The Religion of the Technocratic Mind

Joshua Lore

I want to start with a striking quote by my friend Michael Martin from today:

‘We live in an age of untrammeled superstition: the hope that science will save us from ourselves and bless us with prosperity and allow us to overcome death. This is an age of the totalization of the technological and the technocratic: an age of the unreal, the artificial, the illusory, of the simulacra. Indeed, our moment anticipates the absolute technological colonization of the human person, a grotesque and horrifying apotheosis of all that is implied by the notion of “evolution.” This teleological unfolding which will without question be attended by the violence implicit in such a blind (if altogether unconscious) faith in a new “survival of the fittest.” Thus superstition.’

Firstly: This is a scathing yet, I believe, terrifyingly accurate diagnosis of our societal predicament, and cuts through the puerile fits and tantrums against traditional faith that we hear from New Atheists and their ilk. If we take religion as a metaphysical system of beliefs about the nature of the world — along with its origins and its ends (and this is unavoidable, and essentially so, for the human person!), then scientism and uncurious and pompous atheism is simply, to use the words of David Bentley Hart, “the metaphysic of no metaphysics.” This is fine, I suppose, if one is painfully conscious of the problem there, as Nietzsche and Camus and many other atheists of an earlier time were, but becomes a malignant and dangerous situation when it is pushed out of the mind’s purview.

But I digress from why this quote is sticking with me today.

I’ve recently been reading George Grant’s ‘Technology and Empire’, a deep and unnerving book I hope to talk a little more about in a subsequent post. It’s an excellent look at the dangers of the technocratic mindset, so pervasive in Western (especially North American) society today, and for as much as it infects secular thinking, Christianity across the spectrum has become plagued by it in equal lengths, and that is by far the greater tragedy.

Christianity, along with many of the other great faith traditions, provides a view of man that reaches beyond man, and in so doing gives him a sense of his smallness — and his dependency — in the scheme of things, while not diminishing his substantial and dignified place within the universe, his role as a blessed steward and interlocutor between Creator and his higher beings, and the rest of Creation. In other words, to use Pascal, man stands in a strange and mysterious locus between the infinite and the nothing, capable of perceiving beyond a sense of wondrous admiration (the mysterium tremendum) the extremes of neither. This is an important realization, and all that questioning of “what is man?” flows from there. Pascal:

‘Returning to himself, let man consider what he is in comparison with all existence; let him regard himself as lost in this remote corner of nature; and from the little cell in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him estimate at their true value the earth, kingdoms, cities, and himself. What is man in the infinite?

‘But to show him another prodigy equally astonishing, let him examine the most delicate things he knows. Let a mite be given him, with its minute body and parts incomparably more minute, limbs with their joints, veins in the limbs, blood in the veins, humorous in the blood, drops in the humours, vapors in the drops. Dividing these last things again, let him exhaust his powers of conception, and let the last object at which he can arrive be now that of our discourse. Perhaps he will think that here is the smallest point in nature. I will let him see therein a new abyss. I will paint for him not only the visible universe, but all that he can conceive of nature’s immensity in the womb of this abridged atom. Let him see therein an infinity of universes, each of which has its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as the visible world….in which he will again find all that the first had, finding still in these others with the same thing without end and without cessation. Let him lose himself in wonders as amazing in their littleness as the others in their vastness. For who will not be astounded at the fact that our body, which a little while ago was imperceptible in the universe, itself imperceptible in the bosom of the infinite, is now a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, in respect to the nothingness which we cannot reach?…’

And then the clincher:

‘He who regards himself in this light will be afraid of himself, and observing himself sustained in the body given him by nature between those two abysses of the Infinite and the Nothing, will tremble at the sight of these marvels; and I think that, as his curiosity changes into admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine and manipulate them in presumption.’

Pascal here, after first providing a beautiful illustration of the human condition, hints at the first essential step away from a sort of hubristic thinking that leads to our present predicament. If you’re as of yet unsure what I mean by technocratic (which I intend to simplify and explore a little more groundedly in my next post), you’ve only got to trace that final transformation backwards. It is, fundamentally, a religious sensibility though it detests what is implied by religion. This is why its embrace by so much of Christianity today is a tragedy, for the believer and the non alike — indeed for the whole of creation.

More soon.

Pleasure Spots

It is finals week for most college students right now, including myself. Painfully frantic and unceasingly busy. Appropriate

for the occasion, I present to you a snippet of a letter from George Orwell to a friend:

“…the music is the most important ingredient. Its function is to prevent thought and real conversation, and to shut out any natural sound, such as the song of birds or the whistling of the wind, that might otherwise intrude. The radio and television (just a new form of canned music, more encompassing and with imagery) are already consciously used for this purpose by most people. In very many homes these instruments are literally never turned off, though they are manipulated from time to time so as to make sure that only light hearted music will come out of them. I know people who will keep this music playing all through a meal and at the same time continue talking just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent, while the chatter of voices stops one from listening attentively to the music and thus prevents the onset of that dreaded thing, thought. For:

The lights must never go out.
The music must always play,
Lest we should see where we are;
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the dark
Who have never been happy or good.

It is difficult not to feel that the unconscious aim in the most typical modern context is a return to the womb. For there, too, one was never alone, one never saw daylight, the temperature was always regulated, and one’s thoughts, if any, were drowned by a continuous rhythmic throbbing.

When one looks at Coleridge’s old concept of a “pleasure-spot,” one sees it revolves partly around gardens and partly around caverns, rivers, forests and mountains with “deep romantic chasms”–in short, round what is called Nature. But the whole notion of admiring Nature, and feeling a sort of religious awe in the presence of glaciers, deserts or waterfalls, is bound up with the sense of man’s littleness and weakness against the power of the universe. The moon is beautiful partly because we cannot reach it, the sea is impressive because one can never be sure of crossing it safely. Even the pleasure one takes in a flower–and this is true even of a botanist who knows all there is to be known about the flower–is dependent partly on the sense of mystery. But meanwhile man’s power over Nature is steadily increasing. With the aid of the atomic bomb we could literally move mountains; we could even, so it is said, alter the climate of the earth. Isn’t there, therefore, something sentimental and obscurantist, something nostalgic (a term we vainly use to block healthy criticism of progress), in preferring bird-song to swing music and in wanting to leave a few patches of wildness here and there instead of covering the whole surface of the earth in a network of Autobahnen flooded by artificial light?

The question only arises because in exploring the physical universe man has made no attempt to explore himself. Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness. If one started by asking, “what is man? what are his needs? how can he best express himself and in what way most essentially?” one would discover that merely having the power to avoid real work and live one’s life from birth to death in electric light and to the tune of tinned music is not a reason for doing so. Man needs warmth, society, leisure, comfort and security; he also needs solitude, creative work, the sense of wonder and embrace of the inevitable realities of danger and death. If he recognized this he could use the products of science and industrialism eclectically, applying always the same test: “does this make me more human or less human?” He would then learn that the highest happiness does not lie in relaxing, resting, playing poker, drinking and making love simultaneously and endlessly. And the instinctive horror which all sensitive people feel at the progressive mechanization of life would be seen not to be a mere sentimental archaism, but to be fully justified. For man only stays human by preserving large patches of simplicity and beauty in his life, while the tendency of many modern inventions–in particular the film, the radio and the airplane–is to weaken his consciousness, dull his curiosity, and, in general, drive him nearer to the animals.

— George Orwell, on October 15, 1946