Technology is a problem because we cannot do without it, and our use of it clearly makes us both better and worse. Human beings are—among other things—technological or tool-making animals. We use our brains and our freedom to transform nature, and in doing so transform ourselves. We also have a perverse capacity to make ourselves unhappy and take a singular pride in our misery. We are both proud of and wish to free ourselves from the burdens of our technological success. So we find it almost impossible to judge how much and what kind of technology would be best for us. In principle, we should be free to accept or reject various technological developments. Technology, after all, is supposed to be a means for the pursuit of whatever ends we choose. But in truth it might be our destiny to be moved along by impersonal and unlimited technological progress.

From a purely natural view at least, we do not know why human beings alone among the species are technological animals. Only we human beings can freely negate nature to satisfy our desires; only we human beings can create new and harder to satisfy needs through our technological success. One of the best pieces of evidence of our fundamental difference from the chimps and the dolphins is that we can so easily control them if that is what we want to do, but they cannot give orders to us. We do not know why we have the capability and the desire to threaten the very existence of all life on our planet. It is almost impossible to call what we have achieved through technological success—from a natural point of view—progress.

Technological change really is progress from another view. It is the index of our increasing power to control or manipulate nature. The general rule is that societies that encourage or are open to such change overwhelm those that are not. That is why the modern West has exerted its control over the whole world, and why the Europeans almost eliminated the Native Americans in our country. But this control, of course, is quite ambiguous. Technology is characteristically the imposition of human will over nature; we comprehend nature insofar as we control it. But our control and our comprehension are always far from complete.

Another reason we are not free to relinquish control once we have achieved it is that we cannot dispose of technological knowledge once we have acquired it. Surely we regret, on balance, our invention of nuclear weapons. But it would be the height of imprudence for America to destroy its nuclear weapons or even to stop trying to produce better ones. The knowledge of how to build them is everywhere, and otherwise insignificant powers such as North Korea and even transnational terrorists groups are going to find it progressively easier to use that knowledge.

The example of nuclear weapons reminds us that the progress of technology is in many ways not simply good for human life. Technological development often causes massive human displacement, imposing on many an urban misery that can resemble a living death. Indeed, we can say that any rapid technological advance always causes human disorientation, and its initial effect is to cause at least almost as much misery as it alleviates. Such change seems to become on balance beneficial only after it has become routinized, only after it assumes a place in a relatively settled way of life. Technological change would become an increasingly unambiguous evil were it to become too rapid for we habit- and tradition-dependent beings to live with it well.

According to Martin Heidegger, technology is what defines all of modern life. In other words, we moderns assume that what is real is what can be comprehended by reason; the real is what can be calculated or predicted or manipulated. Anything that cannot be objectively known—known as an object—by reason is not real. For Heidegger, this technological way of thinking is above all nihilistic; everything noble and beautiful that gives human life its seriousness or dignity is regarded, literally, as nothing. The modern view, on the other hand, is that technological thinking frees us from the irrational illusion of indebtedness. Technology can be put at the service of what we now call “free choice” because we have no knowledge of any purposes or ends or limits that are simply given. Unconstrained human choice or willfulness depends on a debt-negating or nihilistic foundation.

A contemporary critic of technology, Wendell Berry, explains that our dogma or “conventional prejudice” today is the uncritical acceptance of the goodness of technological liberation. Our intellectuals and educators mean to prejudice us “against old people, history, parental authority, religious faith, sexual discipline, manual work, rural people and rural life, anything that is local or small or inexpensive.” We are prejudiced against all that is required to acquire moral virtue, to what we must have to subordinate technical means to human ends. We are prejudiced against “settled communities,” against anything that has not been uprooted by the impersonal universalism of technological thinking. But it is only in the routinized and moralized context of such communities that any technology might be viewed as good, as not merely displacing or disorienting human beings for no particular purpose.

Berry agrees with Heidegger that in a technological age those who are best at manipulating others as objects will rule without restraint. Technological democracy tends to bring into existence a new sort of tyrannical ruling class composed of clever and liberated or communally irresponsible meritocrats who employ technology to impose a humanly destructive uniformity on those they rule. These meritocrats—believing maybe more than any prior ruling class that they deserve to rule—are full of contempt for those they control. And they themselves don’t realize the extent to which they are controlled by technological thinking, by a way of thinking that has devalued all standards except wealth and power.

Heidegger and Berry, not without evidence, tend to view America as a sort of technological tyranny in which the unlimited pursuit of money and power that is the result of technological thinking has led the few to lay waste to the communal and moral world inhabited by the many. Technological progress tends to make true or communal democracy almost impossible, as even Tocqueville showed. Berry explains that we Americans characteristically “behave violently” toward the land and particular places because from the beginning we “belonged to no place.” We have regarded the land or nature as an alien or hostile force to be conquered, not as our home. For Berry, what we modern Americans regard as the natural human propensities for wandering and violence are not really so natural at all. Our anxious dissatisfaction can at least be checked by our natural tendency to be bound by habit and familiarity. As even Heidegger says, the existential view that the truth is that we human beings alone have no natural place in particular is not shared by people who have the experience of belonging “deeply and intricately” to some place.

That human beings have to be some place to live and that technology erodes all particular human attachments is true. Beings with bodies have to be somewhere, and all human experience of the universal truth comes through reflection that occurs in the context of particular communities. But it is unclear to what extent that place has to literally be a piece of land; American Indian communities, for example, were often really bands of wanderers. And to some extent or other so too is any Christian community, any community composed of human beings who believe that they are really pilgrims or wayfarers in this world. According to one of the very first modern thinkers, Blaise Pascal, the truth is that human beings exist nowhere in particular. They are miserably contingent and displaced accidents. The truth, in fact, makes us so miserable that we spend most of our lives diverting ourselves from it. The only real remedy for our natural misery, according to Pascal, is believing in a God hidden from natural view. From this perspective, the disorientation we experience in this high-tech world is actually closer to the truth about what we are by nature than is the experience of the Old World peasant.

For Berry, Pascal is simply wrong. Berry seems to believe that we can live well according to nature by becoming deeply rooted in a particular place; we are not wanderers by nature. There is much human experience that supports such a view. But Berry is not simply right; we are different from the birds because most of us self-conscious beings do not accept our deaths serenely. It seems natural for us to fight and to hope to overcome our natural, mortal limits. It seems even noble for us to do so. Our longing for a personal God, winning our liberty by dying courageously, and resisting via technology the nature that is out to kill us all seem to be natural or authentic responses. The truth, surely, is somewhere between Berry and Pascal.

Yet the advent of the new biotechnology—our capacity to give orders to our genes—presents a new challenge to both the defenders and the critics of technology. The biotechnological project attempts to reduce radically the places of contingency and vulnerability in our lives. The aim is to eliminate genetically based diseases and to extend our lives indefinitely through regenerative medicine. We will soon be able to consciously and willfully design better human beings, ones that are smarter, healthier, more productive, and happier.

Biotechnology threatens to overcome the natural limits to the technological regulation of all of human life. Conservatives realize that our technologists are blind to the fact that if biotechnological development is unlimited, personal control will necessarily give way to impersonal or statist control over the most intimate human experiences and choices. Some fear that parents will assume tyrannical or technological control over their children by being able to design them according to their whims. But in our technological republic today we do not let parents—Christian Scientists or snake-handlers, for instance—choose against the health and safety of their children. Soon enough, government will make available and require that everyone employ the latest biotechnological means to have children in a way that maximizes each child’s health and safety. That the state may come to control the means of reproduction and may force women to submit to therapeutic abortions are not far-fetched scenarios.

Leon Kass, chair of President Bush’s Council on Bioethics, worried that Americans are now so dominated by technological thinking that they are not much bothered by the effects of our embryonic stem-cell research on us. The debate on such research, he writes, has largely ignored the consequences for human dignity of “coming to look upon nascent human life as a natural resource to be mined, exploited, commodified.” Similarly, our main objection to human cloning is that it will be unsafe, not that it abolishes the distinction between procreating and manufacturing human beings. A world in which children are manufactured and sex and procreation are totally disconnected would surely be one without much love, one where one manufactured being would have little natural or real connection to other manufactured beings. Only through contemplating the extreme possibilities biotechnology opens for us can we see with neon clarity how the excessive attention given to the perpetuation of individual life characteristic of the modern technological project is destructive of the natural goods given to rational, social beings. The challenges posed by biotechnology—which are only extreme versions of the challenges posed by modern technology generally—may lead us to rediscover the relationships among birth, sex, marriage, the family, openness to the truth, God, and death that constitute human dignity.

Further Reading

Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry

Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human Race

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays

Peter Augustine Lawler, Aliens in America: The Strange Truth about Our Souls

Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology

This entry was originally published in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, p. 840.