Technologies of Religion

Sam Han

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317517894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología de la religión

Bringing together empirical cultural and media studies of religion and critical social theory, Technologies of Religion: Spheres of the sacred in a post-secular modernity investigates powerful entanglement of religion and new media technologies taking place today, taking stock of the repercussions of digital technology and culture on various aspects of religious life and contemporary culture more broadly. Making the argument that religion and new media technologies come together to create "spheres"—environments produced by an architecture of digital technologies of all sorts, from projection screens to social networking sites, the book suggests that prior social scientific conceptions of religious worship, participation, community and membership are being recast. Using the case of the strain of American Christianity called "multi-site, " an emergent and growing church-model that has begun to win favor largely among Protestants in the last decade, the book details and examines the way in which this new mode of religiosity bridges the realms of the technological and the physical. Lastly, the book situates and contextualizes these developments within the larger theoretical concerns regarding the place of religion in contemporary capitalism. Technologies of Religion: Spheres of the sacred in a post-secular modernity offers an important contribution to the study of religion, media, technology and culture in a post-secular world.

1 Disenchantment revisited

Formations of the “secular” and “religious” in the technological discourse of modernity

One of the most damaging ideas that has swept the social sciences and humanities has been the idea of a disenchanting modernity.

(Nigel Thrift 2007: 65)

Introduction

As alluded to in the Introduction, in the confines of contemporary academic discourse, but also in the greater landscape of public debate, a peculiar sense of wonderment is often produced when the basic tenets and assumptions of modernity, its “metaphysics” as Heidegger once said, are challenged. It is a bizarre dance, an exercise in self-deception to a certain extent. What I mean is that many people, not just scholars, understand “modernity,” that troubling word which we have inherited, to be something to the tune of what Anthony Giddens has called “living in a post-traditional world” (Beck et al. 1994, emphasis added), that is, beyond tradition. But when they attain visibility, the remnants of so-called traditional life put the modern into sharp relief. A feigning of curiosity results, taking on a distinctly ethnographic flavor. It is as if after the onset of modernity (whenever this may be – sixteenth century and beyond according to many accounts), “the traditional,” an ever more elusive term, was wiped away completely.

This bewilderment is nowhere exemplified better than when the technological aspects of contemporary life are juxtaposed with leftover phenomena of our supposedly traditional past, especially religion. Take, for instance, a photograph made popular by the columnist Thomas Friedman. There stands an orthodox Jewish man pressing a mobile phone against the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. The caption reads: “Shimon Biton places his cellular phone up to the Western Wall so a relative in France can say a prayer at the holy site.” The book that made this photo popular, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, is one which pits two overarching social forces against one another in the era of globalization. There is modernization, on the one hand, symbolized by the Lexus, and tradition, on the other, symbolized by the olive tree:

half the world seemed to be emerging from the Cold War intent on building a better Lexus, dedicated to modernizing, streamlining and privatizing their economies in order to thrive in the system of globalization. And half of the world – sometimes half of the same country, sometimes half the same person – was still caught up in the fight over who owns which olive tree. Olive trees … represent everything that roots us, anchors us, identifies us and locates us in this world – whether it be belonging to a family, a community, a tribe, a nation, a religion, or, most of all, a place called home. Olive trees are what give us the warmth of family, the joy of individuality, the intimacy of personal rituals, the depth of private relationships, as well as the confidence and security to reach out and encounter others.

(Friedman 2000: 31)

The photo’s semiotic contradiction acts as visual leitmotif for the story that Friedman wishes to tell. The man holding the mobile is not just Jewish, but orthodox. He is clad in the traditional clothing of a particular strand of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, black hat and coat; he is donned with thick, curled sideburns, called payots, and a beard. All of these details do the work of conveying to the audience that this man is not simply a man of faith but devout. He is at one of the holiest sites of the Abrahamic religions praying with not exactly the most holy of objects, a cellular phone. It is this juxtaposition of the ancient (even Biblical) and the modern, which has given this particular photograph such poignancy. This type of response represents a “false norm” (Habermas 1985), which in this instance is really a false dichotomy between “religion” (the olive tree) and “technology,” the latter serving as a proxy for “modernity” (the Lexus). The photograph becomes the perfect illustrative vehicle for Friedman’s argument in the book, which is that, at various times, “the Lexus and the olive tree” turns into the Lexus versus the olive tree.

The thinking exhibited in Friedman’s dichotomous thematization of globalization is none other than, I would argue, a popularized secularization theory for the global age, which, after Jeremy Stolow, I call the “myth of modernization.”

This is the myth which credits modern media – beginning with the printing press – with a key role in the world-historical disembedding of religion from public life, and its relocation within the private walls of bourgeois domesticity, or deeper still, the interior silent universe of individual readers and their infinitely replicable activities of decoding texts. For some, this is a tale about loss of meaning and moral crisis that comes with the dematerialization of palpable structures of religious authority. For others, it is a heroic story about the empowerment of social groups to challenge the repressive apparatuses of Church and Court … This metanarrative is structured around the assumption that the mere expansion of modern communication technologies is somehow commensurate with a dissolution of religious authority and a fragmentation of its markers of affiliations and identity.

(Stolow 2005: 122)

From Stolow, we can say that lodged in the concept of secular modernity is an implicit theory of media and technology, one that equates not only their internal logic as commensurate with the ratio of formal rationality but also their proliferation and wide use as indicative of the decline of tradition, including religion.

Secularization theory, at least in its recent sociological articulation, maintains that secularization “has been a phenomenon concomitant with modernization,” as Bryan Wilson, one of its chief proponents, puts it (Wilson 1998: 52). Of the three areas that he argues are the core concerns of the secularization thesis – authority, knowledge, and rationality, it is the “powerful imprint” of the changing nature of the second – knowledge – that he claims, “no aspect of social change has escaped.” He points specifically to the role of science and technology in “[rendering] otiose supernaturalist dogmas and theological speculations about the nature of life and creation. Religionists have been entirely displaced in the interpretation of such matters, their earlier theories and prescriptions have not only lost their cogency but have been shown to be hollow, ignorant and false” (Wilson 1998: 50). As Talal Asad notes, “‘the secular’ [in the discourse of modernity] presents itself as the ground from which theological discourse was generated (as a form of false consciousness) and from which it gradually emancipated itself in its march to freedom” (Asad 2003: 192). Thus, we can say Friedman basically adopts this understanding, that is, of modernization as rationalization, which is, in turn, set in opposition to non-rational, traditional thinking, which amounts to, in the Marxist parlance used sardonically by Asad, “false consciousness.”

But it must be said that Friedman is not alone when it comes to the cheap adoption of secularization theory. His is not a simple case of a journalist wading into academic waters, hacking away complexity and nuance along the way. As sociologists John Evans and Michael Evans note, a similar logic exists in academic studies of religion and science, sociology among them. They identify an “epistemological conflict narrative,” which they write is “an assumption … built into the history of Western academic thought” (Evans and Evans 2008: 87). Put simply, this narrative views the conflict between religion and science as “over competing truth about the world” (Evans and Evans 2008: 88). In their critical unearthing of it in a variety of scholarly literatures, they make note of the wide reach of the influence of Weber, especially the famed notion of “disenchantment.” Specifically, in secularization theory, they diagnose a specific form of the epistemological conflict narrative, which they describe as “symbolic.” The symbolic epistemological conflict narrative sees as parallel the growth of a modern technoscientific rationality with secularity. “Mysterious forces and powers have been replaced by the calculation and technical means embodied in modern science,” they write (Evans and Evans 2008: 91), leaving “religion” and, more specifically, religious thinking marginalized. Evans and Evans show that this conflict narrative places “religion” and “science” in a deadlock. They rightly point out that it renders religion and technoscience as mere ways of “knowing about the world” and nothing else.¹ The conflict narrative makes religion only “symbolic” not material. It is rendered a category of thought and stripped of any other kind of influence or action. The conflict narrative maintains a view of religion as well as science and technology as largely fighting over Truth, which in this instance is singular and uncomplicated. It follows then that scholarly literature which assumes the logic of conflict in disenchantment understands “the secular” to also then simply be a “mindset.” Pace epistemological conflict, the story of disenchantment (and hence secularization and modernization), is one wherein a set of ideas (traditional/religious) replaces another (modern/rational).

This becomes rather clear not only in secularization theory and studies of religion but also in modernity theory, where the correlation of modernity with technology (Thompson 1995) is nearly unquestionable. Technology has not only “made modernity possible,” as Philip Brey writes, but it is also “a creation of modernity” (Brey 2004: 33). The institutions and culture of modernity are not merely “shaped or influenced by technology,” they are also “constituted by it” (Brey 2004: 54). But as the critical theorist of technology Andrew Feenberg notes, modernity theory depends on a specific definition of rationalization as a “spontaneous consequence of the pursuit of efficiency once customary and ideological obstructions are removed” (Feenberg 2010: 134–135). This definition of rationalization reflects the influence of Weber, Feenberg contends, specifically, the concept of “bureaucratic rationality,” which sees rationalization as becoming efficient through the parsing out, or “disaggregation” of various spheres. For instance, at the level of social structures, “the state, the market, religion, law, art, science, technology” become “distinct social domains with their own logic and institutional identity” (Feenberg 2010: 136). Hence, modernization-qua-rationalization-qua-differentiation relies upon a view of technological rationality as streamlining, through the eradication of customs and ideologies in order to create distinct, rule-following “bureaus” or offices. Scientific-technological rationality, in Weber’s thinking, purifies all that it encounters from “religious…elements” (Feenberg 2010: 136, emphasis added). But these “religious elements” are clearly meant to refer to superstition and what Asad earlier calls “theological discourse.” Scientific-technological rationality does not necessarily remove ritual per se but replaces its source, its reason. Hence, as Feenberg notes, in modernity theory one also finds an emphasis on the rationality of technology (viz. efficiency), not necessarily the dynamics of technology itself. Therefore, analysis of the modernizing effect of technology remains at the level of thought. Technology loses its material weight.

In this chapter, I aim to analyze the Weberian concept of “disenchantment” beyond the epistemological conflict narrative by exploring its ontological aspects. I argue that that disenchantment is not merely just another term for rationalization and intellectualization but a descriptor for a revolution in the traditional layout of the relations between humans, nature, and God, or what I call “onto-cosmology.” Unlike its traditional antecedent, the modern world viewed “the human” as its fulcrum, with its operative key words being Progress and history. Disenchantment, in the reading that I’m offering here, is not simply intellectual but environmental. I proceed in three steps: First, I present an “interpretive genealogy” of technological rationality in discourses about modernity, and suggest that even while they contain a Weberian substrate, they nevertheless display an internal conflict, especially in how they formulate “religion,” “secular,” and “technology.” More strongly, I argue that the lack of conceptual consistency in the invocation of these terms is a symptom of a deeper unresolved ontological (or, onto-cosmological) tension in modern thought. This tension revolves around the relational status of the figures of “the human,” “nature,” and “God.” I use these terms not as definitions of extant, transhistorical realities but as concepts that are forged and maintained continuously. Following Bruno Latour, I use these terms as markers of an ontological shift specific to modernity that allows us to hone in the notion of disenchantment. Second, after having established this ontological aporia, I offer a rereading of Weber’s original concept of disenchantment, drawing from media scholar Jeremy Stolow and political scientist Gilbert Germain, and suggest that when looked at more closely, religion and technology occupy similar “onto-cosmological” positions vis-à-vis nature, as they are both attempts to effect control over it. Lastly, I tease out some of the implications of this argument for the understanding of religion and technology in contemporary times.

The permutations of “technological rationality” in the discourse of modernity

In this section, I demonstrate a brief “interpretive genealogy” of “technical rationality” in modernity discourses. Due to constraints of time and space, I cannot claim to offer an exhaustive critical assessment of technology-informed works on modernity but, following Aronowitz (1993), I instead provide a “reading” of certain influential thinkers and present conceptual clarifications while highlighting a cluster of relevant aspects of their work. As Aronowitz notes, an “interpretive genealogy” differs from other approaches because “the object” is not taken as given, with a “definite history, cast of characters and well-defined mode of intellectual interventions within a fairly well established field of academic knowledge” (Aronowitz 1993: 7). It allows for the study of tendencies, “to tease out what is left unsaid” (Aronowitz 1993: 8). I do so here to point out not only the inconsistency in the way that not only “technology” is deployed but also how “rationalization” is understood, is symptomatic of a deeper unresolved ontological (or, onto-cosmological) conflict.

More to the point, in the genealogy I sketch below, the effects of technology and the aspects of technological rationality are defined in a rather contrasting manner in spite of the clear influence of Weber. In what I label “modernity as massification,” technology becomes a disindividualizing force, effectively “mechanizing” humans. The language used by these authors suggests that technology is not only a modernizing force but also one that reduces or takes away some vague human spiritual essence. In contrast, “modernity as technological atomization” formulates technology as an isolating force, separating humans from one another, leaving them with a communality deficit. Thus, on the one hand, technology and modernity come together to produce mass conformity, while on the other, they come together resulting in anomie.

The theme of “mass” is particularly evident in a strain of existential philosophy associated with Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel. What is significant about their work is not only the use of theological language, but the shared diagnosis of modernity: the technological mechanization of individual personality. Whereas traditional times allowed for “man” [sic] to have a stable knowledge of himself in relation to the world, modernity has ripped the rug from underneath him, throwing him into a seemingly never-ending Heraclitean flux of movement, a consequence of “despiritualization.” Or, as Marcel puts it, “Man is in his death-throes” (Marcel 1962: 13–14). Technological modernity, in this line of thinking, is always degrading to the human spirit. But for these thinkers, the “spirit” they speak of is always an individual one. In terms that prefigure the Frankfurt School, especially Marcuse (Marcuse 2002), Marcel argues that “man becomes dependent on gadgets whose smooth functioning assures him a tolerable life at the material level, the more estranged he becomes from an awareness of his inner reality” (Marcel 1962: 55), calling this “technical man” (Marcel 1962: 75). But this “new man,” as he alternatively puts it, suffers from a spiritual – a word favored by both him and Jaspers – defect: “he loses touch with himself” (Marcel 1962: 18). Hence, the “uprooting of man” by “advanced technique” (Jaspers 1957: 21) is not only a metaphor of detachment but also, most critically, of its “[absorption] into the social,” leading to a “danger to man’s selfhood” (Jaspers 1957: 47). In sum, the individual is no longer a self but rather a “function.” Jacques Ellul describes the unstoppable, amoeba-like integrative-function of technique technology in a similar manner when he writes, “Technique attacks man, impairs the sources of his vitality, and takes away his mystery” (Ellul 1964: 413).

The idea that modernity with its complex of techniques, characterized by their impersonal bureaucratic nature, has chipped away at the metaphysics of human beings through the process of rationalization is clearly reminiscent of Weber. Technology’s cold and calculating character undermines the enchanted mystery of humanity’s Being, his individuality.

A nearly opposite tact comes from the philosopher Albert Borgmann (2003). For him, technology does not provide enough communality, leaving the individual atomized in an anomic state. The information technologies of today are the exemplars of what have been the worst tendencies of technological rationality since the end of World War II; they intensify the “drift away from public and civic engagement” thanks to an overdevelopment of convenience after which “all the world is at one’s call and beckon, and hence to venture out into the world begins to feel like a waste and a pain” (Borgmann 2003: 77). Invoking Robert Putnam, Borgmann argues that contemporary technologies have exacerbated the fragmentation and atomization of society. This is most clear, he suggests, in the rewriting of the public/private distinctions in advanced industrial societies. The public sphere, in his words, “has become both hypertrophied and atrophied,” while the private sphere has become utterly closed off. “As public space has been taken over by instrumentality (i.e., production and administration),” he writes, “finality (i.e., consumption) has passed into the private realm” (Borgmann 2003: 40).

What we have then is a culture wherein legitimate forms of “communal celebration” are extremely rare. Borgmann bemoans the televising of public sporting events s...