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Modern technology is not the problem – the problem is what we choose to do with it. This is a common saying and there is truth in it. What we do with technology, however, is shaped by who in the world we think we are and by the kind of world we believe ourselves to be living in.

Our world is one where concern about modern technology is widespread – how many articles have you seen about the insidious spread of disinformation (fake news), the loss of privacy, the impact our devices

are having on our relationships, the replacement of people with machines?

And there is a large and growing body of evidence to suggest that certain features of our modern technological societies are not necessarily – and perhaps not at all – conducive to ordinary embodied human thriving.

Yet, when we dig closer to the root of the problem, we find that our extraordinary capacity for technological making – a capacity amplified in recent centuries by modern science – has accustomed us to envisioning our world in a distorted way, as a kind of elaborate mechanism that we are free to dissect and use as we see fit.

As Canadian philosopher George Grant put it in the 1960s:

We live in the most realised technological society which has yet been . . . . Yet the very substance of our existing which has made us the leaders in technique, stands as a barrier to any thinking which might be able to comprehend technique from beyond its own dynamism (Technology and Empire, Anansi, 1969, emphasis added).

We should be suspicious of homogeneity, one-size-fits-all solutions, repetition and selfsameness.

Combined with the immense financial interests that attach to technological innovation, our failure to gauge modern technological development from outside our distinctively modern and largely mechanical mindset has left us insensitive to the beauty, wonder and otherness of created nature. It has also left us insensitive to the technological diminishment of ordinary embodied human being.

If we are to surmount Grant’s barrier, we must try to remember just what kind of world we actually live in, as well as how the human task in our world ought properly to be construed. Christian theology has quite a bit to say about both matters.

In Christian understanding our world is decidedly not a vast and elaborate mechanism. Rather it is a creation artfully and lovingly crafted by a good and wise creator to flourish. It is ordered to fullness, diversity, beauty, fruition and growth.

And the human task – or better, the human vocation – within created nature is not to impose our will on things, but to represent God by mediating His essence (which is love) and His intention (which is fruition) to each other and all God’s other creatures for the good of all. This is what the stewardship of creation, Christianly speaking, means.

God’s unconditional commitment to His creation was signalled in the birth of Christ (the incarnation) and most astonishingly in His resurrection from the dead. These are core Christian convictions that have direct and essential implications for our understanding of ourselves and, by extension, for our stewardship which includes evaluation and use of modern technologies.

This context informs a series of questions we should ask about modern technologies.

INITIAL QUESTIONS

Technique, the philosopher Jacques Ellul declared already half a century ago,

is opposed to nature . . . . It destroys, eliminates, or subordinates the natural world…. [Nature and technique] obey different imperatives, different directives and different laws which have nothing in common. Just as hydroelectric installations take waterfalls and lead them into conduits, so the technical milieu absorbs the natural. We are rapidly approaching the time when there will no longer be any natural environment at all (The Technological Society, Vintage, 1964).

Ellul’s reasoning appears exaggerated, but what it’s drawing our attention to is that our modern technological use of nature is distinctly unnatural in the sense it travels consistently in the direction of uniformity, homogeneity and standardization.

It is the modern technological drive toward standardization for the sake of efficiency that lies at the root of modern technology’s tendency to depersonalize and disembody human life. People are idiosyncratic, their individual capacities differ, and their bodies are imperfect and inefficient. Yet in seeking to eliminate all this apparent imperfection, modern technology actually cuts against the grain of created nature.

This means we should be suspicious of homogeneity, one-size-fits-all solutions, repetition and selfsameness. Under modern conditions sameness very often suggests that diversity and particularity have been – and are being – eliminated for the sake of commercial and mechanical efficiencies.

American thinkers Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan have noted this in connection with modern industrial agriculture and modern food culture. “The hallmark of the industrial food chain is monoculture,” Pollan writes in The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Penguin, 2006), by which he means the continuous cultivation of single crops in the same places made possible by modern machinery and chemical fertilizers. The demand for fast food at standardized outlets has only accelerated this trend.

Pollan’s concern is that while this simplification of natural complexity for the sake of commercial manageability appears to produce consistently superior crop yields – as well as beautifully consistent french fries – it also damages soils and leaves crops vulnerable to disease. This standardization, combined with the rationalization of commerce, has given rise to a monocultural diet with all its attendant health problems.

Pollan’s inquiry into modern Western food culture is thought provoking and suggests, at the very least, that we need to question the modern technological drive toward standardization and uniformity.

We also need to turn a more skeptical eye toward modern technology’s longstanding promise to unburden us from the toil and drudgery of the past. While this promise may have been kept in certain respects – I’m grateful for clean running water, flush toilets and penicillin, among many other things – modern tech

Are our technologies enhancing ordinary embodied face-to-face relations?

nology has itself burdened us with the additional and, in many ways, the heavier burdens that stem from disengagement from one another, as well as disengagement from immediate physical reality.

Indeed, in seeking to evade the burdens of ordinary existence, we can inadvertently become insensitive to the mysterious movement of God’s grace in our lives, as philosopher Albert Borgmann has noted repeatedly (see Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life, University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Perhaps the most important thing we need to do in view of the departure of modern technological development away from the preconditions of ordinary embodied human being is to reaffirm the basic truth that, as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer stressed already in 1932, “A human being is a human body” (Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3, Fortress Press, 1997).

Coupled this with the proclamation of Christ’s resurrection from the dead and you have what amounts to a stunning endorsement of ordinary embodied human being. The resurrection affirms our shared experience that we will be and will become most fully ourselves before God in ordinary embodied relationships with each other and with created nature.

And so we need to ask ourselves, Are our technologies enhancing ordinary embodied face-to-face relations? Are our devices making these relations more vivid, more meaningful, more empathic? If they are, then we ought to use them with deep gratitude.

Yet if we find our technologies are somehow undermining our ordinary, embodied, face-to-face relations with each other, this should give us pause. It may be that technology is interposing itself between us, making our communication less fluid and our interaction less meaningful, undermining our development of responsibility for each other.

The incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ must also be understood to affirm the value and standing, not simply of embodied human being, but of created reality as a whole, ordered as it is by space, time and place. And so we need to ask, Are our technologies enhancing our actual experience of ordinary reality? Are they enabling us to dwell richly in those places where we are most at home?

If they are, then wonderful! We should celebrate them. But if they are not, we’ve got some work to do.

BENEATH THE SURFACE

Underneath the obvious departures of modern technological development away from the requirements of ordinary embodied human existence, there often lies the deeper process of what I want to call rationalization. Understanding this process is crucial for grasping what is driving modern technological development forward in the directions of disembodiment and depersonalization.

I’m using rationalization in the sense it was used by sociologist Max Weber, referring to the submission of a practice and/or institution to rational methods that have been expressly designed to produce results, enabling us thereby to predictably control some aspect of reality. Weber believed modernity is more or less defined by rationalized methods, approaches, systems, procedures and techniques. The whole process, he contended in a 1917 lecture, is animated by the simple but powerful belief that we can, in principle, “master all things by calculation” (Science as a Vocation, Hackett, 2004).

And we have managed to achieve a good deal of mastery over our practical and material circumstances by means of rationalized methods, procedures and techniques. Yet the process of rationalization has also been profoundly dehumanizing, and necessarily so, since a good deal of the volatility and unpredictability that must be eliminated from the equations that link means to ends derive from human personality.

The process of rationalization also accounts for the oft-lamented inversion of means and ends in modern society, for rational mastery requires life to be divided into discrete problems for which rational and technical solutions can then be devised. Yet when life is divided in this way, we tend to lose sight of it as a whole – in effect losing sight of the forest for the trees.

As the sociologist Robert K. Merton commented in the foreword to Ellul’s The Technological Society, modern technological civilization is characterized by the “quest for continually improved means to carelessly examined ends.”

Responding Christianly to the process of rationalization, therefore, is going to entail the re-examination of ends. What, we must ask, are genuinely human purposes? How are such purposes most wisely attained? What, furthermore, are the hidden costs associated with the modern system’s provision of health, prosperity, safety, security and convenience? Christians should be known for asking these sorts of questions, questions that reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of modern rationalized procedures, methods and techniques.

AT DEPTH

The typically modern habit of envisioning the world as an elaborate mechanism may also be said to reflect one of two possible answers we can give to an essentially timeless metaphysical question. Is reality ultimately personal? Or is it, finally, simply the impersonal

confluence of matter in motion? That our technological civilization has, in effect, decided the question in favour of the latter is indicated in a great many ways, not least in our penchant for rationalized – which is to say mechanical – methods and techniques.

Yet the Christian religion encourages us to suspect the impersonal world view that lies at the heart of our technological civilization must ultimately be attributed to human sin, for the impersonal world view betrays hubris, that rebellious bid for autonomous self-definition that is the essence of sin.

A mechanical world, after all, is a world open to human management. It is a world amenable to humanly devised methods, procedures and techniques. Indeed, it is a world in which autonomous human mastery is not merely conceivable, but basically compulsory.

A mechanical world, in short, is one in which secular humanism makes a great deal of sense, and in which the determinations of good and evil are ours to decide, and ours to impose upon a reality that no longer has any meaning or significance apart from whatever clever uses we can devise for it.

And so we must learn to defend, not simply human persons and the possibilities of genuinely humane and personal action, but the deeply personal quality of reality itself. C. S. Lewis anguished over this problem at the end of what he believed was one of his most important essays, The Abolition of Man.

Is it possible, Lewis asked in 1943, to imagine a new “natural philosophy” (by which he means a science) that doesn’t confuse the “natural objects” produced by its analysis and abstraction with reality itself? He then continues:

I hardly know what I am asking for . . . . The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. When studying

Responding Christianly to the process of rationalization, therefore, is going to entail the re-examination of ends.

the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation (Harper, 2015).

The difficulty of even beginning to think along such lines is not simply that our imaginations are enmeshed in the mechanical world picture of modern science, but also that the modern engineering mentality has produced – and no doubt will continue to produce – all sorts of powerful and at least apparently useful technologies.

Yet just as the human rule within creation began with Adam’s careful consideration of the various creatures for the sake of naming them, so we remain free even now to listen closely and carefully to the others God created in order that we might bring them more fully into being in our speech. This may seem like a small thing, but the power of our speech should not be underestimated.

Indeed, we anticipate the quality of a proper human relation to nature, for which the creation now waits in eager anticipation (Romans 8:19), simply by noticing its brilliance and beauty, by articulating its marvellous ordering, and by celebrating our uniquely embodied presence within it before God.

As Gerard Manley Hopkins asked in his 1882 poem “Ribblesdale” – “What is earth’s eye, tongue, heart else, where else but in dear and dogged man?”

And who knows? It may be the case that we must strive to truly give voice to created nature before we can really take care of it.

In sum, while the trend of modern technological development away from created nature – including ordinary embodied human being – is a serious problem, the more serious problem is that this development flows from a fundamentally distorted understanding of what the world is as well as of who we are in it.

The paschal mystery – that Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again – ought to rectify our understanding, making possible a new way of seeing both the world and technology. While the revelation of the sons and daughters of God for which the creation now waits in eager anticipation is a future event, we can even now – on the basis of this new way of seeing – begin, as Wendell Berry puts it so vividly in his 1973 poem “Manifesto,” to “practice resurrection.” /FT

The paschal mystery ought to rectify our understanding, making possible a new way of seeing both the world and technology.