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''A Congregation of hackers?''

Members of the Society of St Francis de Sales, otherwise known as the Salesians of Don Bosco, might be surprised and mildly shocked to hear themselves described as hackers! They will readily recognise that they are 'sons' of two of the world's great communicators. Francis de Sales is patron saint of journalists, and Don Bosco's life as a communicator had just about every element of the typical description of today's hacker (including the dishevelled look in one famous photo of the man): eagerness to learn and innovate with the technology of his day especially the printing press, enthusiasm and unbounded energy, late nights writing code (admittedly the special code of religious literature, constitutions and regulations, but also text books on mathematics, history), joy and playfulness. If hacking is about a certain craftsmanship and caring deeply about what you are doing, and also wanting “a way of bringing back the co-operative spirit” (Stallman), then Don Bosco was a hacker! But he was especially a hacker for heaven. It was not utilitarian rationality, not even just creative imagination, that moved him, but a passion for 'the glory of God and the salvation of souls'. He famously said that he would have no difficulty in tipping his hat to the devil if it meant he could be let through to saving just one soul (''Biographical Memoirs'' Vol XIII, 415). There is no need to tip one's hat to the devil to be a hacker in the positive sense of that word, so it would not be at all difficult to imagine Bosco the hacker today – and that should say something to his spiritual sons and duaghters too!

Don Bosco is a saint with a difference. Think of the traditional iconography of saints – which seems to present them as standing out from the crowd, individuals, albeit very holy ones! You don't get that kind of picture with Don Bosco. He co-founded his society with rag-tag bunch of kids, hardly one of them over the age of 18 at the time. Everything he did was co-operative by nature, with a thought to a 'vast movement of people'. In other words, Don Bosco was amongst that rather special body of saints who incarnated the cooperative spirit in a big way.

It is of interest that the Salesians of Don Bosco, who number some 16,000 men (there is a Congregation of women, the Salesian Sisters with similar numbers) and who operate in 130 nations around the world in the field of education and evangelisation, recently gave considerable prominence to ICTs at its 26th General Chapter in Rome, a meeting held every six years and which in early 2008 brought together 240 representatives from every Salesian province. One of those provinces, Ecuador, then followed up the meeting in Rome with a major international conference on 'Free Software and the Democratisation of Knowledge', inviting experts from around the world and tackling head-on some of the implications, especially for education, of a movement that grew directly out of the 1980's MIT hacker culture – the Free Software Movement. I will return later to this question of free software, digital culture and the Salesians.

Don Bosco's educational innovation is known as the Preventive System. There have been many profound studies of this 'system', but there is constant exhortation on the part of Salesian leadership to recognise its adaptability to times and cultures, something that already has a certain degree of proof, as it has adapted to cultures and places far beyond the Italy and Europe it was first forged in. The Preventive System has proven its worth equally in indigenous cultures, and parts of the world where Christianity is in a minority, as it has in good times and bad. The Preventive System deserves adaptation to today's technological culture too, and one senses in the various interventions at the 26th General Chapter on the role of ICTs in the task of Salesian education and evangelisation today, that this kind of interest, along with 'passion for God and passion for humanity' (Fr Pascual Chávez), is part of the Salesian DNA.

There might seem little connection of any kind between the Don Bosco of 19th Century Italy and the Quakers of 17th Century Britain, except that both had developed, according to their own Christian lights, an approach to friendship (Quakers are even better known in places as the Society of Friends) which has then found its way into educational practice.

I am raising this because of the influence of one Quaker of our own time, Parker J. Palmer, in contemporary education. His 'To Know as We are Known: A spirituality of Education' (Harper &Row, San Francisco 1983) was written just at the time when hacker culture was developing at MIT, and he continued to write and speak on education's spiritual underpinning until his recent retirement. I recall being profoundly struck by a comment he made: “My vocation (to use the poet's term) is the spiritual life, the quest for God, which relies on the eye of the heart. My avocation is education, the quest for knowledge, which relies on the eye of the mind”. (p. xi of the introduction to the 1983 edition). Neither Palmer nor Bosco knew of hacker culture, though the former may at least have begun to encounter the reality in higher education, but they offered approaches based on 'the quest for God' and the 'quest for knowledge' which can help inform this culture – and each other.

Palmer has offered a description of what he calls the 'community of truth' which develops a 'learning community' and this resonates nicely with Don Bosco's Preventive System. The hallmark of a community of truth is in its claim that reality is a web of communal relationships, and we can know reality only by being in community with it. (The Courage to Teach: exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's life, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass 1998, p. 95). A subject, the human person, not an object, is at the heart of all education. This both Palmer and Bosco believe in passionately.

Palmer described his 'learning space' as a set of six paradoxes:

'''The space should be bounded and open.''' Without limits it is difficult to see how learning can occur. Explorations need a focus. However, spaces need to be open as well – open to the many paths down which discovery may take us. ‘If boundaries remind us that our journey has a destination, openness reminds us that there are many ways to reach that end’. More than that, openness allows us to find other destinations.

'''The space should be hospitable and “charged”.''' We may find the experience of space strange and fear that we may get lost. Learning spaces need to be hospitable – ‘inviting as well as open, safe and trustworthy as well as free’. When exploring we need places to rest and find nourishment. But if we feel too safe, then we may stay on the surface of things. Space needs to be charged so that we may know the risks involved in looking at the deeper things of life.

'''The space should invite the voice of the individual and the voice of the group.''' Learning spaces should invite people to speak truly and honestly. People need to be able to express their thoughts and feelings. This involves building environments both so that individuals can speak and where groups can gather and give voice to their concerns and passions.

'''The space should honour the “little” stories of those involved and the “big” stories of the disciplines and tradition.''' Learning spaces should honour people’s experiences, give room to stories about everyday life. At the same time, we need to connect these stories with the larger picture. We need to be able to explore how our personal experiences fit in with those of others; and how they may relate to more general ‘stories’ and understandings about life.

'''The space should support solitude and surround it with the resources of community.''' Learning demands both solitude and community. People need time alone to reflect and absorb. Their experiences and struggles need to be respected. At the same time, they need to be able to call upon and be with others. We need conversations in which our ideas are tested and biases challenged.

'''The space should welcome both silence and speech.''' Silence gives us the chance to reflect on things. It can be a sort of speech ‘emerging from the deepest part of ourselves, of others, of the world’. At the same time we need to be able to put things into words so that we gain a greater understanding and to make concrete what we may share in silence. (Taken from Parker J. Palmer, 1998, The Courage to Teach, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pages 73 – 77).

Bosco was not using that kind of language, but he offered four separate kinds of spaces where the praxis of the Preventive System operated in ways very similar to Palmer's paradoxes above: “a home that welcomed, a parish that evangelised, a school that prepared them for life and a playground where friends could meet and enjoy themselves” (Salesian Constitutions: C.40). Each of home, parish, school and playground was a learning space for Don Bosco, each with its character of bounded openness, individual-in-the-group, the little story in the bigger picture, solitude and community, silence and speech. I would venture to say that the kind of space the genuine hacker inhabits must likewise have the characteristics just described.

I would go further and suggest that the young hacker may be at home in each of Don Bosco's 'home', 'parish', 'school' and 'playground' scenarios, though I have the memory still of a student at a school of which I was once principal, reaching a stage of 'crackerdom' that left me with little other option than to negotiate his transfer to another school! He had set about the task of systematically destroying our budding technology centre in the worst of cracker traditions – malicious code that wrought havoc with the system. The other school knew what they were getting and felt they had appropriate persons who could neutralise our young demon's efforts. Alas it may not have been so, or at least not if I was to believe the letters I received from my young friend (he remained a friend), as he set about the task in brand new territory.

Young hackers will only be at home in these places if they know that the educators who populate them have some sympathy with their passion, and can guide and enlighten them, and they will only be truly at home in these places if these same educators can lead them to the passion and quest that is deepest in human beings, God. Hackers are already open to being led deeper, I believe. It is up to us to do it for and with them. The difference between a hacker and a cracker is education.

I find it interesting that some of the key literature on hackers and hacking (I am thinking, for example of Eric Raymond's 'How to become a Hacker') (http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html) is written by people who are at best indifferent to religion, but who quite frequently call on religious concepts, even directly, to make their point. The same Eric Raymond is well-known for his essay entitled 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar'; (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/) Richard Stallman will sometimes end a lecture with a mock canonisation ceremony for St IGNUcius of 'The Church of Emacs', as he calls it. You have to know that he built a stunningly clever text editor which does everything, called Emacs, and founded the GNU Project in 1984 which is a Unix-like operating system now used by millions who think they are using Linux! In fact they are probably using GNU/Linux. I was once asked, at the end of a Stallman lecture at which I was present, if I was offended by the 'canonisation' ceremony. I replied that I was not offended, though I did wonder whether it was in good taste. Rather than indulging in feelings of hurt, I was intrigued. If anything, the experience confirmed another feeling – that this digital culture we are immersed may benefit from a solid Christian anthropology and, dare I say it, theology. I want to take this point up in the next chapter, but before doing so, let me elaborate a little further on the point I began this paragraph with: the kind of language one finds in 'How to be a Hacker'.

Raymond had already written a dictionary with all the jargon words related to hackers, but he realised that he then needed to explain to people how to 'become a hacker', not just describe one. He begins, by the way, by reminding his readers that 'hackers build things; crackers break them', thus succinctly putting paid to any idea that hacking is a malicious thing. Now consider some of the headings for the essay on essential attitudes if one wants to be a hacker:

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved 2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice 3. Boredom and drudgery are evil 4. Freedom is good 5. Attitude is no substitute for competence

Raymond's comment on the first of these is typical of the overall style:

->Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help. To be accepted as a hacker, you have to behave as though you have this kind of attitude yourself. And to behave as though you have the attitude, you have to really believe the attitude. But if you think of cultivating hacker attitudes as just a way to gain acceptance in the culture, you'll miss the point. Becoming the kind of person who believes these things is important for you — for helping you learn and keeping you motivated. As with all creative arts, the most effective way to become a master is to imitate the mind-set of masters — not just intellectually but emotionally as well.

We do not expect to find exhortative religious language here, but we can easily see that the style is pedagogical and some of the content is translatable into religious language, or should I say rather that some religious language might well be translatable into the kind of language we find here! I guess the issue is this: if we are to use 'hacker' and 'heaven' in the same sentence, then we need to resolve these hanging questions or at least give some lead to their resolution....what is the relationship of technology to faith? Can technological language and religious language cohabit peacefully, even productively? Is it more than just cohabitation or could in fact 'heaven' help inform 'hacker' in some way? What does all this mean for education and evangelisation?

And there is one more reason why I have used the term 'hacker' from the outset; I want to keep the focus partly on questions of hardware and software, both of which hacking refers to. Why? Because together they represent much of what Information and Communications Technology, the whole digital scene, is all about. This book will make frequent enough reference to devices and software. It is not that we will be asked for username and password (other than our own name and our practice of charity!) before we get to heaven, but nor is there an unbridgeable gap between the world of spirit and the world of the machine. At least, speaking as one who belongs to an organisation which takes the 'glory of God and the salvation of souls' seriously, especially where young people are concerned, I believe we are going to need to achieve that in the daily context of software and hardware for very many of them.

Chapter 2

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