Modern Technology and the Human Future

A Christian Appraisal

Craig M. Gay

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780830873845
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Technology is not neutral.From the plow to the printing press, technology has always shaped human life and informed our understanding of what it means to be human. And advances in modern technology, from computers to smartphones, have yielded tremendous benefits. But do these developments actually encourage human flourishing?Craig Gay raises concerns about the theological implications of modern technologies and of philosophical movements such as transhumanism. In response, he turns to a classical affirmation of the Christian faith: Jesus Christ, the eternal Word of God, took on human flesh. By exploring the doctrine of the incarnation and what it means for our embodiment, Gay offers a course correction to the path of modern technology without asking us to unplug completely.Gay demonstrates that the doctrine of the incarnation is not neutral either. It presents us an alternative vision for the future of humanity.

CHAPTER ONE

Machine Technology and Human Being

[There] is a paradox common to technological existence: everything gets a little easier and a little less real.

ALEX ROSS, “THE RECORD EFFECT”

AMIDST WIDESPREAD ENTHUSIASM for all the things that will soon be made possible by newer and better technologies—from advanced genetically engineered cancer treatments, to ultra-safe self-driving automobiles, to enthralling virtual environments—the assertion that modern technology is diminishing ordinary embodied human being is both countercultural and contentious. Still, the purpose of this first chapter is to try to persuade even the skeptical reader that, given its evident trajectory (Silicon Valley boosterism notwithstanding), modern automatic machine technology is more likely to detract from our ordinary embodied experience of the world than it is to enhance it.

This should not be taken to mean that the problem lies with technology per se. On the contrary, and as we suggested in the introduction, technological making is indissolubly linked with the distinctively human way of being-in-the-world. Our technologies often enable us to become more of ourselves, more personally interrelated with each other, more dynamically engaged with the world, and better able, even, to worship the living God. So it may help to preface our consideration of modern technology’s impact of diminishing human existence by considering the remarkably positive impact that several premodern technologies had upon human consciousness, technologies that we take for granted when we read and write.

Writing, Reading, and Human Response-ability Before God

The Christian religion summarizes human purposes in the double commandment of love. We are commanded to love God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength; and we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves. For most of us, most of the time, both commands are only aspirational. It is precisely in considering the demands of the “Great Commandment” that we are most likely to be persuaded of our deep need for forgiveness. Love, after all, is an act of self-transcendence. It entails the giving of oneself to another. It must be freely offered. It is often costly. And love can only arise out of mature personal agency. In this connection, we commonly distinguish self-transcending love—agapē—from merely affective and/or erotic love. We also distinguish mature adult love from the love of children; a child’s love is delightful, but it remains undeveloped and as yet unable give a full account of itself. We simply do not expect childish love to be wholly self-transcending.

While human beings have surely always been capable of loving friends and relatives, cultural historians have suggested that the responsible personal agency necessary for agapē is not a feature of “human nature” per se. Rather, it appears to have emerged culturally and historically. For responsible personal agency to have arisen, human beings apparently needed to be lifted out of an original and, as it were, childlike immersion in the immediacy of nature.1 In the first volume of his remarkable historical study of social order, Order and History, entitled Israel and Revelation, Eric Voegelin described the original human experience as follows:

Whatever man may be, he knows himself a part of being. The great stream of being in which he flows while it flows through him, is the same stream to which belongs everything else that drifts into his perspective. . . . We move in a charmed community where everything that meets us has force and will and feelings, where animals and plants can be men and gods, when men can be divine and gods are kings.2

Voegelin’s purpose in trying to represent this original experience for the modern reader was twofold: In the first place, he wanted to suggest that to know oneself as “a part of being” is not yet to know oneself as capable of responsible “historical” agency. Voegelin also wanted his modern readers to see that, for responsible historical agency to have become a possibility, human awareness needed somehow to be lifted out of the participatory worldview of archaic cosmology. Human beings needed to see that they could stand apart from and in a sense above the great stream of natural being.

Voegelin then went on to argue that human consciousness experienced a kind of “leap in being”3 in ancient Israel’s experience of revelation, that is, in the nation’s founding declaration that a God who stood entirely outside and above nature had entered into the natural continuum and had spoken personally to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and eventually to Moses, calling them into relationship with himself. “Suppose . . . they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?” Moses inquired of the voice that had addressed him from out of the oddly—unnaturally—burning bush (Ex 3:13). “I AM WHO I AM,” came the astounding reply. “Say to the Israelites, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—appeared to me and said: I have watched over you. . . . And I have promised to bring you up out of your misery in Egypt into a land flowing with milk and honey’” (Ex 3:15-17).

Israel’s exodus from Egypt was, thus, far more than simply a demographic event. Indeed, as sociologist Peter Berger observed,

It constituted a break with an entire universe. At the heart of the religion of ancient Israel lies the vehement repudiation of both the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian versions of cosmic order, a repudiation that was, of course, extended to the pre-Israelite indigenous culture of Syria-Palestine. The “fleshpots of Egypt,” from which Yahweh led Israel into the desert, stood above all for the security of the cosmic [the natural] order in which Egyptian culture was rooted.4

What Yahweh’s address to Israel called forth, in such a way as to permanently alter the course of human history, was the possibility of dialogue with the living God and hence of a fundamentally new way of being-in-the-world, a way-of-being that would no longer place the primary emphasis upon the maintenance of cosmic order, but would insist instead upon the paramount importance of individual, personal, responsible, and historical human agency before the face of God. Voegelin wrote,

What is new in the eleventh and tenth centuries of Israelite history is the application of psychological knowledge to the understanding of personalities who, as individuals, have become the carriers of a spiritual force on the scene of pragmatic history. No such character portraits [as those found on page after page in the Old Testament] were ever drawn of Babylonian, Assyrian, or Egyptian rulers, whose personalities . . . disappear behind their functions as the representatives and preservers of cosmic order in society.5

As Voegelin’s observations suggest, the “leap in being” catalyzed by Yahweh’s revelation of himself to ancient Israel opened up fundamentally new possibilities for human being-in-the-world. It would take centuries for these possibilities to sink into human consciousness, and responsible personal agency before God would not be pushed to its logical conclusion in the innermost recesses of the human soul until the revelation of Israel’s Messiah. Still, ancient Israel’s experience of revelation signaled the turning of a new page in human history. Thereafter “response-able,” personal, and truly historical agency would move to center stage in world history.

The divine address that occasioned human response-ability, furthermore, was neither arbitrary nor capricious, but ethical and rational, established by covenant, and—most importantly for our present purposes—fixed in written texts. Indeed, it appears that an ingenious technology played a crucial role in facilitating Israel’s “leap in being.” That technology, of course, was literacy, that simple yet clever technique of objectifying thought in a durable and transmissible form. Writing and reading pull us temporarily out of the immediacy of being. They foster reflection, introspection, individuation, and the self-conscious appreciation of oneself as over and against others. By separating the knower from the known, as cultural historian Walter Ong observes in a seminal study of the historical and cultural impact of literacy, writing makes an increasingly articulate introspectivity possible.6 It opens the self to both the external objective world and its own interior world, over and against which the objective world—including other persons—is now apprehended. “More than any other single invention,” Ong declares, “writing has transformed consciousness.”7 And, indeed, as he notes elsewhere, “all major advances in consciousness depend upon technological transformations and implementations of the word.”8

The technological transformation and implementation of the word that has resulted in some of the most significant advances in human consciousness was phonetic literacy. Because it is relatively easy to learn and employ, phonetic literacy was surely one of the most significant technological developments in human history. It appears to have made possible a new understanding of the self, and with this new understanding, any number of new social and cultural formations.

As far as historians have been able to discover, the phonetic alphabet was invented just once—or possibly twice in rapid succession in very nearly the same location—among Northern Semitic peoples around 1500 BC.9 The phonetic system appears to have been invented to keep track of simple commercial transactions—which is to say, for mundane practical and economic reasons—but it also came to be used to record and mediate powerful religious experiences. In conjunction with the use of the alphabet, a new space seems to have opened up between human culture and the immediacy of nature. This was perhaps because, as philosopher David Abram notes, the written characters of the phonetic alphabet—its phonemes—no longer correspond to sensible phenomena but solely to the range of sounds the human mouth can produce.10 In using the alphabet, our attention is subtly shifted away, Abram reasoned, “from any outward or worldly reference of the pictorial image . . . [and a] direct association is established between the pictorial sign and the vocal gesture, for the first time completely bypassing the thing pictured.”11

Abram laments this development, believing that the roots of our modern ecological crisis may be traced back to this separation of the human from the natural. He suggests, furthermore, that the silencing of nature has become particularly problematic within Christian civilization precisely because Christianity’s original documents were written in Greek, the first language in which both consonants and vowels were represented by abstract phonetic symbols. Abram’s provocative thesis is reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan’s contention in Understanding Media that phonetic literacy lies at the root of Western technical rationality. “Only alphabetic cultures,” McLuhan wrote,

have ever mastered connected lineal sequences as pervasive forms of psychic and social organization. The breaking up of experience into uniform units in order to produce faster action and change of form (applied knowledge) has been the secret of Western power over man and nature alike. That is the reason why our Western industrial programs have quite involuntarily been so militant, and our military programs have been so industrial. Both are shaped by the alphabet in their technique of transformation and control by making all situations uniform and continuous.12

Now, although Abram’s indictment of Christian civilization is debatable, and while McLuhan seems often to have allowed himself to be carried away by his own rhetoric, phonetic literacy does appear to have occasioned a number of fundamentally new human possibilities that the inventors of this “transformation and implementation of the word” could not have foreseen. This ingenious technological invention, in short, seems closely bound up with what has traditionally been assumed to be an exclusively theological development, an understanding that places a great deal of emphasis upon responsible and personal human agency before God and neighbor—which is to say, of love. While no one confesses “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 12:3), nevertheless beyond that first generation of eyewitnesses, Christians everywhere have come to faith on the basis of the apostles’ testimony to Jesus. It pleased God that their testimony should have been preserved with the aid of phonetic literacy.

Automatic Machine Technology

And so it is surely no exaggeration to say that technological making is an essential aspect of human being. As the above discussion of phonetic literacy’s cultural, social, psychological, and even spiritual significance suggests, our present understanding of ourselves and our estimation of our potential as human beings have been decisively shaped by technologies, many of which we take almost entirely for granted, and whose inventors and histories have been largely forgotten. To question the continued progress of modern technology would therefore seem to be at odds with human historical development. It would seem to foreclose upon the possibility of hum...