Technology and the Western Story
In his Modern Technology and the Human Future, Craig Gay asks why we have been so accepting of automatic machinery, and why we are not more concerned that modern technological development is trending away from ordinary embodied human existence. How has technology become the metaphysics of the modern age (95)?
Gay argues that our uncritical embrace of technology as the means to progress and the good life is the result of a particular way in which we see nature, or the world. Metaphors matter. And in chapter 3, Gay traces the development of a metaphor that has become the way in which humans now conceptualize the world they live in. The metaphor is a machine. We have conceived of the world as a collection of interconnected parts and elements that function in a mechanical fashion.
This metaphor has had a radical impact on the way we understand our place in the world, our calling or vocation we might say. If all of life is more or less made of a vast collection of parts and elements that are interconnected in a mechanical fashion, then science and technology become the means by which we know the world, how it works, how problems get solved, and how obstacles are overcome. What is more, nature no longer has a teleology or a purpose. And if nature does not have an end or purpose, then humans are not required to find their place within the created order of things. The human task is no longer that of fitting into the economy of the way the world works, but rather the human task is to know and understand the world for the purpose of manipulating it, mastering it according to our purposes, exploiting it for our own ends. The script has been flipped. We do not need wisdom, which was traditionally understood as understanding how to live with the grain of the created order (by understanding God and His design for the world); instead we need technology and science. They enable us to manipulate, control, dominate, craft, and shape the world as we want it to be. We no longer belong to a divinely ordered world which we must conform to, but rather we stand over it, as its masters and possessors. The final cause, the telos, that matters most in the modern age, is ours. But in a sense, it also means that we have no final cause, since the telos is determined by ever-changing and unstable wills and desires.
One other result of this new conceptual framework for seeing the world and our place in it is that scientists and engineers have become extraordinarily powerful. They, in a sense, are the new priests that mediate life to the world. They enable us to master our world, to fix problems, to overcome the ways in which nature obstructs our desires and goals.
This is why we have embraced technology so uncritically. This is how science and technology have become our new metaphysics. Techniques and methods have replaced wisdom. That is to say that we have lost the possibility of encountering something outside of ourselves that might direct and discipline us, something that might give us order for human making and willing (129).
Gay, concludes the chapter by asking what we might do to change our way of being in the world. He notes that what we need is a change of mind, a new way of seeing the world. In essence, we need a new vocation, which is really a return to our original vocation. But he also raises concern that "[t]he key resource we appear to lack in confronting modern technological development is...our inability to imagine any other way of being-in-the-world beyond that of problem-solving inventiveness (97)."
This metaphor has had a radical impact on the way we understand our place in the world, our calling or vocation we might say. If all of life is more or less made of a vast collection of parts and elements that are interconnected in a mechanical fashion, then science and technology become the means by which we know the world, how it works, how problems get solved, and how obstacles are overcome. What is more, nature no longer has a teleology or a purpose. And if nature does not have an end or purpose, then humans are not required to find their place within the created order of things. The human task is no longer that of fitting into the economy of the way the world works, but rather the human task is to know and understand the world for the purpose of manipulating it, mastering it according to our purposes, exploiting it for our own ends. The script has been flipped. We do not need wisdom, which was traditionally understood as understanding how to live with the grain of the created order (by understanding God and His design for the world); instead we need technology and science. They enable us to manipulate, control, dominate, craft, and shape the world as we want it to be. We no longer belong to a divinely ordered world which we must conform to, but rather we stand over it, as its masters and possessors. The final cause, the telos, that matters most in the modern age, is ours. But in a sense, it also means that we have no final cause, since the telos is determined by ever-changing and unstable wills and desires.
One other result of this new conceptual framework for seeing the world and our place in it is that scientists and engineers have become extraordinarily powerful. They, in a sense, are the new priests that mediate life to the world. They enable us to master our world, to fix problems, to overcome the ways in which nature obstructs our desires and goals.
This is why we have embraced technology so uncritically. This is how science and technology have become our new metaphysics. Techniques and methods have replaced wisdom. That is to say that we have lost the possibility of encountering something outside of ourselves that might direct and discipline us, something that might give us order for human making and willing (129).
Gay, concludes the chapter by asking what we might do to change our way of being in the world. He notes that what we need is a change of mind, a new way of seeing the world. In essence, we need a new vocation, which is really a return to our original vocation. But he also raises concern that "[t]he key resource we appear to lack in confronting modern technological development is...our inability to imagine any other way of being-in-the-world beyond that of problem-solving inventiveness (97)."
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