Exorcising the Technical Spirit
The postmodern techno-optimism of Pope Pius XII
The end of World War II saw the world divided into two quasi-omnipotent empires, each claiming the mantle of science, progress and reason. The competition between these empires motivated an extraordinary acceleration in the global integration and rationalization of industrial production. But the war itself, culminating in the devastation of the atomic bomb, had already begun to cast doubt on the unequivocally positive value of this technological progress. By the mid-1950’s the impersonal rigidity of the System was generating a quiet but growing surge of discontent within the more advanced national economies. The literary, philosophical and artistic articulations of this discontent began to publicly identify as “post-modern,” and to gain the upper hand over the established promoters of Enlightenment.
In his Christmas radio message of 1953, Pope Pius XII issued his own diagnosis of the situation. While agreeing with the post-modernists about the fatal pathologies of the modern System of technological production, he overcomes the temptations to despair and to intellectual anarchism easily provoked by the magnitude of the looming crisis. For the Pope, the System is simply another example of man’s constant tendency to rebel against his Creator, and to worship the works of his own hands instead:
Today it is seen with increasing clarity that [the] undue exaltation [of technological progress] has blinded the eyes of modern men, has made their ears deaf, so that there comes to pass in them what the Book of Wisdom scourged in the idolaters of its time: they are incapable of understanding from the visible world the One who is, of discovering the worker from his work.
This is not a matter of historical necessity, and it does not call into question all human institutions and all technological innovation, as some post-modernists would have it. Nor is it entirely negative, because pure evil does not exist. There are many positive elements that God wishes to draw out of the seeming disaster, elements that perhaps would not have arisen in any other way:
It is undeniable that technical progress comes from God and therefore can and must lead to God. In fact, it often happens that the believer, in admiring the achievements of technology […] feels himself drawn to adore the Giver of those goods which he admires and uses, knowing full well that the eternal Son of God is the “first-born of all creatures, for in him were made all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible” [Col. 1:15-16]. Far from feeling moved to disavow the marvels of technology and its legitimate use, the believer finds himself perhaps more ready to bend the knee before the heavenly Child of the crib […] more willing to include the very works of technology in a chorus with the angels in the hymn of Bethlehem: “Glory to God in the highest” [Lk. 2:14].
The Pope interprets this positive dimension of technology in terms of the command given by God to Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis, which constitutes the specific mission of man in the material cosmos:
[The believer] will even find it natural to place alongside the gold, frankincense and myrrh offered by the Magi to the infant God, the modern achievements of technology: machines and numbers, laboratories and discoveries, power and resources. Indeed, this offering is like presenting to him the work already commanded by Himself, and now happily performed, even if unfinished. “Fill the earth and subdue it,” [Gen. 1:28] God said to man when he gave him creation as a provisional heritage. What a long and arduous journey from that time to the present, in which men can in some measure claim to have fulfilled the divine command!
From this Biblical perspective, the power of man over nature is good in itself, since it is a gift from God. But man’s governance over nature can bear lasting fruit only if lived as a participation in God’s universal kingship, which belongs to Him alone as Creator. The problems start when man removes himself from this order, and claims his own autonomous dominion. This has been a constant temptation for human beings, described clearly in the Genesis account itself, but the conditions of technological society give it unprecedented strength:
[I]t seems undeniable that technology itself, which in our century has reached the height of splendor and efficiency, has in fact become a grave spiritual danger. It seems to communicate to modern man, prone before its altar, a sense of self-sufficiency — and the satisfaction of his aspirations for boundless knowledge and power. With its multiple uses, with the absolute confidence it inspires, with the inexhaustible possibilities it promises, modern technology unfolds around contemporary man such a vast vision that many confuse it with infinity itself. As a result, an impossible autonomy is attributed to it, which in turn is transformed in the thinking of some into an erroneous conception of life and the world, designated by the name of “the technical spirit.” But in what exactly does this consist? In this: that deriving maximum profit from the forces and elements of nature is seen as the highest human value; that technological production becomes the goal of life, in preference to all other human activities, and is considered to be the perfection of culture and of earthly happiness.
The Pope’s whole critique of technological society is centered on this concept of the “technical spirit.” This inversion of means and ends, whereby industrial optimization becomes an independent and supreme value, is the heart of the problem. The Pope recognizes that technological progress itself necessarily encourages this error, by offering the illusion of omnipotence over the cosmos. But the technical spirit was alive and well long before technological industry had produced meaningful results. (Brad Gregory argues that it became endemic in the Protestant world in the wake of the Wars of Religion, and by the mid-19th century Henry David Thoreau is able to describe it as the basic outlook of every New England farmer.) By focusing his critique on this spirit, Pope Pius XII makes a sharp distinction between the positive human activity of applying science to industry, and the pre-existing moral failing whereby such activity is divinized.
From the perspective of any non-materialist worldview, the negative consequences of the technical spirit follow straightforwardly from its definition. The “liberation” from transcendent values radically impoverishes the human spirit, generating unresolvable existential anguish:
First of all, there is a fundamental deception in this distorted vision of the world offered by the “technical spirit.” The panorama, at first sight boundless, that technology presents to the eyes of modern man, however extensive it may be, remains a partial projection of life onto reality, expressing only its relationship with matter. It is therefore a hallucinating panorama, which ends up locking man […] in a prison: vast, yes, but circumscribed, and therefore unbearable, in the long run, for his authentic spirit. […] Hence the hidden anguish of contemporary man, who has become blind because he has voluntarily surrounded himself with darkness.
The spiritual impoverishment extends to science itself, blinding the intellect and rendering it incapable of grasping even material realities in their true dimensions:
Their thinking follows other paths and other methods, under the unilateral influence of that “technical spirit” which does not recognize or appreciate as reality anything other than what can be expressed in numerical ratios and utilitarian calculations. They thus believe that they are breaking reality down into its elements, but their knowledge remains on the surface and moves only in one direction. It is evident that those who adopt the technical method as their only means of seeking the truth must give up penetrating, for example, the profound realities of organic life, and even more so those of spiritual life, the living realities of the individual and of human society, because these realms are irreducible to systems of quantitative relations.
The impressive expansion of molecular biology and biotechnology since the time of Pius XII might seem to cast doubt on the claim that the technical spirit is incompatible with “penetration of the profound realities of organic life.” But by studying living things primarily as objects of technical manipulation, modern biology has gradually rendered itself incapable of grasping the concept of life, resulting in an interminable multiplication of inadequate definitions.
The disappearance of life from the intellectual horizon gives rise to social structures radically opposed to the natural dynamism and exuberance of the living world:
However, we cannot fail to draw attention to the new form of materialism which the “technical spirit” introduces into life. Suffice it to say that it empties life of its content, since technology is ordered to man and to the complex of spiritual and material values that pertain to his nature and personal dignity. When technology dominates autonomously, human society is transformed into a colorless crowd, into something impersonal and schematic; contrary, therefore, to the manifest desire of nature and of its Creator.
The suffocation of life and corresponding depersonalization of society has an especially grave impact on the family. For Americans who look back to the 1950’s as the golden age of family stability, it is surprising to see the Pope so concerned about threats to the family in 1953. The threats from widespread divorce, infidelity, abortion and contraception have not yet taken form, but Pius sees a prior danger flowing directly from the technical spirit:
And we think with particular anxiety of the danger that threatens the family, which in social life is the firmest principle of order, inasmuch as it inspires innumerable daily personal services among its members, binds them with bonds of affection to hearth and home, and awakens in each of them a love of the family tradition in the production and preservation of everyday goods. But where the technical concept of life penetrates, the family loses the personal bond of its unity, loses its warmth and its stability. It remains united only to the extent that will be imposed by the demands of mass production, towards which it is moving ever more insistently. The family is no longer the work of love and the refuge of souls, but a desolate repository, depending on the circumstances, either of labor for production, or of consumers for the material goods produced.
From this perspective, the “culture war” issues that dominate the political thought of conservative Christians are simply logical consequences of this prior transformation of the nature of the family. Once the family has become a “desolate repository” of workers or consumers, the moral norms surrounding marriage and family life lose their existential basis. These norms are still objectively valid, but they are no longer immediately perceptible to the ordinary person.
As we will see in a future essay, this observation is key to understanding the teaching of Pope Francis. Conservative Catholics frequently complain about his apparent lack of interest in the culture war. But the real reason for this is his clear awareness that any viable strategy — in this area as well as in the realms of ecology, culture and economics highlighted by various strands of postmodernism — has to start by exorcising the technical spirit.
An essential ingredient for successful exorcism is the infusion of a new spirit to replace the expelled intruder. The seventy years since Pius’ day have seen countless social movements and philosophical schools energetically drive out the technical spirit, only to see it come back in the company of seven demons worse than itself (Mt. 12:43-45). As soon as they gain a meaningful following, these initiatives are inevitably co-opted as psychological tools for promoting consumption or increasing productive efficiency.
To see how to free technological progress from its increasingly demonic pathologies, one must return to the Beginning. The book of Genesis recognizes human dominion over nature as a participation in God’s universal kingship, and the fundamental defect of the “technical spirit” lies in its false assertion of totally autonomous rule. Overcoming the technical spirit ultimately means returning to the original order, in which man lives and experiences his dominion as an image and participation in the work of God:
Just as in creation “in the beginning was the Word,” and not things, not their laws, not their power and abundance, so too, in the execution of the mysterious undertaking entrusted to humanity by the Creator, the same Word, his truth, his charity and his grace must be placed at the beginning; and only afterwards science and technology. We have wished to expound this order to you, and we exhort you to safeguard it valiantly.