timeimmortal

Count Roland invokes Neil Postman’s classic work in his response to this article.

Neil Postman, in various books but especially Technopoly, makes a similar argument about technology and how it and ‘scientism‘ have become our civil Religion. One of my favourite anecdotes is the student who could not declare a room to be hot before consulting the thermostat.

Socrates said it 2500 years ago that writing would impoverish humanity, as it would lead to a weakening of memory. Maybe it has, but likely not since writing can help us discover and adapt beyond one man’s lifetime work. But the kernel of truth is that every technology we develop changes us, and not necessarily for the better. Our trust in technology and in ‘they’ is as irrational as the faith we hold, if secularist claims about religious faith are to be beleived (they are not), and more irrational than the actual faith claims and their rational justifications especially in light of the ends to which they are going. GPS may save time on a temporal shipment; our faith has the telos of our immortal souls and the eternal situation in which they end.

What is increasingly troubling is that the gap between those who know (in a full sense) the technology and those who use it is widening. For example, thirty years ago most men could fix their own cars — they were simple nough to understand — or at least know if the mechanic was being less than honest, but today most drivers can not fix many problems because cars have become more technical. Yet, we seem to be putting more trust in said technologies. Trusting more what one understands less of, as a society, is irrational insofar as it makes us more vulnerable to personal and corporate catastrophe — a broken car on a lonely highway in winter, a terrorist attack using a Tandy 3000 on our power network. That is the opposite thrust to what Christians strive to do — trust more as we understand more. Now, we can never fully understand God and a childlike (NOT childISH) faith is important, but a child’s most important question is ‘why?’ and we seek to find the answer to that question about God and about creation. Blind faith in what ‘they’ tell us is right is not mainstream Christianity. Mainstream Christianity is fides quearum intellectum — faith seeking understanding — and while we,in sin, can follow the wrong path, a sincere journey will eventually take us towards the Truth. Modern society’s faith in ‘they’ — usually scientists or media-political elites — is indicative of cult (in the contemporary sense) behaviour.

Chesterton was so right, but then again, aren’t we Christians just ignorant fools? Everyone is, but sometimes God graces us with wisdom — I suspect Chesterton would have told the two mothers to cut the child in half, too.

Roland hints at a rather curious thing — the underlying paganism in atheism (or, more broadly, secularism).

Even a cursory look at history should inform the reader that, for as long as humanity has had any semblance of society (even down to the tribal level), humanity has had Religion. The act of worshipping is an intrinsic aspect of human nature, and the philosophers of atheism have it exactly wrong. The question is not, as some might suppose, whether we shall worship; the question is what we shall worship.

For example, Daniel Dennett would ultimately suggest that we worship the meaty organ located an inch or two behind our eyes, and its capacity for reason and rational thought. Other secular categories of worship include the environment (through movements such as radical global warming/climate change alarmism) and animals (through movements such as PETA and other rabid animal rights organizations), the sexual organs and the sexual act, money, power, technology (which we are discussing here), and Barrack Hussein Obama. Most adherents of these movements and philosophies might not regard their participation in them as being an act of worship, but fundamentally that is what it distills down to, personal opinions nonwithstanding.

In other words: formal, ardently disbelieving atheism is but a temporary interlude between (in the West at least) Christianity and whatever religion will supplant Christianity, or between old Christianity and a new, resurgent Christianity.

Humanity’s reliance on — and increasing credulousness in the face of — technology, however, seems poised to continue and to worsen. Roland is exactly right in noting the widening gap between the typical user’s understanding of the complexity of a particular piece of technology and the actual complexity of that technology. Think for just a moment, O Reader, about the last time someone — if not yourself, mind — pointed at a computer tower and called the whole assembly a “hard drive.” That’s a tiny (if somewhat irksome, in my opinion) example, but illustrative all the same.

We trust too much in technology, while at the same time knowing less and less about the ins and outs of pieces thereof. That’s not a good — nor very Christian — position for us to be in.

Count Roland is, I think, seeking to supplant Ed Darrell as my most frequent correspondent. He writes in yet again with some supplemental thoughts on this article, which hinted at how our society’s loss of innocence in recent decades more or less parallels the reduction in the number of children our society is producing.

This has ben noticed, at least by ‘fringe’ ‘conservative’ not crazy intellectuals for at least 25 years with Neil Postman’s “The Disappearance of Childhood” and his and Diana West’s analyses (hers in “The Death of the Grownup“) pin the decline as definitively started in the 50’s and prepared for since about the time of Vatican I (Not to mention various papal writings which indicated part of this due to their topics - Humanae Vitae and adolescent sexuality for example).

It is a return to the situation of the middle ages and earlier without the large hanging anvil of the necessity of several children to survive oneself and have at least a couple children survive to adulthood. Our one designer baby and our pet or doll surrogates fill the rest of the psychological space, or so some are deluded to believe, and that one child will survive sans accidents and we have the government to support us in old age, not children, so one is enough.

But I agree with both of them that the ‘adultification’ you speak of is of a severely adolescent nature since adult and child are contrast classes with adolescence only recently bridging the gap in our thoughts. But, if one of the contrast classes diminishes, so does the other. Without children there are no adults and vice versa. Thus all that remains is the adolescent group which attempts to marry the rights of adulthood with the responsibilities of childhood. A system stable that does not create.

Mark Steyn and many others have spoken about the concept of permanent adolescence being the prevailing trend in our post-Christian society, and I do think there’s more than just a ring of truth to the observation. Adolescence, as I recall it, was a struggle to exert one’s rights as a fledgling adult while still retaining all the child-like ways of acting and living that made life “fun.” And it is no stretch at all to say that many people these days have not grown up past that point.

A glance at the birth control-addled, sex-obsessed meta-adults that roam about Edmonton’s downtown area on any given evening (especially on weekends) tells the tale more than any number of essays could: ours is a world in which “fun” (read: gratification) is the ultimate object for many people, and for whom “responsibility” is nothing more than an extremely hard-to-spell (more than) four-letter word. We have become a society of people obsessed with the things we have a “right” to do, and yet we care not a whit for any consideration that intrudes on, or gets in the way of, our fun. We are, in other word, a society of people stuck in a permanent adolescence.

And it will likely be up to Christians to pick up the pieces once that unstable social framework devolves into pagan chaos.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!