In this brief episode of defining technology I note two of the common approaches to technology amongst Christians.
The first, is Heidegger noted approach that there was a shift at some point between techne (art) and modern technology.
Embedded with Heidegger's view is the notion that we have enframed the world with technology.
I really am quite at a loss to understand the attraction of either of these perspectives.
1. The past was different.
A number of authors have picked this up and use different points. Ursula Franklin in her book The Real World of Technology adopts similar concepts as well as any number of other authors.
It was 'better some other time' idea I actually find funny. It plays out in any number of ways across time. In this case we see it as declinism. As The Economist recently pointed out there is a long history of this kind of belief structure. Their focus was working life.
Yet the belief that something
has gone wrong with labour markets has a history of turning out wrong. Since
the dawn of capitalism people have lamented the world of work, always believing
that the past was better than the present and that the workers of the day were
uniquely badly treated. Adam Smith argued that the burgeoning industrial sector
of late-18th-century Scotland had the potential to make workmen “as stupid and
ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become”. Emile Durkheim
reckoned that in a glorious past in France, people had enjoyed work because
they controlled it, were good at it, and did it in the bosoms of their
community—but that capitalism had stolen all of this.
Labour Gains p3. in Special Report: The Future of Work, The Economist April 10 2021
To be fair, the early factory system and early industrialised mining were horrific and to use the appropriate term 'Dickensian'. However factory reform acts and changing technologies started making things better surprisingly quick. I am not making the argument that it was great and that I would like to have worked in those conditions, but that period made for our period. You can't jump, as it were, life goes the long way around.
2. Enframement
This is even more historically difficult. While it is true that one of the lens' with which have enframed the world is technology it is by no means the only one and it is not of the highest order.
If we go back even to the first century AD we see Jewish
amulets for healing. I can not find a specific reference to the example I have read about but if I ever do then I will write an updates blog.
In the rest of the world the goal was to keep the gods happy. Mesopotamian myths had cities being founded as places of residence for the gods - not humans.
Order not technology is humanity oldest and highest level of enframement perspective.
Some significant contours should be evident. For the ancients the very order and coherence of the natural world implied some kind of personal agency. There is not a hint of the idea that the ordered world emerged from chaos by purely natural means. My point here is that no one wrote these texts to argue for the existence of the gods. That much was simply assumed. On this basis, Genesis 1 is unlikely to offer much succour for those who want to argue against Darwin. It was never designed to do so. More probably it was designed to answer the question: which god's ordered and filled the heavens and the earth?
Rikk Watts. On The Edge of the Millennium: Making Sense of Genesis 1 (2001).
This is an ordered functional world but it isn't an easy life without technology, the pandemic shows even modern technology it can be challenging.. Disease, disability, farming etc etc have always been hard. Pretending otherwise is just myth making and not Biblical story telling.
