
released 11/19/2021
Ken Myers talks with essayist L. M. Sacasas about his writing on technology and society. His reflections are currently available at his Substack site, “The Convivial Society.” In this conversation, Sacasas discusses some of the ideas of Ivan Illich (1926– 2002), whose work has influenced Sacasas’s own understanding of the anti-human dynamics of technological society.
21 minutes
PREVIEW
The player for the full version of this Feature is only available to current members. If you have an active membership, log in here. If you’d like to become a member — with access to all our audio programs — sign up here.
Related reading and listening
- We are not “stochastic parrots” — In this essay, Talbot Brewer argues that our understanding of the nature of words and their relationship to human nature is “teetering” due to artificial intelligence chatbot systems and large language models (LLMs). (42 minutes)
- Catechesis in “Screentopia” — In this lecture, Brad East builds a case for why he believes digital technology is the greatest threat facing American Christians today. (57 minutes)
- “Your life is a miracle” — In this lecture, L. M. Sacasas questions whether Byung-Chul Han’s critique of modern life as a “burnout society” is still accurate. (40 minutes)
- Truth lives in language — Craig Gay reflects on how language is not merely a tool for humans to use, but is a part of our very being as creatures made in the image of the God who is the living Word. (52 minutes)
- Modern isolation —
FROM VOL. 150 Eric Jacobsen argues that the emblematic items of the car windshield, the television, and the cell phone — “three pieces of glass” —have led to alienation from people and the places where we live. (22 minutes) - How tech is making us less human — Christine Rosen argues that we must reckon with serious moral and ethical questions raised by the acceleration of “artificial intelligence” into almost every area of life. (31 minutes)
- Human beings as “word-bearers” — In this lecture, D. C. Schindler argues that misology — hatred for reason and contempt for language — is a deep cause of our current cultural crisis. (56 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 167 — FEATURED GUESTS: Nicholas Carr, Thomas Ward, Joseph Stuart, Steven Knepper, Robert Wyllie, Ephraim Radner, and Andrew Willard Jones
- Nietzsche, technology, and desire — Steven Knepper and Robert Wyllie discuss philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s thought on Nietzsche and on the effects of digital media on concepts of freedom, desire, and receptivity to others. (14 minutes)
- St. Thomas the anthropologist — G. K. Chesterton on Aquinas’s complete Science of Man
- Knowing and living our metaphysical totality — Clyde Kilby on the power of myth to bring together “the slender hints of the knowable”
- The destructive perils of speech without a real partner — Josef Pieper and Marc Barnes on how chatbots pervert the nature of conversation
- Machines and misanthropy — Nicholas Carr on how technology has transformed our understanding of progress (and people)
- Alienation and autoamputation: the price of power — Nicholas Carr on the numbing effect of technology
- Disengagement from the world — Nicholas Carr encourages us to consider how automation technologies impact our ability to engage with the world and whether — like a good tool — they present a more inviting world or close us off from that world. (30 minutes)
- Modernity’s crisis of place — Craig Bartholomew reflects on the importance of place to our humanity. (58 minutes)
- The inward eye, cosmic truth, and making well — Andrew Kern takes his listeners along an “interlinear” reading of a portion of St. Augustine’s Confessions that explores the differences between how God makes and how we create. (38 minutes)
- The cost of “killing” God — In this October 2023 lecture, Carl Trueman explores the concept of “desecration” as a frame for understanding the nature of modernity in our time. (42 minutes)
- How music blesses and teaches —
FROM VOL. 64 Theologian and musician Jeremy Begbie explores what we learn about time, theology, and the structure of Creation from the experience of music. (28 minutes) - Cosmic realities in the built world — Christopher and Christine Perrin discuss the implications of architect Christopher Alexander’s (1936–2022) discovery of patterns of building that cohere with the the created cosmos and with ourselves as human creatures. (59 minutes)
- Life more abundantly — Jeanne Schindler advocates for a return to an understanding and prioritizing of sensory experience — real engagement with the real world — as foundational to learning and living. (35 minutes)
- Technophiliac obsessions —
FROM VOL. 141 Literary and media scholar Grant Wythoff talks about the “father of science fiction,” Hugo Gernsback. (26 minutes) - Utopian dreams and cynicism — John Durham Peters discusses the history of the idea of communication, saying that our hopes are too high when we believe that the solution to social discord is just better communication. (49 minutes)
- Thinking Together — Alan Jacobs discusses some principles he’s compiled to help us think well (and charitably) in our cultural context, and he warns us to be attentive to the ways technology displaces previously fixed communities. (53 minutes)
- Man as “both mystic and hobbit” — D. C. Schindler explores how building is a quintessential human activity and an expression of our view of the meaning of reality. (47 minutes)
- Setting the liberal arts free — In addressing the state of liberal arts education in the U.S., Gilbert Meilaender raises some core questions and makes some surprising proposals. (28 minutes)
- What adolescence misses —
FROM VOL. 94 Mark Bauerlein talks about the ways of learning and living practiced by contemporary youth, how they impact the acquisition and use of knowledge and form intellectual habits, and what this means for the future of our society. (16 minutes) - Helping boys become virtuous men — Teacher and chaplain Mark Perkins describes forms of formation that take the body seriously 50 minutes
- The temptations of talismanic technologies — Jeffrey Bilbro on the persistence of techno-utopianism
- Living in a tool-i-fied world — Joseph Minich on how the ubiquity of technology makes atheism entirely plausible
- Still connected to the land — Nadya Williams on the inescapably earthy character of human flourishing
- The amplification of distraction —
FROM VOL. 152 Jeffrey Bilbro advocates a Christian posture toward our contemporary digital media ecosystem that addresses its disorienting and disintegrating effects. (23 minutes) - In the Image of Our Devices — Nicholas Carr considers how automation technologies impact our ability to engage with the world. (66 minutes)
- A Christian understanding of human nature —
FROM VOL. 35 Robert C. Roberts and Mark R. Talbot discuss the need for Christian psychologists to draw from Christianity’s deep tradition of understanding human nature. (15 minutes) - Postmodern culture and the gospel —
FROM VOL. 6 Roger Lundin discusses the ethical and theological consequences of our postmodern culture. (9 minutes) - The recovery of an integrated ecology — In this essay, Michael Hanby unpacks the summons of Laudato si’ to an ecological way of life based on a proper understanding of creation in its fullness and integrity. (57 minutes)
- The hatred of logos — D. C. Schindler draws on Plato to argue that in its very form, social media evidences a general contempt for logos — reason and language — which defines man. (26 minutes)
- Politics and the good —
FROM VOL. 160 D. C. Schindler argues that political order cannot be disentangled from the social, and that fundamental questions of what humans are and what the good is cannot be bracketed from politics. (30 minutes) - The profound drama of human sexuality — In this lecture, D. C. Schindler explains the cosmological significance of human sexuality and why it is paradigmatic of the relationship between nature and freedom. (32 minutes)
- A poet’s relationship to time —
FROM VOL. 57 Poet Wilmer Mills (1969–2011) discusses how his agricultural and cross-cultural childhood in Brazil shaped his imagination and his relationship with modernity. (11 minutes) - The downward spiral of all technocracies — Andrew Willard Jones explains the two paths that exist with the development of new technologies: one which leads to an expansion of the humane world and one which exploits and truncates both Creation and humanity. (65 minutes)
- To see people as people — Anthony Bradley argues that a recovery of Christian personalism is needed to counter the dehumanization, polarization, and tribalism of our day. (45 minutes)
- Ethical issues in neurobiological interventions — William Hurlbut explores current neurobiological advancements and the ethics and dangers of biotechnology interventions that go beyond therapy. (62 minutes)
- How social media truncates relationships — In this lecture, Felicia Wu Song explains how social media industrializes and monetizes our relationships, forming us in modes of relationships and identity that are detrimental to ourselves and to society. (41 minutes)
- An impoverished anthropology —
FROM VOL. 146 Mark Mitchell asks whether there is anything that truly binds Americans together beyond their commitment to self-creation. (34 minutes) - An embedded life — Following a move from one state to another, Gilbert Meilaender explores the tension between being simultaneously a sojourner and a body located in place and time. (30 minutes)
- In technology, we live and move and have our knowing — George Parkin Grant on technology’s establishment of a framework for thinking about technology
- Impact of “infotainment” on community — Neil Gabler and C. John Sommerville discuss how the mentalities conveyed by our experience with communications media work against the nurturing of community. (36 minutes)
- On the Degeneration of Attentiveness — Critic Nicholas Carr talks about how technology-driven trends affect our cultural and personal lives. (56 minutes)
- Gratitude, vitalism, and the timid rationalist — In this lecture, Matthew Crawford draws a distinction between an orientation toward receiving life as gift and a timid and cramped rationalism that views man as an object to be synthetically remade. (52 minutes)