Time-saving innovations can distance us from our more important values, says Mark Vernon

The way we relate to technology has much to do with our imaginations – what we do and don’t regard as appealing, welcome, necessary. That has been a longstanding feature of our minds, as can be detected back into the Neolithic period. Consider the contrasting attitudes of the ancient Egyptians and the peoples of Mesopotamia to what was an innovative, disruptive piece of technology back then: the lever.

In Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates, levers were used to lift water out of lakes and rivers for a thousand years before they were adopted by those who lived alongside the Nile. The Egyptians knew about the shaduf, as rigid poles hinged across a central pivot were called. The devices enabled heavy weights to be lifted easily and were used away from the river, to move the enormous stones needed for the construction of the pyramids. However, when it came to fetching water from the Nile, the Egyptians resisted them.

The reason seems to have been a dislike of the way the shaduf intervened in the relationship people enjoyed with the god of the Nile’s life-giving flow, called Hapi. The shaduf would mean that men and women no longer had to step into the marvellous flood to collect water. The shaduf requires a solitary user to conform to its way of being, by standing on the bank with space to heave it. It undermines the experience of Hapi, which is why it can be assumed people tended not to use them.

There is a distant echo of this resistance when nowadays individuals choose to remove technology from token parts of their lives so as to taste a less isolated, more participative relationship with the natural world. It’s a yearning for an older kind of spiritual intelligence. They may decide to undertake an arduous pilgrimage on foot, or swim in wild places not a pool. Some learn to bake bread, so as to knead and know dough. Others will write by hand so as to enjoy the flow of ink on paper and the way it supports their labors.

More again will turn to making music, not only listening to it, by joining a choir or learning an instrument. They may never be great musicians but that is not the point, which is to understand more directly the expressive magic of communal melody and harmony. Little wonder there is evidence that practising a craft improves mental health. The materials communicate their substance. A craftsperson finds it harder to assume they are alone.

For ancient people, that would never have been questioned: crafts are not only useful activities but bring people closer to divine aspects of reality, which is why sewing linen or forging iron were intimately associated with gods. Back then, all activities potentially sustain spiritual vision. That is something we might learn from now.

This is an extract from Mark Vernon’s book Spiritual Intelligence in Seven Steps.