Not Neutral:Technology and
the “Theology of the Body” |
Pope John Paul II’s “theology of the body” is
becoming better and better known among ordinary Catholics, many of whom
have found in it a way of connecting the central mysteries of the
Christian faith – Trinity, Incarnation, and
Eucharist – with their marriages, their bearing and rearing of children,
and their sexuality. To such Catholics, the theology of the body has
transmitted the “good news” of Vatican II that marriage, too, is a way
of holiness, on which couples are called to walk with their children as
an ecclesia domestica,
a domestic Church. The Pope’s theology
of the body is very timely. As we all know, the institution of marriage is
crumbling around the Western world, and if there was ever a time when
Catholic couples needed to feel that their ordinary lives are anchored in
the heart of the mystery of God, it is now. But the theology of the body
is timely in another way. It responds in depth to what is arguably one of
the main cultural causes of the collapse of marriage: the mechanization of
bodiliness through technology. This statement will
probably surprise many readers, who may think of “technology” as meaning
nothing more than the “latest gadgets”: computers, cell phones,
genetically modified corn, and the like. What does satellite TV have to do
with the breakdown of marriage? It is worth noting
that the latest gadgets sometimes provoke an ill-defined sense of unease
in us. The latest gadgets tend to change our lives in massive ways, and
often rather more quickly than we are prepared for Think of the sudden
ubiquity of the personal computer and then, on its heels, of the internet.
A whole generation (“generation Y”) has grown up “wired”, before we have
had a chance to ask what being wired means and whether it is a good thing
or not. And so, amidst all of the celebration over the latest
life-changing technological breakthrough, there is also a good deal of
head shaking, too. Somehow, we feel dimly, something is being lost. The
machine has won another victory over nature. Are we altogether sure that
it is good for the machine to be so invincible? Instead of
dismissing this unease as the result of nostalgia or the inevitable, but
short-lived, shock of the new, we should try, for a change, to get to the
bottom of it. If we do, I think we will see that it illuminates the
cultural significance of the Pope’s theology of the body in surprising
ways. The Age of the Machine:
If we are going to make any sense of technology, and
so name the source of our unease with it, we need to stop thinking of it
as a mere collection of tools. We need to start thinking of it as what it
really is: a mind-set, an implicit philosophy. The Canadian philosopher
George Grant (following Heidegger, although meaning this in a different
way) has even called technology the “ontology of our age”. By that he
means that technology is the filter, or framework, through which we
Westerners (and, more and more, all peoples) approach and experience the
very being of things. Technology, Grant is saying, is the name for our
basic world-view, our overall
“take” on reality as a whole.
According to Grant,
the pervasiveness of the technological mind-set makes it especially
difficult to think clearly about technology. Technology is ubiquitous, so
much a part of the very air we breathe that it shapes how we think about
technology itself. Of course, since technology is “in the air”, we are
likely not to notice how deeply it has shaped our thinking about
technology. And so we need to make a special effort to distance ourselves
from our usual way of imagining technology – as a set of neutral tools or
instruments, harmlessly lying ready for whatever uses we may decide to put
them to. But if technology is not neutral, what is it?
In order to avoid misunderstanding, let me clarify
that by calling technology the “mind-set” of our culture, I am not
suggesting that each of us is psychologically a convinced technocrat 100%
of the time. Human nature, fortunately, is too complex and too refractory
for that ever to be the case. What I am saying, though, is that technology
is the dominant element in the overall drift of modern Western
civilization. This implies, of course, that our civilization contains
other elements, too, some of which are survivals from pre-technological
ages. My point is simply that the form these many elements take – the form
that distinguishes modern Western culture from, say, ancient Chinese
culture – is shaped decisively by technology. Or, if the word technology
is unhelpful, substitute the phrase “modern project”: the project, that
is, of mastering nature in order to better the lot of man in this world.
Technology is another name for modernity as
the enterprise of becoming “masters and possessors of nature.”
The humanitarianism allied with the modern goal of
mastering nature is of course
attractive, but we need to be clear about the
meaning that the founders of modernity (people like Bacon and Descartes)
gave to that goal. Nature, these founders thought, is amoral, unresponsive
to man’s “loftier” aspirations. So much so that these aspirations, however
noble seeming, are no better than foolish idealism. Rather than trying to
conform ourselves to some alleged Purpose animating nature, the early
moderns said, let us therefore try to conform nature to our purposes –the
more realistic purposes of making our lives more (materially) better in
this world.
I won’t try to assess the merits of this modern
proposal here. I only highlight one of its implications: if nature is
amoral, then there is no such thing making with the grain of nature or
against the grain of nature; there is just
making, just the raw transformation of the raw
material of the world. Human making is unbounded by any pre-given moral
order written into the heart of nature. Of course, we modern Westerners
still remain under the spell of Christianity, whether consciously or nor,
and so our making is in fact curbed by an inherited morality. The point is
simply that, given the drift of the modern project, there is no reason why
it should be.
Our feelings of unease at developments like the
Internet or biotech are often waved away with the bland assurance that the
problem with technology isn’t technology itself, but how we choose to use
it. The trouble is that this faith in the neutrality of technology
expresses the essence of technology itself – the conviction that the
transformation of nature is uncircumscribed by any moral standard given in
the nature of things apart from human will.
The belief that technology is a set of neutral
instruments, like technology itself, is of a piece with the typically
modern conviction that there is no moral order in physical nature, just
brute matter whose only meaning we
put into it through our transformative making and doing. To say
“technology is neutral” is to say “making, as making, is amoral, but you
can add morality to making – if you wish.” And so it is to say that human
making, human will, is the only source of moral value in the universe, and
that technology is the instrument of this freedom. Of course, the
technological mind-set is not just a mind-set. It has also profoundly
changed how we make things. The word “technology” sums up the passage from
a concern for working with the grain to the conviction that there is no
grain – at least no morally binding and significant grain – to work with
in the first place. It is shorthand for the shift from the ideal of the
craftsman to the ideal of the technician. And since this shift has
affected how we make what we make, the technological mentality behind the
shift is bound to be “wired” into our gadgetry itself.
Take the computer. It is true that people use
computers for all sorts of different purposes, ranging from evangelization
to purveying pornography. But, however different the purposes of the users
might be, the computer itself
has a purpose. We could state this purpose as “processing information”.
Processing information may sound innocuous,
but it isn’t. For it means taking human meaning and turning it into
“information” – that is, into packets of electrical signals that the
computer is programmed to “read”. Processing information means breaking
down, or attempting to break down, the whole of an idea into parts that a
computer can handle without having to understand the idea as a whole
(computers are made not
to be “artificially intelligent”). It means treating, or attempting to
treat, an idea as a bit of machinery that you can assemble and disassemble
at will. It means treating a whole precisely
not as a whole, with an integrity that goes
beyond the “sum of its parts,” but as what Aristotle called a
soros, a “heap”: an
accidental aggregation of elements thrown together any which way.
The point I am
making is that no one would have thought up the computer if he or she
hadn’t first thought up the idea of “processing information”, and that no
one would have thought up the idea of processing information if he or she
had not had a technological mindset to begin with. For a technological
mind-set is essentially the attitude that says that you can – even should
– prescind from the wholeness of the whole, break the whole down into its
parts, and re-arrange the parts for purposes that don’t have to have any
intrinsic connection with the whole, but come entirely from the
transforming will of the human agent. It is just this understanding of the
whole-part relation that the idea of “processing information” applies to
thinking and communicating. The computer is the technological mind-set
come home to roost.
Note well: the action of
“processing information” is always the purpose
of the computer itself. It is thus one that every user necessarily makes
his own, even if implicitly, by the very act of using the computer. Your
may use the computer for evangelization, and not for selling porn. You may
be trying to convey ideas, and not reduce them to bits of machinery.
Nonetheless, by turning on the computer, you are just so far accepting the
purpose of the computer itself. In order to achieve
your purpose, you have
got to let the computer achieve its
purpose of processing information. That is the bargain that most of us
have accepted without much reflection. Perhaps we could do with a bit more
of the skepticism of those who used to warn
caveat emptor.
Back to
the Body:
What I have said so far suggests why technology may cause a sense of unease in us. The machines we build have the technological mind-set built into them. The hawkers of these machines seek to assure us, of course, that they have no purposes other than the ones we give them – that we, not the machines, are the masters. But the fact is that the machines do have purposes of their own, purposes hidden from most of us by the pervasiveness of the mind-set those purposes express. And so we begin to wonder: are we really are the masters after all, or might not the machines be pulling the strings? I’m not suggesting, of course, that anyone (in his right mind) actually believes that there are, say, gremlins in his refrigerator or computer. My point is just that there is a logic to the development and spread of technological gadgetry – a logic partly fuelled, of course, by the market – that seems to stride forward with an increasingly irresistible momentum. Most professionals, I daresay, are now hooked up to the internet in their homes and/or offices. Was this the result of a sovereign choice? Or of a more or less willing capitulation to the inevitable?
What does all of this have to do with the body? The
answer is that we (as a culture) filter our own bodiliness through the
technological mindset. The same technological mind-set that makes the
computer shapes our dealings with ourselves in our embodied condition It
is not just that the
technological mindset began with the world and
ended up with our bodies. The very act of refashioning (or attempting to
refashion) the world technologically also refashions (or attempts to
refashion) the conditions of our bodily existence. It is already a first
technological assault on our bodily existence. By de- or re-naturing the
world in which we have to live as bodies, we de- or re-nature or bodies
themselves. How we treat physical nature is by definition, and in the same
act, how we treat ourselves, and the modern attempt to become “masters and
possessors of nature” has always aimed at making us masters and possessors
of our own human,
bodily nature.
We thus come to the deepest reason for the vague
unease that the latest technological gadgets arouse in many of us:
technology is the project of erasing the distinction between artifice and
human nature. To put it provocatively, technology has always been
biotechnology, and biotechnology threatens the irreplaceable uniqueness
and inviolable sanctity of the body.
Not surprisingly, a culture that thinks it can
reshape the physical world technologically is also prone to think, sooner
or later (especially when the cultural influence of Christianity begins to
wane), that it can extract human consciousness from its given embodiment,
rearrange this embodiment, and then reinsert consciousness when the
rearrangement is satisfactorily completed.
A technological culture is committed, in
principle, to the view that our consciousness can be downloaded into any
old embodiment just as the consciousness of the characters in
The Matrix is downloaded
into computer-generated bodies. But as soon as I think of my own body in
this way, I am assaulting my own dignity as a human person, which is tied
up with my given embodiment. This assault is perhaps most deadly when it
comes to the sexual sphere, because sexuality is a (if not
the) basic, pervasive
inner shaping of our given bodiliness as an embodiment of our personhood.
(Which suggests, by the way, that phenomena like contraception and
abortion are not just regrettable sins that a hedonistic culture has
chosen to indulge in. They are flashpoints where the technological mindset
that shapes our whole culture becomes particularly evident.) As C.S. Lewis
points out in The Abolition of Man
and That Hideous Strength,
the attempt to master our own bodily natures becomes a form of slavery
that subjects us to the ruthless tyranny of an anonymous, superhuman
techno-logic mocking our efforts to control it.
One can only admire the genius and, no doubt, the
good will of the men who invented the computer, the television, and the
telephone. And there is no question that technology has improved our lives
in certain respects. My point has rather been that we have bought the good
things technology has put within our reach as part of what Grant calls a
“package deal”. Once again, technology is not just a “supermarket” of
neutral tools that we can pick and choose to suit ourselves, regardless of
our world-view. It is
our world-view, and, as Grant argues, it is this world-view that makes us
think of technology on the model of the supermarket, and not of the
package deal.
Technology has been arguably the most powerful
organizing myth of Western culture for close to five hundred years. Since
we are all caught up in this myth, none of us can point fingers, but all
of us ought to try to think as comprehensively and deeply about technology
as we can – especially since it has so many consequences for our
experience of our own bodiliness. We are coming more and more to think and
feel our own bodies through technology (although, happily, we can never do
so completely). Is it a price we are willing to pay?
One of the reasons for the plausibility and appeal of
the myth of technology has surely been the precariousness of the human
condition. Our bodies expose us to suffering, death, and all the shocks
mortal flesh is heir to, and this exposure is uncomfortable and often
deeply perplexing. And so the temptation to take things into our own
hands, to attempt the impossible task of engineering our way out of the
human condition, is always near at hand. Pope John Paul II’s theology of
the body trains the light of the Gospel on this temptation. On the one
hand, the Pope re-orients us towards the hoped-for Resurrection of the
Body, in which we will rise with Christ immortal. There is thus some truth
in the technological myth, which may be thought of, perhaps, as an
“immanentized” hope for the Resurrection – albeit in
this world. On the other
hand, the hope for the Resurrection reveals that the vulnerability and
exposure of our bodily condition endure transformed into the transparency
of Trinitarian communion. We are free, the Resurrection suggests, not when
we belong to ourselves, having mastered our bodily natures,
but when we belong to the Father in our
bodies’ unashamed exposure to his love. Thus, just as Jesus rose with his
wounds, in the same body that suffered on Calvary, the Resurrection we
“look for” underlines the dignity of the mortal body even in its weakness.[1]
This is the “good news” that John Paul II’s theology of the body has to
tell a technological world whose desire to escape the
misere of the human
condition has led to a forgetfulness of the true
grandeur that shines
forth in it.
Adrian Walker
is an editor of Communio.
This piece appeared in Second Spring
issue 7. [1] We are not disembodied consciousnesses standing over against our bodily selves. We are consciousness embodied, embodied, moreover, in this given body that we not only have, but also are. We are the irreplaceable persons we are partly because we come into the world embodied, as male or female, without having had a chance to choose whether we wanted to be so or not. The clock of our one-of-a-kind personal history, which we and we alone live as our unique selves, is already ticking, and has been ticking since were conceived in and as this body. All of this means that the “thrownness” of our bodily condition (to borrow a term from Heidegger), our lack of control over our own origin, is something that gives us dignity, not that takes our dignity away. That we can’t control our origin is what allows the Origin to display his paternal goodness in us and our bodies. |