“Weber was brilliantly right to place [Benjamin] Franklin near the center of his account of English-speaking Protestantism. Incomparably less philosophic than Locke, Franklin illustrates the influence back from Protestantism into the ideas of the new worldly modernity. He may have had contempt for revelation in his sensual utilitarianism, but the public virtues he advocates are unthinkable outside a Protestant ethos. The practical drive of his science . . . takes one quite outside the traditionally contemplative roots of European science, into the world of Edison and research grants. In 1968 Billy Graham at the Republican Convention could in full confidence use Franklin in his thanksgiving for what the Christian God had done for America.

“The fact that such men have so often been the shock troops of the English-speaking world’s mastery of human and non-human nature lay not simply in the absence of a doctrine of nature into which vacuum came the Hobbesian account of nature (so that when revelation was gone all that was left was that account) but also in the positive content of their extraordinary form of Christianity. The absence of natural theology and liturgical comforts left the lonely soul face to face with the transcendent (and therefore elusive) will of God. This will had to be sought and served not through our contemplations but directly through our practice. From the solitude and uncertainty of that position came the responsibility which could find no rest. That unappeasable responsibility gave an extraordinary sense of the self as radical freedom so paradoxically experienced within the predestinarian theological context. The external world was unimportant and indeterminate stuff (even when it was our own bodies) as compared with the soul’s ambiguous encounter with the transcendent. What did the body matter; it was an instrument to be brought into submission so that it could serve this restless righteousness. Where the ordinary Catholic might restrain the body within a corporatively ordained tradition of a liturgy rhythmic in its changes between control and release, the Protestant had solitary responsibility all the time to impose the restraint. When one contemplates the conquest of nature by technology, one must remember that that conquest had to include our own bodies. Calvinism provided the determined and organized men and women who could rule the mastered world. The punishment they inflicted on non-human nature, they had first inflicted on themselves.

“Now when from that primal has come forth what is present before us; when the victory over the land leaves most of us in metropoloi where widely spread consumption vies with confusion and squalor; when the emancipation of greed turns out from its victories on this continent to feed imperially on the resources of the world; when those resources cushion an immense majority who think they are free in pluralism, but in fact live in a monistic vulgarity in which nobility and wisdom have been exchanged for a pale belief in progress, alternating with boredom and weariness of spirit; when the disciplined among us drive to an unlimited technological future, in which technical reason has become so universal that it has closed down on openness and awe, questioning and listening; when Protestant subjectivity remains authentic only where it is least appropriate, in the moodiness of our art and sexuality, and where public religion has become an unimportant litany of objectified self-righteousness necessary for the more anal of our managers; one must remember now the hope, the stringency, and the nobility of the primal encounter. The land was almost indomitable. The intense seasons of the continental heartland needed a people who whatever else were not flaccid. And these people not only forced commodities from the land, but built public and private institutions of freedom and flexibility and endurance. Even when we fear General Motors or ridicule our immersion in the means of mobility, we must not forget that the gasoline engine was a need-filled fate for those who had to live in such winters and across such distances. The Marxists who have described the conquest of the continent as an example of capitalist rape miss the substance of those events, as an incarnation of hope and equality which the settlers had not found in Europe. Whatever the vulgarity of mass industrialism, however empty our talk of democracy, it must not be forgotten that in that primal there was the expectation of a new independence in which each would be free for self-legislation, and for communal legislation. Despite the exclusion of the African, despite the struggles of the later immigrant groups, the faith and institutions of that primal encounter were great enough to bring into themselves countless alien traditions and make these loyal to that spirit. To know that parents had to force the instincts of their children to the service of pioneering control; to have seen the pained and unrelenting faces of the women; to know, even in one’s flesh and dreams, the results of generations of the mechanizing of the body; to see all around one the excesses and follies now necessary to people who can win back the body only through sexuality, must not be to forget what was necessary and what was heroic in that conquest.

“Now when Calvinism and the pioneering movement have both gone, that primal still shapes us. It shapes us above all as the omnipresence of that practicality which trusts in technology to create the rationalized kingdom of man. Other men, communists and national socialists, have also seen that now is the moment when man is at last master of the planet, but our origins have left us with a driving practical optimism which fitted us to welcome an unlimited modernity. We have had a practical optimism which had discarded awe and was able to hold back anguish and so produce those crisp rationalized managers, who are the first necessity of the kingdom of man. Those uncontemplative, and unflinching wills, without which technological society cannot exist, were shaped from the crucible of pioneering Protestant liberalism. And still among many, secularized Christianity maintains itself in the rhetoric of goodwill and democratic possibilities and in the belief that universal technical education can be kind, etcetera, etcetera. Santayana’s remark that there is a difference between Catholic and Protestant atheism applies equally to liberalism; ours is filled with the remnential echoes of Calvinism. Our belief in progress may not be as religiously defined as the Marxist, but it has a freedom and flexibility about it which puts nothing theoretical in the way of our drive toward it (or in other words as the clever now say, it is the end of ideology). In short our very primal allowed us to give open welcome to the core of the twentieth century — the unlimited mastery of men by men.”

— from George Parkin Grant, “In Defence of North America,” in Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (House of Anansi, 1969)
A pdf copy of the essay may be downloaded 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)
  • “Beginner adult” or “special kind of child”? —
    FROM VOL. 44
    Thomas Hine takes an historical — rather than a psychological — approach to the development of the concept of the teenager. (10 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
  • The avant garde of secularization —
    FROM VOL. 38
    Alvin Kernan explains sweeping changes in American university education since the 19th century. (11 minutes)
  • 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)
  • Self-transformation, American style — Jackson Lears on late-19th-century visions of rebirth
  • 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)
  • Modernity and the shaping of America —
    FROM VOL. 48
    Historian Jon Butler explains how aspects of modernity were already present and at work in colonial American life prior to 1776. (12 minutes)
  • Eugenics and the rise of “evolutionary ethics” —
    FROM VOL. 70
    Richard Weikart describes evolutionary ethics and examines the ties between national racism and the eugenics movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (16 minutes)
  • On Eugenics in America — Christine Rosen explores early eugenics support in the early 1900s and current “participatory evolution” practices. (50 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)
  • What hath “manifest destiny” wrought? — Daniel Walker Howe on the eschatological imagination that encouraged American expansion
  • Recognizing the Puritan flavor of “America” — George McKenna on the originally theocentric vision for the American vocation
  • Progress and God’s providence in American history — Historians Daniel Walker Howe and George McKenna explain religious understandings of God’s purpose for America in the 19th century and colonial era, respectively. (34 minutes)
  • Countering American apathy toward history —
    FROM VOL. 124
    Historian John Fea discusses how American and Protestant individualism continues to influence our orientation toward the past. (22 minutes)
  • “Detachment as a whole way of life” —
    FROM VOL. 85
    Professor Christopher Shannon discusses how early twentieth-century social scientists encouraged the American idea that individual identity works against communal membership. (17 minutes)
  • Alchemy, astrology, energy, and gnosticism —
    FROM VOL. 85
    Catherine Albanese describes the varieties of “metaphysical religion” popular in early American history and draws connections with the more recent New Age movement. (14 minutes)
  • 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)
  • 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)
Tags: