The Trouble with Treacherous Servants

What 2 Samuel can teach us about technology

In much writing about technology (including my own) you will often encounter the metaphor of technology as a treacherous servant. For instance, I wrote in a column for WORLD earlier this year about smartphones, “Technology is a great servant but a bad master; although these devices may be here to stay, we have a responsibility to ourselves and our children to ensure we are using them, rather than them using us.” The metaphor is common enough to be at risk of becoming a cliché, but I don’t know that we give it the thought it deserves.

After all, I think we are often tempted, when reaching for such language, to think that this paradox of “servant as master” is one of the novel features of our current technological experience, that it is precisely because our technologies have become so advanced that they are in danger of using us, rather than we them. After all, who was ever at risk of being tyrannized over by their hammer or hatchet? And yet, the problem of treacherous servants turning on or exploiting their masters is a theme as old as literature itself—or probably older.

I had occasion to reflect on this while preparing for my “Faithfulness as Christian Citizens” mini-course for churches, where I draw extensively on Old Testament narratives to draw out illuminating insights for political life. One of my favorite such passages is 2 Samuel 3. For those a little rusty on their Samuels, the narrative goes like this:

Saul has died, and David, as the Lord’s anointed, is seeking to consolidate his rule over Israel. However, initially he enjoys only the support of his own tribe, Judah; the rest of Israel, understandably, rallies around Saul’s sole surviving son, Ish-bosheth. A civil war commences, and the balance of power slowly shifts: “And David grew stronger and stronger, while the house of Saul became weaker and weaker” (2 Sam. 3:2). A fascinating narrative then ensues. Abner, the commander of Ish-bosheth’s army, is described as “making himself strong in the house of Saul” (3:6); Ish-bosheth then accuses Abner (falsely or truly, the narrative never tells us) of sleeping with one of Saul’s concubines (thus symbolically appropriating kingly authority to himself). Abner responds indignantly and decides to defect and “transfer the kingdom from the house of Saul and set up the throne of David over Israel” (3:10). Abner then summons a council of the elders and goes to David on their behalf to pledge fealty.

David accepts Abner’s peace overture, but when David’s own general, Joab, learns of it, he denies that the overture is genuine, denouncing Abner as a spy and treacherously murdering him. David then goes to great lengths to publicly distance himself from this action, proclaiming his grief at Abner’s death and cursing Joab. Thus “the people and all Israel understood that day that it had not been the king’s will to put to death Abner the son of Ner” (3:37) and David still succeeds in consolidating support from Abner’s followers. Fascinatingly, though, he does not sack Joab—Joab has rendered himself too indispensable for that.

Now, there are all kinds of things going on in this passage and I left out lots of interesting details in this brief summary. You could probably teach a whole mini-course on politics from this chapter alone. But let’s focus on the central theme: the theme of over-mighty servants.

Both Ish-bosheth and David, like most aspiring monarchs, depend heavily on their chief military captain. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword, and those who live by another’s sword are liable to die by it as well. Precisely because Abner is such a useful and essential servant to Ish-bosheth, he is liable to become Ish-bosheth’s true master. Ish-bosheth realizes the inverted power dynamic taking hold and tries to stop it, but it is too late. He sits by, pathetically and powerlessly, as Abner dresses him down and promises to support his arch-rival. We might assume that David, the great warrior-king, slayer of lions and bears and Goliath, would be immune to this danger, holding sufficient personal power that none could threaten him. But by the end of the chapter it is clear that he also has become too dependent on his servant Joab. David doesn’t cut quite as pathetic a figure as Ish-bosheth, but we are left with the bizarre spectacle of David publicly dressing down Joab for murder and treason while leaving him in command of his entire army. As the book of 2 Samuel unfolds, we see Joab repeatedly appearing as a “broken reed, which will pierce the hand of any man who leans upon it” (Isaiah 36:6)—although he also sometimes restrains David’s own follies. He functions, in short, as the quintessential servant—extremely useful, sometimes indispensable, but for that very reason, the real power behind the throne.

In The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius reflects on this universal phenomenon. In the classic discussion in Book III, Lady Philosophy walks Boethius through the five false roads to happiness—wealth, honor, power, fame, and pleasure—and shows how each is deceptive, because each, while promising self-sufficiency, turns out to be another form of slavish dependence. In words that could have been written about Ish-bosheth, she says, “Dost thou count him to possess power who encompasses himself with a body-guard, who fears those he terrifies more than they fear him, who, to keep up the semblance of power, is himself at the mercy of his slaves?” And in a fascinating passage on wealth, she points out that the more wealth someone has, the more people they need to help protect their wealth: “the wealth which was thought to make a man independent rather puts him in need of further protection.” We see this today in the stories of complacent billionaires swindled by their accountants, bilked by their attorneys, or robbed by their security guards.

In other words, indispensable servants are always at risk of becoming oppressive masters. Humanity has always known this; it is only recently that our technologies have become so useful as to replace human servants and occupy this ambivalent position, leaving their owners and users reduced to the spectacle of pathetic Ish-bosheths—unable to live with them or without them.

There is no simple answer to this dilemma, though it may perhaps at least be some comfort to us in our predicament to realize that we are hardly alone, but are simply facing an age-old paradox that bedeviled Agamemnon before it bedeviled us. That said, Boethius’s answer, while it might be easy to dismiss as trite, is certainly not wrong: if you don’t want to be reduced to slavish dependence on anything creaturely, don’t seek for your happiness in any mere creature. Only a perfectly self-sufficient source of happiness (God) can confer self-sufficient happiness on those that seek it. In other words, the simplest way to ensure that technology (or anything else for that matter—food, sex, good weather) remains a useful servant rather than a cruel master is to make sure that you yourself can be as happy and content without it as with it.

Simple, maybe, but certainly not easy.

Newly Published

• “A New Sheriff in Town” (WORLD Opinions): The tech policy community was thrown into an absolute tizzy of excitement a couple weeks ago by the Third Circuit Court’s ruling in Anderson v. Tiktok, a landmark ruling that radically challenged a quarter-century of terrible precedent that has shielded internet platforms from the ordinary legal liabilities that most other industries face as a matter of course. I published a column last week on the significance of the decision, which may well end up in front of the Supreme Court next year.

• “iThink Therefore iAm” (American Compass): In case you missed it, my big think-piece of the summer published last Wednesday at American Compass. In it, I survey the six key pillars of social conservatism—Limits, Tradition, Patience, Dependence, Embeddedness, and Embodiment—and show how each has been dissolved by the acid of the digital age, leaving central conservative convictions increasingly implausible to ordinary Americans. If this sounds like bad news, I argue that it actually presents a great cultural and political opportunity to advance a substantively conservative agenda on bipartisan grounds.

• Also, though this is not a publication, I had the pleasure last Wednesday of traveling up to beautiful Cairn University outside of Philadelphia to introduce the new cohorts of John Jay Fellows to the Reformed natural law tradition. They were full of very sharp questions, and the three hours flew by. If you’re not already familiar with the John Jay Institute, I’d strongly encourage you to check them out!

Coming down the Pipe

• This afternoon, I’ll have the privilege of speaking at the Global Age Assurance Standards Summit in DC, which is leading the effort to establish age verification as the standard for pornographic websites. I’ll be giving a briefing on the important upcoming SCOTUS case which will determine the constitutionality of such measures, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton.

• “Technology and Freedom: The Faustian Bargain of Modern Life”: On Thursday, I’ll be delivering the Collegium Lecture at New College Franklin, presenting my chapter on technology from my forthcoming book Called to Freedom: Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License. Tune in at this link to watch via livestream (6:30-8:00 PM CT)

• “Not So Smart After All” (WORLD Opinions): Continuing my theme of recent reflections on technology and epistemology, my next forthcoming piece for WORLD focuses on the pitfalls of supposedly all-knowing AI bots that have a tendency—like many of us—to just BS their way out of hard questions. Does the advent of AI threaten to destabilize even further our sense of what’s true and what’s false?

• The World and Everything in It: I recorded an audio version of my recent column on Anderson v. TikTok, which will appear on WORLD’s podcast tomorrow.

• Conservative Conversations with ISI: I had the pleasure of speaking with Tom Sarrouf of ISI about my new article on technology and the plight of social conservatism, “iThink Therefore iAm.” It was a fantastic hour-long conversation that gave me the opportunity to lay out my case and some key building blocks of a conservative tech policy agenda. Should post today or next Tuesday.

• Faithful Citizenship in a Fractured World:

  • Audio of my lectures at Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Raleigh, NC will be posted serially starting today here.

  • I’ll be teaching a slightly-expanded version of the course at St. Andrews Anglican, Mt. Pleasant (ACNA), this weekend. Register here.

  • I’ll be teaching a slightly-condensed version of the course at City Church of Richmond (PCA), September 20-21. Register here.

  • I’ll be teaching a very-condensed version of the course at Christ the King Alexandria (ACNA), October 20.

• I have articles appearing in the upcoming issues of Ad Fontes, Mere Orthodoxy, and National Affairs later this month. Subscribe to the print editions to be among the first to read them!

On the Bookshelf

• D.C. Schindler, Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty (2017): Very much enjoying this so far, although I definitely have questions. I am always suspicious of efforts by intellectual historians to force a thinker into the position of being a foil for the view the author wishes to advance, especially a foil that represents everything that’s wrong with the modern world. So I remain to be convinced that Schindler’s summary of Locke is faithful to Locke’s intentions—though I may just need to keep reading. I do note with interest that Schindler starts out with a threefold distinction that maps very well onto my own in Called to Freedom: he speaks of ontological freedom, moral freedom, and political freedom, and argues that the trajectory of modernity has been away from the first toward preoccupation with the second and then with the third, forgetting their dependence on the first. I use similar categories, except that I call the first “spiritual freedom,” reflecting my Augustinian/Lutheran starting point.

• Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012): A recurrent tendency of humans in the midst of complex social conflicts is always to imagine and attribute a monolithic unity to “them,” forgetting that every institution is itself riven by internal conflicts and tensions as different personalities jockey for position. We all know this about our own institutions, but somehow trick ourselves into reading every signal emanating from an opponent’s camp as the indication of a consistent, unified, and threatening position. This, as Clark shows, is a key way that tensions escalated in Europe prior to 1914—in every government, there were at least some hawks, and each government was inclined to suspect that the hawkish noises it heard were the true positions of the governments it was dealing with. Many lessons here for contemporary politics.

• Anton Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (2023): Lord willing, will finish this masterpiece by early next week and then start going back with a fine-toothed comb, typing up notes. Here’s one passage apropos to the topic of today’s post:

  The perfect tool is a tool perfectly obedient—a perfect servant. But the servant will also tend to master us to the extent that we are compelled by its implicit vision of what is lovable and valuable about human beings. And that ‘most perfect and obedient tool’ represents (not coincidentally) a new view of nature and of women in particular—one that beguiles us all the more because we see in it what we want, the image of another we have made for ourselves.”

• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869): Not much progress to speak of here. Perhaps I can rectify that on my upcoming travels this weekend.

Recommended Reads

• “The Christian Persecution Narrative Rings Hollow” (David French): This piece from a couple weeks ago, texted to me yesterday by a friend, is recommended not as something praise-worthy, but simply as a good indication of where ex-vangelicals are at these days when it comes to politics. Two things jumped out at me from this essay—one good, one shockingly bad. The good point is that the persecution complex is a heady drug, and once you get out of certain evangelical subcultures, it rings a bit hollow. French is right that it’s always helpful to take some time to step out of echo chambers. The shockingly bad is how poorly this First Amendment lawyer seems to understand the First Amendment. He claims that the establishment clause was “underenforced” until 1947, when the Court finally began to correct this “constitutional mistake” and understand the clause’s true meaning that had lain hidden for a century and a half. I had to wonder whether he actually believes this or is being willfully disingenuous. And he refers to drag shows as a “fundamental freedom” which evangelical Christians are discrediting themselves by attacking. Note the significance of this reasoning—it’s not merely that evangelicals should exercise prudential restraint in curtailing such wrongs, but that these wrongs should be treated as fundamental rights.

• “Why I Have Not Gone to Rome” (Jordan Cooper): On a totally different note, really interesting piece here by my friend Jordan Cooper, who has recently launched his own Substack. This articulates more clearly than I ever could have myself why I too have never found the lure of Rome particularly alluring. Put simply, while it’s not clear that Rome’s core claims are false, that’s because they’re unfalsifiable and so could never be shown to be true either. They are certainly plausible, especially if you are already Roman Catholic, and so I do not begrudge my Catholic colleagues their convictions. But it’s hard to see on what basis I could find myself reasoned into such convictions.

• “Negative Epistemology and ‘The Outer Ring’” (Samuel James): I share Sam’s admiration for Lewis’s classic essay “The Inner Ring,” which is indeed an essential read for understanding pretty any dimension of human social life. And I really like his coining of the terms “outer ring” and “negative epistemology,” to describe those who define their thinking not by a desire to belong to the sophisticated set of the Right Kind of People, but by their determination not to belong to “the Wrong Kind of People”: “Once you’ve settled on deciding who the Wrong Kind of People are and why you won’t hear anything they’ve got to say, eventually all those good reasons for blacklisting them will magically seem to apply to more and more.” I would add that there’s a transitive property to outer-ringism: you begin by rejecting tout court anyone who smacks of a certain error, and then you wonder why your friend does not join you in this wholesale rejection. He too must be one of the Wrong Kind, and so you must cut yourself off from him as well—and so on, ad infinitum, in the intellectual equivalent of Stalinist purges.

Get Involved

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If you have any questions or comments or pushback on anything you read here today (or recommendations for research leads I might want to chase down), please email me (w.b.littlejohn@gmail.com). I can’t promise I’ll have time to reply to every email, but even if you don’t hear back from me, I’m sure I’ll benefit from hearing your thoughts and disagreements.