The Prophets
of
Technocracy
Dr. Ben Reinhard
I dreamt that all the planning of peremptory humanity
Had crushed Nature finally beneath the foot of Man;
Birth-control and merriment, Earth completely sterilized,
Bungalow and fun-fair, had fulfilled our Plan;
But the lion and the unicorn were sighing at the funeral,
Crying at the funeral
Sobbing at the funeral of the god Pan.
—C. S. Lewis, “Pan’s Purge”
Technology, it is clear, has left mankind behind. For the moment, the forces we have created are profitably restrained — to the ease and comfort of the multitude, and to the staggering enrichment and empowerment of the elite who control them. Yet even our rulers are only riding the tiger, and it is only a matter of time before their grip slackens, and the machines man made to be his servant become, finally, his master. But whoever happens to rule at the moment, it is clear that the tyranny of the machine is unlike anything else hitherto encountered by the human family. Where the old tyrannies claimed merely the bodies of their subjects, the Machine claims all: body and soul, mind and strength, and all the inner recesses of the human heart. The old world has faded; the new one, being born, promises to be an inhuman, harrowing age.
And, most terrifying of all, it is all happening so fast.
Reflections of this sort are likely not new to readers of Hearth & Field. They can be found on the pages of any of a dozen respectable publications; they echo the concerns of contemporary writers as diverse as Paul Kingsnorth, Bill Watterson, Rod Dreher, and Pope Francis. But though readers will recognize that such warnings are not exactly new, I wonder how many recognize precisely how old they are. For all that it reads like a pastiche of contemporary criticisms of the technocratic paradigm, the opening paragraph is in fact comprised entirely of lightly paraphrased quotations from Christian humanists from the early-to-mid twentieth century: Romano Guardini, Christopher Dawson, C. S. Lewis, Conrad Pepler, and J. R. R. Tolkien.
These writers foresaw, with a startling clarity, the emergence of the technocratic order in which we live; attending to their warnings, we can get a better understanding of our current predicament — and, just possibly, a sense of how we might respond to it. Such will be the purpose of this essay.
The Technocracy Foretold
When we turn to these writers, we find them remarkably united in a litany of concerns that clearly — at times, eerily — anticipate the anxieties of the present day. Already in the 1920s, the priest-philosopher Romano Guardini worried that we had passed the technological inflection point — what some today might call the singularity — and that return to older modes of life was impossible. His Letters from Lake Como present the matter starkly. “The old world” — the one made by and for humans in harmony with the natural order — is perishing and cannot be saved; for Guardini, the point of no return came somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century. The Welsh historian Christopher Dawson placed the turning point at roughly the same point. Writing in 1942, he observed that the past century had completely and irreversibly transformed human culture — as though “the stream of time had been transformed from a slow flowing river to a roaring cataract.” A decade or so later, C. S. Lewis also suggested that the nineteenth century had witnessed a cataclysmic rupture in the history of culture: the resultant chasm left his audience on the one side, and nearly everyone else in human history, from the pharaohs to Walter Scott, on the other. He submitted, with melancholy resignation, that he was one of the last living remnants of the Old Culture.
Standing as they did between the two worlds, the old humanists were able to clearly diagnose the defining features of the nascent Machine Age — and the dangers attendant upon them. Even when used benevolently, the new powers that humanity has won have not come without a cost. Guardini observed the disenchanting effects of labor-saving technology: “each new machine means that something we previously mastered with the help of our organic intellectual equipment is now left to a technical construct. We thus make an object of something that used to be subjective, part of life’s initiative.” He gives the example of the sailing ship and the ocean liner: the latter is safer and more reliable, but something has been lost along the way. Similarly, Fr. Conrad Pepler notes “the industrial organization of society fixed man in a state of separation from the creation around him.” The same note is struck, again, in Dawson, Tolkien, and (as seen in this essay’s opening epigraph) Lewis: we may have gained efficiency and pleasure, but Pan — the all that is wonderful, mysterious, and tremendous in nature — has been slain.
The loss of natural awe is, however, merely an unintended side-effect of the progress of technological powers. The actual exercise of the new powers results in something far more insidious: the creation of an omnipotent, omnipresent techno-tyranny. Lewis provides the classic formulation of the idea: “what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”
The actual exercise of the new powers results in something far more insidious: the creation of an omnipotent, omnipresent techno-tyranny.
This new power gives the rulers of the present age powers that the god-tyrants of classical antiquity could only dream of. Dawson warned that “the engineers of the mechanism of world power” sought to extend their reach into the inner sanctum of the human soul and across the globe; he envisioned a coming age “when the cities become one city — a Babylon which sets its mark on the mind of every man and woman and imposes the same pattern of behaviour on every human activity.” Tolkien put the same thought more pithily in a letter to his son Christopher: “The special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to.”
But even this is only the beginning of sorrows. Dawson observed that human nature is ill suited to the godlike powers granted by technology, and he looked with horror on the “marvellous mechanical monster that threatens to devour the culture that created it”; Lewis argued that the final victory of the Conditioners — his term for the reigning technocrats — could only be the subjection of the human race, finally and forever, to the irrational powers of Nature: “the abolition of Man.” But it was Tolkien who offered what may be the bleakest assessment of affairs. In early 1945, he offered his son Christopher his thoughts on the end of World War II:
The first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter — leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What’s their next move?
For Tolkien, it would be the Machines — not the Americans, not the Soviets, nor any other human rival — who would rule the coming age. As we contemplate the march of the Machine in the fifty years since Tolkien’s death, its intrusion into every sphere of human activity, it is hard to disagree with his assessment.
The prospect of the reign of the Machines, however, led our writers — and leads us — to an inevitable theological conclusion. Machines — even of the apparently thinking variety — lack real intellect and will, and cannot truly govern on their own. But if the human race can no longer govern its creations and Machines by their nature cannot rule, then who is in control? The old prophets of technocracy provided a chilling answer. Guardini believed that the forces of technology had already broken free from human control and “fallen victim to the demonism of number, machine, and the will for domination.” Lewis, Tolkien, and Dawson all recognized a fundamental sympathy between the technocratic scientist and the diabolist magician: the only difference was the means by which they sought power; their guiding principles are exactly the same. Because of this, it is unsurprising that the scientist and the sorcerer produce similar results: Dawson observed that the technological age had created “new black arts” and unleashed “the powers of the abyss — the dark forces that have been chained by a thousand years of Christian civilization and which have now been set free to conquer the world.” Lewis’s fictional magicians — in The Magician’s Nephew, Perelandra, and especially That Hideous Strength — make the connection explicit; the latter work ends with its technocrats offering blood sacrifices to devils. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is of course many things — but one of the things it is, as I’ve suggested elsewhere, is a mythopoetic Catholic response to the horror of the diabolic technocratic paradigm.
Applications
The technological anxieties of the twenty-first century, then, were anticipated point-for-point nearly a century ago. What are we as contemporary Christians to do with this knowledge? Two possible responses suggest themselves.
The first — and, as far as I can tell, prevailing — response is characterized by a hazy and optimistic complacency. On this view, earlier writers’ anticipation of contemporary discourse is sufficient to disprove either. Repetition of a prophecy is tantamount to falsification. Cassandra never tells the truth, and Peter has cried wolf before: the world did not end in 1950, and it is not about to end now. Admittedly, we have some work to do: the Complacent is perhaps embarrassed by the civilization apostasy of the last seventy years, but is willing to attribute it more or less to bad luck, or at worst to a lack of nerve. But we can work harder: win the next election, advance more Christians in art and academia, evangelize more effectively. And all this work can take place within the prevailing technocracy. The television that once spewed smut can air faith-based films instead; the smartphone can be used for prayer apps just as easily as for pornography. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle, after all. The Complacent tends to take a high view of the power of human innovation and places an almost fideistic trust in the power of grace to redeem any social order. Whether redemption may require transformation, renunciation, or even destruction is rarely considered. And anyway, how are we supposed to find our way around without the benefit of GPS?
A second response is possible, more pessimistic, more urgent, and more radical. The Radical views the present day not as a mere repetition, but as a fulfillment of the earlier warnings: we have reached the fatal age that the earlier writers so clearly described. The Radical is blessed by a clarity of principle and plagued by inconsistency of action: no critic of the technocratic paradigm, however committed and sincere, can avoid some participation in it. But the radical interpretation of events has the benefit of being right — and of a considerably stronger explanatory power in the face of the last century’s more distressing trends. On this view, far from being inexplicable, the twentieth century’s mass apostasy was practically inevitable. As Guardini had it, “the ongoing intensification of science and technology . . . seems to be a hindrance to our ability to have immediate religious experience or to our receptivity to religious motivation.” Pepler was more direct: modern industrial man will struggle to accept the Faith, as “the tenor of his life and the build-up of his imagination construct a barrier that is almost impervious to the teaching of Christ.” Pepler clearly saw that the twentieth century’s adoption of a mechanized, artificial, and unnatural anti-culture would ultimately render Christianity — humane, organic, natural — incredible to the masses.
Where do we go from here? The prophets of technocracy do gesture, by both precept and example, to some solutions. Pepler envisioned bands of families strategically retreating from the industrialized world into a quasi-monastic life: a kind of more literal, and more missionary, Benedict option. Tolkien himself — as father and teacher, gardener and worshipper — offers in many ways an exemplary model of the natural life; not coincidentally, the mythopoetic project for which he sacrificed so much of his life and career has at its heart the re-enchantment of Creation. But in the main, to ask the question “what shall we do now?” is to discover the limitations of our prophets: those who lived at the beginning of the technocratic paradigm, naturally, had some difficulty imagining what life would be like — and how to respond — to the full-blown technocracy of the 21st century. Indeed, some of the twentieth-century critics fell into what — in retrospect — can only be seen as a naïve optimism, envisioning some form of rapprochement between Man and Machine. Thus Lewis held out hopes for a “regenerate science” — one wary of deadening abstractions and capable of studying Nature without desacralizing it. Guardini was even more sanguine. He believed that it would be possible for Christians to penetrate the new technological order and, in so doing, transform it and create a new world — one characterized by “stronger, more considered, more human technology.”
The mercies of the Lord endure forever, and so the possibility of a regenerate technology cannot be excluded outright. In the short term, however, it is difficult to imagine how this might come about. We are now as far removed in time from Guardini’s world as he was from the old organic world whose decline he documented; the rate of change has only accelerated. In light of this, some of his concerns — and still more, his hopes — seem outdated and quaint. Thus, as already noted, Guardini was worried about the effects of labor-saving machinery and the loss of the “organic intellectual” component in this or that activity: travel or craftsmanship or agriculture. But now, with the rise of artificial intelligence, virtual realities, transhumanism, and the rest, the terms of the game have changed: the labor being saved is the very business of being human.
But now, with the rise of artificial intelligence, virtual realities, transhumanism, and the rest, the terms of the game have changed: the labor being saved is the very business of being human.
In the face of this, another, more direct response suggests itself — a third way, more realistic than that of the Complacent, but more hopeful than that of the pessimistic Radical. This is the way of Renunciation.
Our approach to the technocracy must be patterned on the life of Christ, characterized by abnegation, conversion, and (as Casey Chalk has recently argued) a spirit of poverty. In the concrete, this means turning toward the real and the arduous whenever possible. Readers of Hearth & Field are doubtless familiar with the standard salutary suggestions — backyard chickens and family mealtimes and deeper participation in the liturgical life of the Church. These lists are familiar for a reason. Any step that restores contact with reality is wholesome; indeed, given the spiritual nature of the conflict we are in, deeper participation in the grace-mediating prayer of the Church is positively essential. But the restoration of sanity will not come by simply superadding healthy activities to an otherwise fully mechanized lifestyle: it will mean turning away from that lifestyle — and renouncing some of the goods that have come along with it.
This will inevitably mean struggle, pain, and sacrifice. I cannot speak to what such renunciation will look like in other spheres of life, but I can offer a suggestion from my own experience. Like every teacher of the humanities, I have struggled over the past year to know what to do about the rise of artificial intelligence programs. The situation is dire. According to the old adage, good writing is clear thinking made visible; to put it another way, you don’t know what you know until you put it on paper. Because of this, the term paper has long been the touchstone for student academic achievement. Or at least it was: now, any student with access to the Internet can create something like a passable simulacrum of a paper in seconds; more clever ones could make the mechanized origins untraceable in a matter of minutes. Confronted with this, what are we to do? Ruling out the obscene technocratic solution favored by some educators, we are left with three options. First, we might proceed as though nothing has changed: mass-assign papers, check them for plagiarism — perhaps even catch a few — and grade the rest as quickly as we can. Second, we could eliminate papers altogether in favor of some non-mechanizable form of assessment. Or third, we might attempt to restore academic argument and paper-writing as a fully human activity, conducted in community and characterized by hand-written outlines, drafts, and in-person feedback.
Of the three, the first is by far the least disruptive option: it preserves the appearances (most of my students won’t cheat anyway) and allows us to pretend nothing has changed. The second would be easier still, even if it would raise some departmental eyebrows. The third will appear plainly undesirable: this kind of writing takes time, and the pursuit of truly humane education in the industrial-scaled modern university is almost certainly a fool’s errand. But, in the upcoming fall semester, I’m going to make it my aim in my courses.
I suspect that the difficulties encountered by educators can be replicated, with small modifications, in every profession and every state of life: rejecting, as far as we are able, the empty glamours of the technocratic age, asks more of us than we might suppose. It does not mean returning simply to the status quo ante of 2019, or 2010, or 1993, but a radical re-examination of what it means to be fully human. In pursuit of this, every moment, every action, every thought clawed back from the reign of the Machines is something to celebrate; every moment yielded to them should be an occasion of regret, if not outright repentance. Grant that technology may one day be transformed and redeemed: but the first step is to redeem our own time, for the days are evil. If the technological order is ever to be brought to sanity, we must be sane ourselves. No one gives what he does not have.
It is admittedly a tall order. Every impulse of our technopolized society, and every psychological snare developed by our nearly omnicompetent conditioners, militates against it; even basic participation in public life requires some concession to the reign of the Machines. But this is the way of reality, and of freedom. By anchoring our approach to our power-mad machine world in the self-emptying love of Christ, we proof ourselves at least against the age-old and newly potent temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. And we may perhaps hope thereby to win the grace of a yet greater deliverance. As Christopher Dawson wrote:
The powers of the world, formidable as they appear . . . are powerless against that Spirit who is the Lord and Giver of Life. And in the same way all their new and elaborate devices for the enslavement of the human mind are powerless against those higher powers of intelligence and science, and counsel and wisdom, which are the essential gifts of the Holy Spirit.
So it was in the darker days of World War II, and so it is today. This Whitsuntide affords us the opportunity to heed St. Francis’s counsel and begin again — as we await the Spirit’s coming to renew the face of the Earth.
