ role within it – neat!
Thanks for this thoughtful probe into what Andy Crouch suggests that Steve Jobs and his message mean for our culture! Your point that Crouch neglects the value of connectivity made more possible by his technology is well taken.
I wonder though about a couple of your points: How is it that Crouch “retreats into religious moralism”? Is it moralistic to draw moral distinctions, or only to do so without appropriate humility? While Crouch doesn’t refer to his own faults, his tone strikes me as admiring of Jobs’ contributions and wistfully sad about the followers of his gospel (he feels “compassion and something like fear”) rather than judgemental. Religious folk who call themselvs Christian are often as self righteous and moralistic as any other kind, but those who listen to Jesus hear that each of us is broken, and equally in need of outside help – he challenges accusers to think about being the first to cast a stone at someone else, and to take the plank out of one’s own eye before pointing out the splinter in a brother’s.
My second question is how you read Crouch’s attempt at a Christian response to Jobs’ contributions as so one-sided, since he starts by crediting Jobs’ creations with making technology safe, accessible, and elegant for ordinary people before raising questions about whether we worship them too much. Buddhists have much to teach about holding contrasting ideas in mindful tension, but I would expect their focus on the inner life to coincide with that of Christians, in contrast to followers of a secular gospel that defines the highest good in terms of external, individualistic accomplishment, however brilliant.
This is more a comment on Andy Crouch’s article than on Tom’s blog post. I do appreciate Tom’s thought that personal creativity and traditional values are not necessarily mutually exclusive. When I read Crouch’s article I thought, “Crouch makes too much of Apple’s logo and Jobs makes too little of death.” Jobs said in his Stanford commencement address, “Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new.” This strikes me as a “corporate” view of death, as if death ushers in a new and better humanity somehow, like a new and improved I-pod. I wonder where the individual who lived and died fits into this way of thinking. C.S. Lewis makes a different point, if I read Jobs rightly, in his essay, “The Weight of Glory.” He writes, “Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive….It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization–these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit–immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously–no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”
Thanks for your thoughtful article, Tom, and for allowing my two cents worth.