Technology

In the popular mind technology usually means things like machines. Technology is what engineers give us: telephones, fax machines, automobiles, electric lights, water purification plants, compact disk players and so on. We live in a high-tech world—a world of computers and advanced technologies. While we might resist some aspects of modernity, it is very difficult to establish and live out a critical perspective on technology, the very thing we will explore in this article.

Defining Technology

Our word technology derives from the Greek roots technē and logos. As biology is the study of bios (biological life) and theology is the study of theos (God), so technology originally meant “the study of technē.” Technē is the Greek word for an art, skill or craft—for a technique of making or doing something. In this basic sense, of course, we could say that birds have techniques for building nests, beavers have techniques for building dams, and flies have techniques for irritating us. Human beings also have always had techniques—various arts, skills and methods for meeting their needs and desires—for building houses, making clothing, raising and preparing food (see Meal Preparation). We have had other techniques for making decisions, governing ourselves, communicating with others, raising children and worshiping God.

Some of our techniques are handed on by our traditions. Others are imposed by authorities: “This is the way we do this; period!” But what distinguishes our human (from animal) techniques is our capacity to revise or replace our various techniques through the application of our rationality. Human techniques are not just a product of our instincts or traditions but of our reason. We do not merely submit to nature but create artificial means; we develop tools to more effectively achieve our ends or goals. The difference between science and technology is that while science aims to know and understand things, technology aims to change things, to have a practical effect, to be useful.

Today, of course, we use the word technology not just for “the study of techniques” but for “tools” and “techniques” themselves (“Do we have the technology to do this or that?”). This subtle change in language highlights the fact that our modern techniques are now virtually all linked with study (discourse, logos), with research and rational analysis. There remain, of course, techniques that are handed on by long-standing tradition, socialization, religious faith and even biological instinct. But such techniques are in retreat because of the demonstrable, measurable success, the efficiency, of our rational technologies.

Technology in the Modern World

For most of human history, nature has been the primary milieu in which human life, including human technical development, proceeded. Specific techniques assisted life in remarkable ways, but choices were conditioned primarily by nature. For example, the length of one’s workday was determined by when the sun rose and set. The range of one’s movement was typically confined to the distance one could walk or ride a horse. Learning was passed on from one person to another and depended on the presence of a living teacher.

Human life has also been conditioned by society and human culture. Traditions placed constraints on what people did. Values, embedded in customs and expressed in beliefs, constrained the development and use of techniques. Even if nature allowed the conditions for work, social or religious tradition might prevent you from working during certain times (for example, the institution of the sabbath day), at certain places (for example, sacred burial grounds or mountains) or in certain ways (for example, cruelty to animals, dietary prohibitions against pork, etc.). So too, the way one worked or played might be defined by social roles assigned to men and women, to old and young or to one social class or another.

But in the modern world, while neither nature nor human culture is a negligible factor, our primary milieu is technologically defined. We can work as long as our electrical power keeps the lights on and our computers running. We can travel as often and as far as our transportation technologies will take us. Our entertainment is for the most part technologically constructed. Social taboos against shopping or working on Sunday have disappeared. Socially determined roles for men and women, for old and young, have largely, though not entirely, disappeared. For the most part today, what we do, how we do it, where we do it, is determined by technology not by nature or social tradition. We live in a technological milieu.

How Technology Serves Us

For most of us most of the time, this change to a technological milieu is a good thing. Who would want to return to a time when the whims and constraints of nature were so confining? And who would want to return to a situation in which often irrational social traditions decided the possibilities of life for one’s class or gender? In this sense technology has served and even liberated us.

Consider, for example, how technology has served us by creating tools that vastly extend our human powers: construction tools like hammers instead of rocks, then jack hammers instead of sledge hammers; medical tools like x-ray machines, prostheses and pharmaceuticals; transportation tools like planes, trains and automobiles; communication tools such as television, compact disc players, computers and fax machines. The list of technological tools is awesome. The ways these tools have served us is spectacular.

Technology has also served us by its development of methods. Technology is not just tools; it is a method of rational analysis, of quantification and measurement, of empirical testing, of innovation, of new ways of approaching problems. In the material world technology is the method of rationally analyzing how to move things from one place to another, how to multiply, divide, simplify or combine various elements and factors. As such, technology helps us break down a production and distribution process into its constituent parts and then restructure the process toward greater efficiency.

The method that works with automobile assembly lines and other material processes is also applied to human relations, as in the conduct of business meetings, the creation of effective advertising and the development of psychotherapy. Technology is the creation of better means, in fact, of the “one best means” in every field of human activity. Modern bureaucracy, for example, operates under the rule of technological method—even if in practice it often is far less efficient than we would like.

How Technology Masters Us

Modern technology is not only our servant but our master in some important ways. It frees us in some ways; in others it constrains us and sets our agenda. This mastery has four characteristics.

Technology is ambivalent. This means that specific technologies always have both positive and negative aspects. It is common to say that technology is neutral and only its use or its users are good or bad. But technology is not neutral, nor is it exclusively evil or good; it is both good and bad. Certainly you can say that, for example, a gun in the hands of a crook will be put to bad use, and a gun in the hands of a good person can be put to good use. But it is the technology itself that makes possible these uses. One cannot simply invent guns without weighing these outcomes and deciding whether to proceed. So too, the development of automobiles not only results in freedom to travel but also in pollution, in serious injuries to people and in anonymity that facilitates social breakdown. The possibilities of television are accompanied by the loss of human conversation and the capacity to entertain oneself in a spectator era.

Our lives and choices are mastered and increasingly determined by both the positive and negative impacts of technology. Every benefit is accompanied by a cost. Often the positive and negative impacts of a technology are not fully seen by their inventors. Monks who invented the clock in the Middle Ages to add precision to their daily prayers in service of God did not realize that it would end up being a major instrument in the service of mammon by regulating work. The inventor of the stethoscope did not foresee that physicians would lose their capacity to listen to patients as they increasingly relied on technical instruments interposed between them and human beings. Inventors of computer networks did not foresee that pornography would be the major content traveling on their information superhighway.

Technology has an almost deterministic force. Technological developments create technological problems that require further technological responses ad infinitum. There has been a qualitative shift from earlier eras in which specific tools and techniques were developed through the freely chosen creativity of human beings to meet specific, limited objectives. Technology now obeys its inner logic of development as rigorously as we used to think that nature obeyed its own laws. This necessity is especially visible in a larger view of the technological complex as a whole. “If it can be done, it will be done; indeed, it must be done”: technology carries its own imperative to further development. Who today can oppose technological expansion and development?

Technology is universalistic. It invades every area of the world and every aspect of human existence. This is what Neil Postman calls “technopoly”—a monopoly over all human affairs. This includes the geographic universalization of technology. Every corner of the world is affected by technological intervention. Global development means technological development. Traditional ways of agriculture are replaced by technological ones. Traditional forms of governance must be replaced by bureaucracies. Those who resist are condemned to live at best as an underclass, at worst as the refuse dump of the globally dominant technological complex.

But technological universalism or technopoly also refers to the invasion of technology into every aspect of our lives. Politics and campaigning are technicized; sport and entertainment are dominated by technologies; public relations and fundraising obey technological laws; churches employ public relations techniques to build their memberships; even prayer and spirituality are analyzed and taught as a set of rational techniques for manipulating God and the self. Sexuality, the last domain of the truly wild and mysterious, has never been so technicized—not just in terms of reproductive or prophylactic technologies but in the technical analysis of the sex act itself. Our physical space is dominated by technological instruments; our psychic space is dominated by the method and values of technology: rationality, effectiveness, measurable success.

Technology serves as the sacred. The sacred or the divine is whatever occupies the very center of our existence, giving our lives unity, direction and meaning. The traditional gods have been toppled and replaced by technology. Traditional gods may receive lip service in church or in private conversation, but in practice, on Monday morning if not before, it is technology that is served. Technology is our hope for the future and for our present-day salvation. When something is omnipresent, omnipotent and not subject to criticism, when it inspires and compels our sacrifices and praise, it is serving as a god. But is technology an adequate god? Or is it a bogus pretender to divinity that needs to be demythologized and desacralized? Is the technogod ultimately a liberating, redeeming god or an enslaving one?

Another way to express this is by saying we have moved from technology to technologism. Adding that ism is a way of saying that technological thinking and values have become the foundation, the worldview, the criterion of all judgment. The potential goodness of technology is radically in question when it develops into technologism as an all-embracing intellectual, moral, cultural and spiritual identity.

The questions are these: Who or what is in control of our lives? Have we become mere tools of our tools? Have we made technology the god of our civilization? Gods always demand some kind of worship in return for the salvation, meaning and direction they offer. The worship demanded by technology has meant lives of frantic absorption into the latest technological development. Our lives are dominated by the products and the problems of technology. Our learning is dominated by the acquisition of technological literacy and competence.

We should evaluate this covenant with technology by asking what has been excluded. What has been lost is the value of the inefficient, the nonrational, the aesthetic, the spiritual and the traditional. Love and beauty, for example, are prostituted and lost when they are made to serve a technological calculus. Relationships with family members and colleagues are seriously distorted when rationality and efficiency are the criteria of value.

Four Basic Responses to Technology

Responses to this kind of critical questioning of modern technology usually take one of four forms.

Denial. Some will deny that there is a problem and protest that modern technology is more or less desirable and under control. This first response is partly a product of exhaustion. We simply do not have the time or energy to stop and take a critical look at the broader dimensions of what is happening to our human life. We are too busy. It is also true that our technological society provides innumerable distractions and opiates to its members. Denial is also a product of a lack of perspective. Most of our technologically trained population at large have little significant background in history, philosophy, theology and non-Western cultural attitudes. Yet these are precisely what we need for a critical perspective. We have much knowledge of a certain type, but little wisdom. Hence we tend to regard our Western technological perspective as the only legitimate one, though it is by no means the only perspective in the Western tradition, to say nothing of the rest of the world.

Love of technology. A second response allows that we have some serious dysfunctionality in our technological civilization, but we only need more and better technology to resolve these problems. This is the technophile response, the true believers. The priests and evangelists of technology want to get everyone on the information superhighway—with an integrated office system, linked to our home entertainment and work centers and to our portable cellular phone and powerbook computer. Thus the technological environment becomes essentially airtight, and everyone is technologically linked to everything at every moment. But where is this superhighway going?

Fear of technology. Opposite the technophiles are the third group, the technophobes. In the Industrial Revolution these were the Luddites, the band of protesters who wished to smash the machines and maintain a more balanced existence. The hippies of the sixties made a somewhat similar call, but romanticism and adolescent anger make a flimsy foundation for resistance, as the subsequent absorption of the sixties generation into the yuppies has demonstrated. Technological reactionaries are doomed to be the colorful feather in the cap of the technological giant: a dash of color on a giant who moves forward unimpeded.

Resistance and revolution. This response calls first for a profound awareness and critical analysis of our reality: the reality of the technological main currents under the surface of the ocean of our existence and the reality of our flesh-and-blood neighbors. For such awareness we must stop relying on USA Today and on CNN-type news bites—and invest our time in broader, deeper works of cultural criticism, including historical and multicultural perspectives that will give depth and breadth to our own analysis of social and cultural reality. Along with this we will need to turn off the distractions and carve out time to develop human relationships with people around our living and working areas. This means learning how to listen, how to be quiet, how to reflect deeply, how to care.

With this growing awareness, we need to resist, indeed, to refuse the necessity, universality and divinity of technology in our life and work, that is, “just saying no” to technology at decisive points. But gods do not easily vacate their thrones. To dethrone the old, we need to install a more appropriate one. To begin with, we can resist in the name of humanity. Our thinking, living, working and playing can revolve around the sacredness of human life, earth and universe in which, and with which, we flourish or come to grief. Concretely this means that people are not reducible to statistics, that intelligence is not reducible to IQ numbers or degrees held or genetic maps, that this living student or friend before me is sacred and is more important in his or her living wholeness and mystery than any rational calculation could ever account for. So we need to replace technologism with a robust humanism.

Christians, of course, would suggest that the strongest foundation on which to base such a humanism and to resist technologism is a theological one in which the transcendent God who created the universe and human beings is invited back into our sacred space. We would say that humanism is true and good because God has created humans in the divine image, whereas technological civilization tends to promote uniformity and reduce individuals to faceless atoms in a mass society. Biblical people would say that to mistreat or undervalue a person is to mistreat an irreplaceable child of God. To exploit and to abuse the earth and the universe are not merely a technological dysfunction but a serious sin against God and his creation.

Resisting technology as a pretender to the place of God in our lives can thus proceed from resistance to a revolution in values that rebuilds authentic individuality and community—a life in which we do not smash the machine, but we do question it, appraise it in reference to our human or religious values, and then sometimes say yes and sometimes no to its deployment as a servant in our lives.

The Impact of Technology on Theology and Religion

Without any doubt the development of certain technologies has served theology and the religious life in impressive ways. Communication techniques, most notably translation techniques and the printing press, have made possible a relatively inexpensive, massive diffusion of the Bible into the hands of the people, bringing new spiritual life to multitudes. It has also tended to move authority away from hierarchies and elites, who alone previously had access to Holy Scripture, into the hands of literate, popular masses. Better transportation has facilitated people’s possibilities for gathering together for worship, witness, learning and service. Radio, television and other media have multiplied the potential exposure of large numbers of people to things theological and religious. Organizational, public relations and therapeutic techniques have contributed to the effectiveness of some aspects of religious life. Political techniques are now being used by various religious groups (for example, the “religious right”) to increase their social impact, for better or worse.

But while noting the benefits, we must also ask how we respond to the lies, half-truths, manipulation and corruption that are technologically foisted on a gullible audience? Technology has vastly increased the potential impact of religious hucksterism and charlatanism. And how should we evaluate the impact of the technological medium on the life and message it is intended to serve? What is lost when the dynamic, personal character of the Christian gospel is replaced by the passive, depersonalized character of watching religious television (see Televangelism)? What is lost when pastoral searches, evangelistic campaigns, fundraising campaigns and pastoral care are primarily structured by technobusiness models and methods?

Technology as a worldview and intellectual paradigm tends to progressively put in question and then marginalize the traditional, inefficient, unquantifiable, nonrational and transcendent. Individual techniques and technologies need not necessarily have this exclusionary impact. But we live in the era of technologism, of the global technological ensemble, of technology as infrastructure and intellectual/spiritual paradigm.

Towards a Theology of Technology

Any theological critique of technology must return to the biblical sources. There we find that technology is an expression of divinely created human creativity and imagination, of doing and making good and helpful life-enhancing things. Technology and engineering are the expression of our human imagination and creativity in forming and transforming nature for practical purposes and uses. While there is plenty of biblical material emphasizing the spiritual and inward over the material and external, this is balanced by passages affirming the concrete, external world of things. For example, the Old Testament describes in detail the materials, dimensions and building techniques for Noah’s ark, Moses’ tabernacle and Solomon’s temple. In a classic text, Moses says, “See, the Lord has chosen Bezalel . . . and he has filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability, and knowledge in all kinds of crafts . . . to engage in all kinds of artistic craftsmanship” (Exodus 35:30-33).

A major problem arises, however, when we treat technology as sacred, when it moves to the center of our lives, receives our sacrifices, bestows meaning, direction and significance on what we do. The root problems are idolatry and autonomy. What should be carried out in a living relationship to God, subordinate to the character and plans of God, is now autonomous, subject to nothing except its own internal imperatives. Such technology carries with it no respect for nature, social tradition, religious authority, the absurd or the paradoxical, the weak and the unproductive. And yet all of the foregoing are part of the world God has created and wishes to redeem. So it is essential for us to develop a theology of technology.

God’s creativity as the source of human theological imagination. Recall the accounts in Genesis 1-2. God created; God made the heavens and the earth. God gave shape, order and design to what was without form, filled what was void or empty and illuminated the darkness. What God made was described as “good,” “useful” and “pleasing to the eye.” What God made was diverse, complex and awesome in scope. It was orderly and bounded but also set free.

We human beings are made in the image and likeness of this creating God. So the first and basic source of our own creativity is this fact of our nature. But human creativity and technology are not just an exhibition of our nature—they are also a response to the command and invitation of God. It is the freedom of obeying God’s Word that underlies technological activity in a biblical worldview. God commands us: “Be fruitful and multiply,” “Fill the earth and subdue it,” “Have dominion,” “Till and keep the garden,” “Name the animals.” At its best our technological creativity continues to bear witness to God’s creation when it combines innovation harmoniously with what already exists as good, when it contributes both beauty and utility to the world and when it allows both individual uniqueness and partnership/community to flourish.

Human creativity is bounded. Our technological and creative work is bounded in four ways. First, it is launched by the Word of God. Creation begins when God says, “Let there.” Human work begins when God says, “Be fruitful . . . fill . . . subdue . . . till . . . keep . . . name.” It doesn’t begin out of idle curiosity, boredom, greed or lust for power. Second, it is bounded temporally by the sabbath: God rests on the seventh day and so do those made in God’s image. There is a time to cease from technology. Third, it is bounded spatially in that there is a tree at the center of the garden that is not to be harvested for food; a limit is respected; it was a tree that could be harvested but must not be. There are limits that technology should not transgress. Finally, human creative work was bounded ethically in that the prohibited tree was the “ethics tree”—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Humans were to live and work in relationship to the God who sees and names the good; they were not to try to take this ethical knowledge for themselves outside of this relationship with God. All technology must be subjected to this fundamental ethical judgment of God.

Human technology now needs redemption. The Fall occurs when man and woman misuse their freedom, breech the boundaries and grab for the fruit of the ethics tree. The human situation changes dramatically. They are evicted from the garden and cannot go back. Technology is itself now fallen, sometimes perverse and violent, open to becoming idolatrous and autonomous.

Because of the Fall, the creativity motifs in a theology of technology must now be caught up within a theology of present and final redemption. Redemption means that in a fallen, broken world we are not able to act naively. Realism means we must take account always of the potential for deception and destruction in our work. Redemption means that our work (our technology) must aim at healing what is hurting, repairing what is broken, liberating what is in bondage, preserving what is degenerating, conserving what is disappearing. Creating, illuminating, ordering, filling, naming—these original motifs of creation continue, but the arena is no longer pure and innocent. Sacrifice, servanthood and humility will need to characterize a redemptive technology.

Human technology must keep the end in view. Technology is a development and perfection of means. But in our civilization the means have become ends in themselves and are developed without adequate attention to the proper ends of human life. Christian life is eschatological life: it is life lived in expectation of the coming end, the consummation of God’s kingdom and purposes. The Holy Spirit is given as the pledge, the down payment, of our future inheritance. Christians lean toward the future (Romans 13:11-14). Thus, our technology needs a new, rigorous assessment of the true ends of human life. In the light of these ends, specific technologies can be assessed and evaluated. Our means must not be self-justifying. They must be justified by God’s end, and then they must exhibit the character (not the contradiction) of that end.

Faithful Technology

Our challenge is to recover the notion of fidelity. The most important exercise of fidelity is toward God and his Word. After the Fall of Adam and Eve, God continues to speak to humankind. Often the word of God takes the form of questions: Where are you? What have you done? Where is your brother? Who do you say that I am? Faithful technology will hear God’s commands and questions, seeking them not only as the starting point of our technological activity but as its boundary. It will aim to contribute to God’s purposes for life in the world, trying to discern and respect appropriate limits and boundaries in space and time.

Fidelity to God means trying to hear God’s ethical judgment on our projects instead of pronouncing our own and overcoming evil with the good. Fidelity to God means fidelity to our Creator and Redeemer. Faithful technology will not just be fruitful, fill, subdue, create, name, till and keep—but will go into all the world, love your neighbor, love your enemy, heal the sick, set free the captives, comfort the lonely, welcome the children.

Fidelity also must govern our relationships with others. Faithful technology will not subordinate people to technique. It will express faithfulness to partners, neighbors, friends, fellow humans. It will promote technology on a human scale. It will refuse to reduce people to technical categories, not try to adapt people to the requirements of technology. It will invite others to help rebuild the boundaries and discern and support good technological work.

Our modern choices with respect to technology are symbolically represented by the tower of Babel and Abraham’s altars (Genesis 11-12). The technology of Babel intends to make a name for the self, make security for the self, breech all limits, choose and occupy its own chosen place. But the technology of Abraham builds an altar for God and lets God care for our reputation, protect and guide us to the place he chooses. As Christians we know we cannot go back to Eden. We must go forward either to Babylon, where Babel’s project is fulfilled, or to the New Jerusalem, where Abraham’s project is fulfilled. The afterlife is depicted in the form of a city, not a new garden, into which the nations bring their glory. We must pray and work that something of our own generation’s technology might be worthy of a place in that city of God.

» See also: Computer

» See also: Computer Games

» See also: Home Video

» See also: Information Superhighway

» See also: Television

References and Resources

I. Barbour, Ethics in an Age of Technology (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993); D. J. Boorstin, The Republic of Technology (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978); J. Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom (London: SCM Press, 1951); J. Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964); S. C. Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (New York: St. Martin, 1975); G. P. Grant, Technology and Justice (Toronto: Anansi, 1986); C. Mitcham, Thinking Through Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); S. V. Monsma, ed., Responsible Technology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986); N. Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).

—David W. Gill