SERVICE IN HIGH-TECH SERMON 9/16/2001

            This has been a sad week for all of us, after the unspeakable terrorist attacks of last Tuesday (11 September 2001). Others are more qualified than I am, to speak to those events. I won't try to do so, except that I'll mention one very helpful and profound book which I've read many times in my life, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by a Massachusetts rabbi named Harold Kushner. (Schocken Books, New York, 1981; also Avon Books, New York, 1983.) This book was a best-seller two decades ago, and deservedly so; it shouldn't be hard to find a copy.
      Now I'll switch back to the thoughts which I'd prepared a month ago, when I first knew that I'd be speaking today. My topic is the relationship, between a career in high-tech industry and service to God and to Humanity.
      Here in the Bay Area, we live in what’s probably the most-concentrated high-tech area on this planet. Many of us here make our living directly in high-tech industry, as I’ve done for 45 years now; and the rest of us probably depend upon it in some way for our livelihoods.
      My current job assignment, for instance, is writing precise, technical-reference descriptions about different aspects of a highly innovative and complex microprocessor. How can such a job be service to God and to Humanity?
      Are techies like me all called upon by God to abandon and renounce our secular occupations and turn to other, holier, purer ways to earn our daily bread? There are several hundred thousand folks in this neck of the woods for whom that could be a burning question. Perhaps, even including many of you.
      My father was a UCC minister for 55 years. In college, however, he had majored in physics, at Haverford College and at MIT. He’d even gone on to a year of graduate-school physics at Columbia University. When he told his physics-major adviser there that he was going to put all of that aside, and transfer to Union Theological Seminary, his adviser reproached him -- in shock -- "Hastings, you have the makings of a first-rate physicist, but you’ll never be more than a third-rate minister!" I think that my father spent the rest of his professional lifetime trying, with some ultimate success, to prove that man wrong!
      There has been a box of books over on the side table in this sanctuary, Soul & Silicon, by Carl A. Goldman. Jim Burklo told us that they were free for the taking, and all but one is gone now. If you read only its dust jacket, the book’s message seemed to be that each of us techies can find peace and fulfillment only when we quit our big-money high-tech jobs and enter low-paid -- but more worthy -- social-service occupations. But actually, when you open up the book and start reading the pages inside, it’s a lot wiser and less simple-minded than that.
      At one time I took a course to prepare me to pass my real-estate licensing exam in Washington state. (I did pass, and I still have that license.) I remember, from that course, a realtor’s phrase "Highest and best use." It’s a profound phrase; and its scope isn’t limited to real property. I’ve asked myself, hundreds of times over the years, what is my own personal "Highest and best use."
      I did at one time consider following in my father’s footsteps. But I now feel that it would have been a disastrous mismatch with my personal strengths and weaknesses, and that my own "Highest and best use" may very well have been to work in the field of digital electronics as I have done.
      Technology, in the broadest sense, is how we cope with our environment. Paleoanthropologists refer to the Cro-Magnon and Neandertal skill set of creating serviceable flint knives and axes, with good sharp edges, as their "technology."
      In the ancient world at the time of Jesus, there were two occupations that might, in this sense, be called ‘technological’: blacksmith, and carpenter. I’ve always found some comfort in the assertion, in the Gospel of Mark, that Jesus worked -- no doubt for at least half of His lifetime -- in one of those technological occupations. If we believe both Matthew and Mark, He must have started out as His father’s apprentice. So He was, for His time in history, a ‘techie’ -- a designer and builder of tables and chairs, of cabinets and ox-yokes, maybe even of entire houses. He must have understood how to saw in a straight line, when to choose cedar and when to choose oak instead, and other principles of basic technical knowledge applicable to doing His carpentry work for His village. No doubt many people of the village depended upon His technical skill, and trusted Him to develop sturdy and serviceable wood furniture and workplace devices which would serve them well.
      So I don’t believe that serving God and one’s fellow human beings in the highest way always has to mean turning one’s back on technology as one’s life work. If everyone here in the Valley were suddenly to do that, and to enter social-service occupations, who would then be the "hewers of wood and drawers of water?" Who would then make BART and CalTrain run on time, and keep telephone and email service running? Where would the computers have come from, which this church -- among other worthy institutions -- depends upon to keep its mission all tied together? And, economically, the Valley would become like that mythical Irish community where everybody makes a living by taking in everybody else’s washing.
      The world’s work does have to get done. And, increasingly, getting it done depends upon high-tech knowledge to make that process go more smoothly, or even just adequately.
      Having said that, it’s well known by each of us that many folks in this Valley have gone into high-tech work, not out of a sense that it’s their personal "Highest and best use," but as their path to The Big Score -- which actually is the title of a book which I own about Silicon Valley. Of course, at this particular time in the Valley’s history, The Big Score has turned into The Big Scrunch. The applicable saying is -- to quote a Wall Street Journal article of a few years back -- "What was the lever on the way up, becomes the screw on the way down." The words of the Hebrew prophet Haggai, written twenty-six-hundred years ago, apply dead-on to the Bay Area’s recent dotcom meltdown and cost-of-living explosion. For many of us, those stock options have turned out to be " . . . a bag with holes."
      But where was the idea of service, in the e-business plans of many of these dotcoms?
Instead, there seems to have been the notion of ‘creating a revenue stream’ -- setting up a system whereby money would magically flow, in exponentially-increasing amounts, into the e-bank accounts of the dotcom’s founders. Never mind fulfilling any genuine economic or social e-needs.
      For instance . . . Might Webvan still be around, if its management had started out with a more-modest e-business vision -- of how best to serve the genuine and urgent needs of shut-ins, seniors, caregivers, exhausted harassed parents, and handicapped people who really do have serious difficulties in physically getting themselves to a grocery store to shop? Wouldn’t that have been a more worthwile, and more durable, e-vision than the one which Webvan seems to have had -- of replacing Albertson’s and Safeway and Nob Hill and Lunardi’s at one fell swoop with a totally-new whizbang shopping experience?
      Another aspect of a high-tech career, for those of us who are seekers, is the so-called conflict between science -- or technology -- and religion. The claim that some areas of knowledge ought never to be pursued is older than Christianity. In Greek mythology, Prometheus was punished by the gods for learning to use fire, and Daedalus and Icarus were punished by the gods for developing manned flight. In Hebrew legend, Adam ate of the apple of knowledge, and was punished first by realizing that he needed that fig leaf to cover his nether regions, and then by having his eyes opened to perceive some other more difficult truths.
      Today it’s not all that different; We have technophobia, both right-wing and left-wing. So-called religious conservatives want to put all study and control of human reproduction out of bounds, and so-called liberals want to outlaw all study and application of nuclear technology and genetic engineering. Some would even like to outlaw the study of artificial intelligence, and ban computers in our schools.
      To quote the British science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, "Any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And we’ve always had those folks among us who have tried to outlaw magic, for instance by burning witches in Salem. They’re driven by primordial fear of the unknown -- at least, of what’s unknown to them.
      Technology in and of itself is neither good nor evil; it’s neutral. It can be applied in ways that are destructive; or it can be applied in ways that are life-affirming. It can be enslaving; or it can be liberating. Image-processing technology can be used for guiding smart bombs; or it can be used for noninvasive scanning of our insides for signs of cancer. Computer-controlled telephone systems can be used for junk-call telemarketing; or they can be used for quick and reliable message handling of life-or-death nine-one-one calls. Automatic recognition of faces can be used for spying on people; or it can be used for locating lost children in crowds. Biochemical technology can be used for germ warfare; or it can be used to make our lives longer and better. Email can be used for nuisance spam; but, in Moscow ten years ago, it was used to foil the attempted old-line communist coup against Mikhail Gorbachev.
      Besides the good and the bad applications of technology, there are some which are merely ugly. Technology can go overboard and be misapplied also, in ways that aren’t exactly evil, but are silly and nonessential and go beyond common sense and actually get in our way. A quote from one of my Silicon Valley colleagues, a technologist and marketeer named David Wyland: "Whatever can be automatically done for you, can also be automatically done to you."
      With six billion people already on this planet, and counting, we desperately need technology to leverage our finite resources, so that we can avoid catastrophe -- or at least dystopia. (That word means anti-utopia.) Science-fiction writers have drawn for us chilling pictures of dystopian worlds, such as we might all be living in within just a few more years. Blade Runner, Soylent Green, Logan’s Run, and George Orwell’s classic 1984 are some of the better-known dystopias.
      The worldwide AIDS epidemic threatens to repeat the Black Death epidemic in Europe of a few centuries ago, and biomedical technology is our thin red line of defense against it. For so-called ‘conservative Christians’ to say, as many did just a few years ago, that AIDS is God’s judgment on gays -- that’s worse than a travesty of Christianity, in my book. It imputes a malicious intent to God. I’d call that blasphemy.
      We who work in high-tech can’t always control what’s done with the fruits of our labors. We can, sometimes, ‘vote with our feet’ and change companies, or change technical fields. I for one would rather be where I am now, working to advance the prospects of worthy microprocessor designs which take as little as one-twentieth of the electric power of their competitors to do the same job, than working in defense industries as I was a few decades ago -- even though I never personally worked on anything lethal.
      Having said that, a lot of the technology originally developed for the military is already saving lives, and will save more lives in the future. Even high-tech swords can be turned into plowshares.
      Late at night, I brood about "How permanent is what I do? Am I building anything for the future? Will I leave anything behind me which is worth anything to the world? How permanent is what any of us does? What will endure about our country, our civilization, our way of life?"
      The Hittites, the Tocharians, the Khazars, the Etruscans, the Mayans, the Easter Island Polynesians, and countless other groups all once had their civilizations, their languages, their cultures, their technologies. They rose, and then they fell. Except in the case of the Mayans, whatever they achieved has mostly been lost over the years.
      So what does it all mean, in the long run?
      It means this: Here and now, the world’s work has to get done. If it doesn’t get done, there will be discomfort, disease, hunger, suffering, privation, and needless death. Technology can be, and should be, applying science to getting the world’s work done better, faster, and cheaper. If you’re part of that enterprise, don’t feel ashamed of what you do. Two millennia ago, Jesus was part of that too, for most of His working life. #

Mark 6:3 "Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?"

Matthew 13:55 (part) "Is not this the carpenter’s son?"

Joshua 9:23 (part) " . . . and some of you shall always be slaves, hewers of wood and drawers of water for the house of my God."

Haggai 1:5-6 "Now therefore thus says the LORD of hosts: Consider how you have fared. You have sown much, and harvested little; you eat, but you never have enough; you drink, but you never have your fill; you clothe yourselves, but no one is warm; and you that earn wages earn wages to put them into a bag with holes."

Romans 12:4-5 "For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another."