The Worship of Technology

" How can Evil be cast out? [One path] calls upon man to remove Evil through his own power and ingenuity, in the strange conviction that by thinking, inventing and governing, he will at last conquer the nagging forces of Evil. . . This idea, sweeping across the modern world like a plague, has ushered God out and escorted man in, and has substituted human ingenuity for divine guidance. . .Armed with this growing faith in the capability of reason and science, modern man turned his attention [away] from God and the human soul.  The laboratory became man's sanctuary, and scientists his priests and prophets. But in spite of these astounding new scientific developments, the old evils continue and the age of reason has been transformed into an age of terror." [  Martin Luther King, Jr., "Strength To Love", 1963].

So very many decades ago, this passage was written by a deep thinker and a compassionate man, who took into his soul an abiding concern for the future of our world. Martin Luther King, Jr. pondered, as early on as 1963, what it will mean to be human in an essentially technological age.

This angst over the role of technology is not a new concern.

In the early 1800's in England, at the rise of the Industrial Revolution, so-called Luddites were textile workers who smashed power looms and spinning frames, out of protest against their potential replacement as workers, by a machine age.

In 1949, an M.I.T. mathematician, Norbert Weiner, predicted the computer age. In a long-buried essay recently profiled in The New York Times, [May 21, 2013], Weiner wrote," These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the present basis of industry, and of reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price. If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory, with the [poor] valuation of human beings, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigating cruelty."

I am certainly no Luddite, advocating the destruction of all technology. But I do perceive a disturbing wholesale embrace of technology, without any self-reflection upon the issue of what kind of world we are creating.

This self-reflection necessarily impacts our youth the most. They are the ones who will be inheriting our world.

I went to a tag sale recently with my teen son. He saw an IBM Selectric typewriter, which was the epitome of technology in the 1970's and 1980's. He asked, "What is THAT?!"

I was listening to music on the radio recently, and he did not know where the music was coming from? I was not wearing ear buds, the TV was not on and he saw no iPod docking station. I told him it was the radio. He said, "What?!"

My son asked if there were cell phones during the Revolutionary War? He told me that I could not possibly have cooked dinner in the "old days" without a microwave.

We need to educate our kids about technology. Young people today are taught HOW to use technology. They are also taught that all technology is useful, that all technology advances us as a society and all technology has no down side.

They know nothing about the history of technology, and even less about the effects of technology on our humanity.

I see my son struggle with human interactions because everything he does is on a device, not face-to-face. Parents have to coach their teens to go up the fast food counter and ask for more ketchup. Young job seekers receive training in how to shake hands and look someone in the eye.

Students in a Science class at my son's school were instructed to build a structure with straws and flexible joints. All the buildings were built flat, though, because the students live in a flat-screen world!

Students in America want instant answers to their math problems, for example, because in the on-line world, there is no process. Answers come with a point-and-click immediacy. When American students have to use Process to figure out an answer, they become anxious, or enraged, or they think they are stupid.

Thanksgiving a couple of years ago consisted of my nieces and nephews taking photos of each other at table, using their smart phones, and e-mailing the photos around. They had not seen one another in a year and yet, they did not even talk to one another!

Even worse, in the future, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that America will need 70% more home health aides by 2020. [The New York Times, May 20, 2013.] It is expected that it will be robots fulfilling much of this demand since there will not be enough human workers.  Do we really want a robot to care for our parents in their dying days?

In this age of technology, drones do the killing during war and we believe that this is so clean, it is so antiseptic, maybe it is not even killing?

But the most heartbreaking trend I see is in Reproductive Technology. We can engineer a perfect pregnancy with technology, but the cost of this technology is our justification to throw away unused fetuses; and then we eumphemistically call the unborn, who are thereby sacrificed:  "unused byproduct", or "mere DNA", or "worthless cells."  Do we worship technology to such a degree, that we cannot even recognize our own humanity when we see it?

The M.I.T. Professor Norbert Weiner concluded in his 1949 essay, " The Machine Age,  "Finally, the machines will do what we ask them to do and not what we ought to ask them to do. There is general agreement of the past ages, that if we are granted power commensurate with our will, we are more likely to use it wrongfully than to use it rightly.  . .In short, it only a humanity which is capable of awe, which will also be capable of controlling the new potentials which we are opening for ourselves. We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of the machines, or we can be arrogant and die."

[Related Posting, "War Is Not A Game", March 22, 2013.]

(c) Spiritual Devotional 2013. All Rights Reserved.