Religion and Theology

Christianity and the History of Technology, Part Two

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

This is the second in a series of posts discussing the work of a handful of scholars exploring the historical relationship between Christianity and technology. First post. 

In his classic essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Lynn White, Jr. staked out a position that departed from Ellul at almost every conceivable point. White begins by describing the gap in technical achievement that opened up between Western Europe and both Islamic and Byzantine civilizations to the the east. This gap predated the “Scientific Revolution” of the sixteenth century and was already evident by the late Middle Ages. Consequently, White turns to the Middle Ages to understand the nature of Western technology.

Although White is at this stage in his career moving from the single-factor approach to technological change, elements of the approach are still evident in the “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” in which he points to the introduction of the heavy plow as catalyst for changing attitudes about humanity’s relationship to nature. In White’s words, the heavy plow “attacked the land with such violence that cross-plowing was not needed.” White also notes that this new attitude of domination was soon given pictorial expression in Frankish calendars which depicted man and nature in opposition with man as master.

At this juncture in the essay, however, White shifts from a single technological factor analysis of social change to a consideration of the cultural influences that conditioned the development and deployment of technology in adversarial relationship to nature. White finds the Christian religion, as practiced in Western Europe, to be the chief culprit. “Especially in its Western form,” White concludes, “Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.” After briefly recalling the well known plot points and language of the creation narrative in the opening chapter of the book of Genesis, White contrasts Christianity to ancient paganism and the Eastern religions and finds that Christianity “not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.” Christianity accomplished this “psychic revolution” by disenchanting nature, making it “possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.”

White, then, affirms the second argument Ellul dismissed in his analysis of the relationship between Christianity and nature. He surmounts one of Ellul’s criticisms — that eastern branches of Christianity did not yield the same relationship to nature and thus religion is not the key factor — by pointing to the significant differences in theological outlook that characterized the activist Latin churches in the West and the contemplative Greek churches of the East. Ellull had noted the difference, taking the Russian Orthodox Church as his case in point, but he concluded that the difference must be cultural and not religious. While the cultural shaping of ancient Christianity should not be overlooked, the fact remains that by the Middle Ages both Eastern and Western Christianity had taken on their distinct shape and were now, as culturally inflected variations of the same religion, shaping the intellectual climate of their respective societies.

Furthermore, White also strengthens the argument by pointing to the sacramental vision of eastern Christianity. Nature existed as a system of signs to be read and through which God spoke to humanity. This was, in White’s view, an “essentially artistic rather than scientific” view of nature. While the West initially shared this sacramental vision, by the late Medieval period it had given way to a natural theology more inclined to “read” nature by understanding the workings of nature rather than merely contemplating its appearance. (Bronislaw Szerszynsk will later take up this semiotic argument in depth.)

The rhetorical frame of White’s article concerns itself with the sources of “the present ecological crisis,” but the body of his argument addresses itself to another question: What accounts for the advance of Western technology beyond its civilizational rivals? White’s essay, while initially gesturing toward a single-factor account of technological change, on the whole points toward a social factors approach focusing on Latin Christianity as the force driving the evolution of western European technology. By so doing, it set the terms and became a key point of departure for subsequent discussion of religion’s relationship to technology. Most notably, it anchored the debate in the Middle Ages, it pointed to the cultural significance of seemingly arcane theological distinctions, it identified Christianity as the most important cultural factor driving technological activity in the West, and it linked the historical question to environmental concerns.

(Next up: More from Lynn White on cultural climates and technological change.)

Christianity and the History of Technology, Part One

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

This is the first in a series of posts reviewing the work of a handful of scholars exploring the historical relationship between Christianity and technology. 

Since the mid-twentieth century, there has been a sustained, if modest, scholarly conversation about the relationship between technology and religion. Among scholars who have specifically addressed the nature of this relationship, research has focused on the following set of concerns: religion’s role in determining Western society’s posture toward the natural world, religions’s role in abetting technological development, religion’s role in shaping Western attitudes toward “labor and labor’s tools,” and, more recently, the use of religious language and categories to describe technology. The majority of these studies focus almost exclusively on European and North American context and so “religion” amounts to Christianity. Jacques Ellul, Lynn White, George Ovitt, Susan White, David Noble, and Bronislaw Szerszynski have been among the more notable contributors to this conversation.

Jacques Ellul’s comments are the earliest, but they do not set the terms of the debate. That honor falls to Lynn White who in his 1968 essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” first proposed that Europe’s relationship to technology had been distinctly shaped by the Christian worldview. Scholars have repeatedly returned to further scrutinize this thesis and its ecological frame.

George Ovitt’s The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture remains the most thorough treatment of the nexus of questions generated by White’s essay. Ovitt concludes that there is good reason to significantly qualify White’s claims.

Susan White’s study, Christian Worship and Technological Change, stands apart as a consideration of technology’s influence on Christian liturgy.

David Noble builds on the work of White and Ovitt to offer an account of what he terms “the religion of technology” which amounts to a pervasive intermingling of religious concerns with the project of technology as a well as a tendency to link the quest for transcendence to technology.

Finally, Bronislaw Szerszynski’s Nature, Technology, and the Sacred offers a theoretically sophisticated reconsideration of White’s argument which, with respect to the technological character of contemporary society, embraces Ellul’s diagnosis of technological society. Szerszynski also moves the argument out of the medieval period to argue that the really decisive transformations in the intellectual and religious context of Europe’s technological history should be located in the Protestant Reformation.

Ellul’s The Technological Society was first published in French in 1954 and the first English translation appeared in 1964. Within the brief historical sketch Ellul provides of the evolution of technique, he examines the relationship between Christianity and technology. In Ellul’s estimation, Christianity as it was practiced through the late Medieval period was at best ambivalent to the advance of technology. He recognizes that received opinion contrasts the Eastern religions, which were supposedly “passive, fatalist, contemptuous of life and action” with Christianity, the religion of the West, which was supposedly “active, conquering, turning nature to profit.”

Although this characterization was widely accepted, Ellul believed it to be in error. It both ignored the real technical advances of Eastern civilizations and misunderstood the posture of Christianity to technical development.

According to Ellul, the emergence of Christianity marked the “breakdown of Roman technique in every area — on the level of organization as well as in the construction of cities, in industry, and in transport.” In his view, Julian the Apostate, and later Gibbon, were not altogether mistaken in attributing the withering of the Empire to rise of the Church. Following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, a society emerged under the tutelage of Christianity, which Ellul characterized as “‘a-capitalistic’ as well as ‘a-technical.’” In every sphere of Medieval culture save architecture Ellul sees “the same nearly total absence of technique.”

Ellul goes on to challenge the two historical arguments employed by those who believed that Christianity “paved the way for technical development.” According to the first, Christianity’s suppression of slavery gave impetus to the development of technology to relieve the miseries of manual labor. According to the second, Christianity’s disenchantment of the natural world removed metaphysical and psychological obstacles to its technologically enabled exploitation. The former fails to account for the impressive technical achievements of slave societies, and the latter, while valid to a certain extent, ignores the other strictures Christian faith placed on technical activity, namely its other-worldly and ascetic tendencies. Additionally, Christianity subjected all activity to moral judgment. Accordingly, technical activity was bounded by non-technical considerations. It is within this “narrow compass” that certain technical advances were achieved and propagated by the monasteries.

(Next up: Lynn White Jr. and the roots of our ecological crisis.)

“Liking” and Loving: Identity on Facebook

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 2 Comments

By one of those odd twists of associative memory, John Caputo’s little book, On Religion, came to mind today. Specifically, I recalled a particular question that he posed in the opening pages.

“So the question we need to ask ourselves is the one Augustine puts to himself in the Confessions, “what do I love when I love God?,” or “what do I love when I love You, my God?,” as he also puts it, or running these two Augustinian formulations together, “what do I love when I love my God?”.

I appreciate this formulation because it forces a certain self-critical introspection. It refuses us the comforts of thoughtlessness.

A little further on, Caputo takes the liberty of putting his words to the spirit of Augustine’s quest:

“… I am after something, driven to and fro by my restless search for something, by a deep desire, indeed by a desire beyond desire, beyond particular desires for particular things, by a desire for I-know-not-what, for something impossible. Still, even if we are lifted on the wings of such a love, the question remains, what do I love, what am I seeking?”

Then Caputo makes an important observation:

“When Augustine talks like this, we ought not to think of him as stricken by a great hole or lack or emptiness which he is seeking to fill up, but as someone overflowing with love who is seeking to know where to direct his love. He is not out to see what he can get, but out to see what he can give.”

Not too long ago I posted some thoughts on what I took to be the Augustinian notes sounded in Matt Honan’s account of his time at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. In that post, “Hole In Our Hearts,” I employed the language Caputo cautioned against, but I’m now inclined to think that Caputo is on to something. His distinction is not merely academic.

Plummeting, perhaps, from the sublime to the … what to call it, let us just say the ordinary, this formulation somehow triggered the question, “what do I like when I “Like” on Facebook?” Putting it this way suggests that what I like may not, in fact, be what I “like”. The question pushes us to examine why it is that we do what we do in social media contexts (Facebook being here a synecdoche).

Very often what we do on social media platforms is analyzed as a performance or construction of the self. On this view, what we are doing is giving shape to our identity. What we like, if you will, is the projected identity, or better yet, the perception and affirmation of that identity by others. This, of course, does not exhaust what is done with social media, but it is a significant part of it.

There are, remembering Caputo’s distinction, two ways we might understand this. Caputo distinguished between love or desire understood as a lack seeking to be filled and love or desire understood as a surplus seeking to be expended. This distinction can be usefully mapped over the motivations driving our social media activity.

When we think about social media as a field for the construction and enactment of identities, we tend to think of it as the projection, authentic or inauthentic, of a fixed reality. Perhaps we would do well to consider the possibility that identity on social networks is not so much being performed as it is being sought, that behind the identity-work on social media platforms there is an inchoate and fluid reality seeking to take shape by expending itself.

The entanglement of our loves (or, likes) and our identity on social media has, it turns out, an antecedent in the Augustinian articulation of the human condition. Caputo went on to note that the question of what we love is also bound up with another Augustinian query:

“Augustine’s question — “what do I love when I love my God?” — persists as a life-long and irreducible question, a first, last, and constant question, which permanently pursues us down the corridors of our days and nights, giving salt to fire to our lives. That is because that question is entangled with the other persistent Augustinian question, “who am I?” …

What we love and desire and who we are — these two are bound up irrevocably with one another.

“I have been made a question to myself,” Augustine famously declared. And so it is with all of us. The problem with our talk about the performance of identity is that it tends to tacitly assume a fixed and knowing identity engaging in the performance. The reality, as Augustine understood, is more complex and whatever it is we are doing online is tied up with that complexity.

Hole In Our Hearts

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 8 Comments

Writing for Gizmodo, Matt Honan describes his experience at the massive Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and it reads like a passage from Augustine’s Confessions had Augustine been writing in the 21st rather than 5th century.

The quasi-religious overtones begin early on when Honan tells us, “There was ennui upon ennui upon ennui set in this amazing temple to technology.”

Then, a little further on, Honan writes:

“There is a hole in my heart dug deep by advertising and envy and a desire to see a thing that is new and different and beautiful. A place within me that is empty, and that I want to fill it up. The hole makes me think electronics can help. And of course, they can.

They make the world easier and more enjoyable. They boost productivity and provide entertainment and information and sometimes even status. At least for a while. At least until they are obsolete. At least until they are garbage.

Electronics are our talismans that ward off the spiritual vacuum of modernity; gilt in Gorilla Glass and cadmium. And in them we find entertainment in lieu of happiness, and exchanges in lieu of actual connections.

And, oh, I am guilty. I am guilty. I am guilty.

I feel that way too. More than most, probably. I’m forever wanting something new. Something I’ve never seen before, that no one else has. Something that will be both an extension and expression of my person. Something that will take me away from the world I actually live in and let me immerse myself in another. Something that will let me see more details, take better pictures, do more at once, work smarter, run faster, live longer.”

Here is the confession, the thrice-repeated mea culpa, alongside a truly Augustinian account of our disordered attachments and loves complete with a Pascalian nod to the diversionary nature of our engagement with technology.

I call this an Augustinian account not only because of the religiously inflected language and the confessional tone. There is also the explicit frame of an unfulfilling quest to fill a primordial emptiness. Augustine’s Confesssions amounts to a retrospective narrative of the spiritual quest which takes him from dissatisfaction to dissatisfaction until it culminates in his conversion. He famously frames his narrative at the outset when he prays, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.” The restless heart knows its own emptiness and seeks, often heroically and tragically, to fill it. It loves and seeks to be loved, but it loves all the wrong things.

Pascal, writing in the shadow of Augustine’s influence, put it thus:

“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.”

In a post titled “Making Holes In Our Hearts,” Kevin Kelly agrees to a point with Honan’s diagnosis, but his interpretation is quite different and also worth quoting at length. Here is Kelly:

If we are honest, we must admit that one aspect of the technium is to make holes in our heart. One day recently we decided that we cannot live another day unless we have a smart phone, when a dozen years earlier this need would have dumbfounded us. Now we get angry if the network is slow, but before, when we were innocent, we had no thoughts of the network at all. Now we crave the instant connection of friends, whereas before we were content with weekly, or daily, connections. But we keep inventing new things that make new desires, new longings, new wants, new holes that must be filled.

Yes, this is what technology does to us. Some people are furious that our hearts are pierced this way by the things we make. They see this ever-neediness as a debasement, a lowering of human nobility, the source of our continuous discontentment. I agree that it is the source. New technology forces us to be always chasing the new, which is always disappearing under the next new, a salvation always receding from our grasp.

But I celebrate the never-ending discontentment that the technium brings. Most of what we like about being human is invented. We are different from our animal ancestors in that we are not content to merely survive, but have been incredibly busy making up new itches which we have to scratch, digging extra holes that we have to fill, creating new desires we’ve never had before.

Kelly is on to something here. Discontentment is generative. Dissatisfaction can be productive. When Cain, having murdered his brother, is cursed to be forever a wanderer alienated from God and family, he builds a city in response. Here is an allegory to match Kelly’s observation. The perpetually wandering, alienated heart builds and makes and creates.

But does it follow that we should then celebrate discontentment, dissatisfaction, and unhappiness? I don’t see how. It is hard to cheer on misery, and it is a certain misery that we are talking about here. Perhaps the more appropriate response is the kind of plaintive admiration we reserve for the tragic hero. They may posses a real nobility, but it is finally consumed in despair and destruction.

The narrator of Cain’s story tells us that he built his city in the land called Nod, a name that echoes the Hebrew word for “wandering.” This touch of literary artistry poignantly suggests that even surrounded by the accouterments of civilization the human soul wanders lost and alienated – never satisfied, never home, never secure.

There is at least one other reason why we need not celebrate generative misery. Misery is not the only fount of human creativity. Love, wonderment, compassion, kindness, curiosity, beauty — all of these might also set us to work and marvelously so.

Augustine understood that finding rest for his restless heart in the love of God did not necessarily extinguish all other loves. It merely reordered them. Having found the kind of satisfaction and happiness that our stuff (for lack of a more inclusive word) can never bring does not mean that we can never again create or enjoy the fruits of human creativity. In fact, it likely means that we may create and enjoy more fully because such creation and enjoyment will not be burden with the unbearable weight of filling the primordial vacuum of the human heart.

The simplest and only way to enjoy penultimate and impermanent things is to resist the temptation to invest them with the significance and adoration that only ultimate and permanent things can sustain.

Saint Augustine by Phillippe de Champaigne, c. 1645

Another Controversial “We Can, But Ought We?” Issue

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

A few days ago I posted links to two pieces that raised the question of whether we ought do what new technologies may soon allow us to do. Both of those case, interestingly, revolved around matters of time. One explored the possibility of erasing memories and the other discussed the possibility of harnessing the predictive power of processing massive amounts of data. The former touched on our relationship to the past, the latter on our relationship to the future.

A recent article in Canada’s The Globe and Mail tackles the thorny questions surrounding genetic screening and selection. Here’s the set up:

Just as Paracelsus wrote that his recipe worked best if done in secret, modern science is quietly handing humanity something the quirky Renaissance scholar could only imagine: the capacity to harness our own evolution. We now have the potential to banish the genes that kill us, that make us susceptible to cancer, heart disease, depression, addictions and obesity, and to select those that may make us healthier, stronger, more intelligent.

The question is, should we?

That is the question. As you might imagine, there are vocal advocates and critics. I’ve steered clear of directly addressing issues related to reproductive technologies because I am not trained as a bioethicist. But these are critical issues and the vast majority of those who will make real-world decisions related to the possibilities opened up by new bio-genetic technologies will have no formal training in bioethics either. It’s best we all start thinking about these questions.

According to one of the doctors cited in the article, “We are not going to slow the technology, so the question is, how do we use it?” He added, “Twenty years from now, you have to wonder if all babies will be conceived by IVF.”

Of course, it is worth considering what is assumed when someone claims that we are not going to slow down the technology. But as is usually the case, the technical capabilities are outstripping the ethical debate — at least, the sort of public debate that could theoretically shape the social consensus.

About three paragraphs into the article, I began thinking about the film Gattaca which I’ve long considered an excellent reflection on the kinds of issues involved in genetic screening. Two or three more paragraphs into the article, then, I was pleased to see the film mentioned. I’ve suggested before (here and here) that stories are often our best vehicles for ethical reflection, they make abstract arguments concrete. For example, one of the best critiques of utilitarianism that I have read was Ursula le Guin’s short story, “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas.” Gattaca is a story that serves a similar function in relation to genetic screening and selection.  I’d recommend checking the movie out if you haven’t seen it.