Jul302021
Article excerpt

With a title taken from one of Saint Francis of Assisi’s canticles, Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si’ was issued in 2015. While many commentators focused on the ecological policies the document endorsed (or seemed to), very little was said about the philosophical and theological foundations of the document. 

In an article titled “The Gospel of Creation and the Technocratic Paradigm,” published in the Winter 2015 issue of Communio, Michael Hanby examined some of the more theoretical issues raised by the encyclical. As Hanby notes, Pope Francis identifies a “technocratic paradigm” present in modern thought which defines “the place of human beings and of human action in the world.” The fundamental problem, according to Pope Francis, “is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It is as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation. Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us.”

Hanby argues that this technocratic mentality influences how we strive to know Creation before we launch any projects of manipulation. “This new technological manner of knowing is a knowing-by-doing that ‘takes experience apart and analyzes it,’ in Francis Bacon’s words. That is, it destroys in thought and experiment the unity of experience and the intelligible wholes that comprise it in order to reduce these objects to their simplest components and reconstruct them as the sum of those abstract components and their interactions. This is the meaning of that famous Baconian phrase, ‘knowledge is power.’ It’s not simply that we now know nature for the sake of control; it is rather that we know by means of the various kinds of control we are able to exercise over the phenomena of nature, and the truth of our knowledge is measured by the success of our experiments in predicting, retro-dicting, or manipulating these phenomena.”

Hanby makes it clear that “this control is often undertaken with the best of intent and for noble ends — indeed Bacon himself advances his new science in the name of charity. The imperative to control is not principally a matter of subjective will or intention; rather it is inherent in the structure of scientific cognition and experimental rationality.”

Hanby observes that the technocratic paradigm affects how we regard human nature and the most intimate aspects of human experience. “The so-called sexual revolution, for instance, is most fundamentally the technological revolution turned on ourselves, not only in the deep sense that the canonical dualism of sex and gender presupposes a more basic dualism between the affective part, usually thought to be the locus of personal identity, and a meaningless material body regarded as a kind of artifact, but also in the more mundane sense that the technical conquest of human biology is its practical condition of possibility. Just as ‘same-sex marriage’ would have remained permanently unimaginable were it not for the technological conquest of procreation, so too would it have never been possible to think that a man might ‘really’ be a woman if we did not think it were technologically possible to transform him into one. And yet these technologically generated exceptions have occasioned a radical rethinking of the whole of human nature, sexuality, and embodiment. . . .

“A culture whose very view of reality is technological, with all the assaults on human dignity that inevitably follow, will have every incentive not to think about the profound questions of human existence that for so long animated Western culture. Education will largely consist in learning not to ask them, and so will be scarcely distinguishable from ignorance. But more worrisome still, the inhabitants of such a culture will be unable to think deeply about such questions, because there will be no depths to think about; for they will have already reduced reality to an assemblage of superficial ‘facts’ and thinking to the arrangement and manipulation of those facts. For such a society there would simply be no such thing as a profound question, only problems awaiting technical or managerial solutions. A society whose members are thus unable to think cannot ultimately be a free society, because they can never see beyond and thus transcend the fate which their powers have unleashed. Their only consolation, and this is also their curse, is that they might never know the difference.”

A pdf of Michael Hanby’s article is available here.

Related reading and listening

  • 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)
  • 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)
  • 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
  • In the Image of Our Devices — Nicholas Carr considers how automation technologies impact our ability to engage with the world. (66 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 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)
  • 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)
  • In technology, we live and move and have our knowing — George Parkin Grant on technology’s establishment of a framework for thinking about technology
  • 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)
  • Humans as biological hardware — In this essay, Brad Littlejohn and Clare Morell decry how modern technology tends to hack the human person in pursuit of profit. (55 minutes)
  • “The system will be first” —
    FROM VOL. 27
    Robert Kanigel describes the transformation of work due to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s concept of scientific management. (11 minutes)
  • Choices about the uses of technology — This Feature presents interviews with David Nye and Brian Brock related to how we evaluate adoption of new technology and how technology influences our thinking. (31 minutes)
  • What it means to be a person —
    FROM VOL. 147
    Sociologist Craig Gay argues that in order to address the challenges of a technological approach to the world, we need to recover the Christian tradition’s robust theology of personhood. (24 minutes)
  • The problem with dynamism without direction — Paulina Borsook on the biological paradigm of technolibertarianism’s love of spontaneous dynamism, whatever the costs
  • The libertarian spawning-ground of tech bros — Paulina Borsook on high tech’s long-standing animosity toward government and regulation
  • Tech bros and public power — Paulina Borsook discusses the “bizarrely narcissistic” and ultra-libertarian culture of Silicon Valley. (22 minutes)
  • Voluntarily silencing ourselves —
    FROM VOL. 39
    John L. Locke discusses the value of personal communication and how technology is displacing it. (12 minutes)
  • Souls in cyberspace —
    FROM VOL. 25
    Douglas Groothuis examines the worldview and mythology behind the creation and marketing of the Internet. (13 minutes)
  • Life in a frictionless, synthetic world —
    FROM VOL. 17
    Mark Slouka explores the worldview of techno-visionaries who aim to create a new era of human evolution. (11 minutes)
  • The digital revolution and community —
    FROM VOL. 7
    Ken Myers talks with Jane Metcalfe, the founder of WIRED Magazine, about technology and community. (8 minutes)
  • Metaphysical impulses beneath techno-utopianism —
    FROM VOL. 38
    Erik Davis describes his research on how humans’ fascination with technology is permeated with “mythic energy” and gnostic aspirations. (11 minutes)
  • Post-Christian America and the “unlimited technological future” — George Parkin Grant on technology and the Puritan legacy of “unflinching wills”
  • Education that counters alienation — In this lecture, Jeanne Schindler explores how digital technologies warp not only education but our experience of being human. (30 minutes)
  • Education vs. conditioning — Education necessarily involves metaphysical and theological preconditions, and Michael Hanby argues that our current education crisis is a result of society rejecting these preconditions. (41 minutes)
  • What is lost with labor-saving devices — Romano Guardini on what is lost when cultural pursuits eclipse natural order
  • Paradoxical attitudes toward plastic — Jeffrey Meikle traces the technological, economic, and cultural development of plastic and relates it to the American value of authenticity. (15 minutes)
  • Technology and the kingdom of God —
    FROM VOL. 63
    Albert Borgmann (1937–2023) believes Christians have an obligation to discuss and discern the kind of world that technology creates and encourages. (12 minutes)
  • The gift of meaningful work — In this lecture, D. C. Schindler argues that genuine work is inherently meaningful and facilitates an encounter with reality and therefore, ultimately, with God. (36 minutes)
  • Diverting language from its richest possibilities —
    FROM VOL. 75
    Steve Talbott discusses the rich capacities of language and how technology diminishes them. (18 minutes)
  • The recovery of true authority for societal flourishing — Michael Hanby addresses a confusion at the heart of our current cultural crisis: a conflation of the concepts of authority and power. (52 minutes)
  • The roots of American disorder — In this reading of an article from 2021 by Michael Hanby, the critique of Marxism in Augusto del Noce’s work is compared with texts from the American Founders. (79 minutes)
  • Why liberalism tends toward absolutism — In this lecture, Michael Hanby examines what causes liberalism to become dictatorial in thought and practice. (49 minutes)
  • Automation and human agency —
    FROM VOL. 150
    Philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford laments the losses of human skill that correspond with gains in mechanical automation. (21 minutes)
  • A fearful darkness in mind, heart, and spirit — Roberta Bayer draws on the work of George Parkin Grant (1918–1988) to argue that our “culture of death” must be countered with an understanding of reality based in love, redemptive suffering, and a recognition of limitations to individual control. (33 minutes)
  • Questioning “conservatives” — John Lukacs asserts that believers in unending technological ‘progress’ can’t really be conservatives.
  • Seeking control, in white magic and The Green Book — Alan Jacobs on C. S. Lewis’s critique of the modern pursuit of god-like control
  • The negation of transcendence — Michael Hanby argues that our current civilizational crisis can be understood as a “new totalitarianism” that negates or disallows every form of transcendence. (32 minutes)
  • Life, liberty, and the defense of dignity — In a 2003 interview, Leon Kass discussed his book Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics. The unifying theme in the book’s essays is the threat of dehumanization in one form or another. (36 minutes)
  • The surrender of culture to technology —
    FROM VOL. 6
    Neal Postman discuses the ways in which how we think about the world has been influenced by communications technology, even in its earliest forms. (11 minutes)
  • A.I., power, control, & knowledge — Ken Myers shares some paragraphs from Langdon Winner‘s seminal book, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (1977) and from Roger Shattuck‘s Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (1996). An interview with Shattuck is also presented. (31 minutes)
  • Technology and social imaginaries — In this interview from 1999, cultural historian David Nye insists that societies have choices about how they use technologies, but that once choices are made and established, a definite momentum is established. (19 minutes)
Tags: