Technology and Responsibility (Part 1 of 4)
Romano Guardini on the challenges and opportunities of our strange age
The wilderness in its original form has been conquered: untamed nature is reduced to obedience. But it returns once more within human culture, arising from the very factor that had defeated it: technological power itself.1
— Romano Guardini, 1950
The Second World War, culminating in the inaugural deployment of atomic weapons, shattered the last remnants of naïve faith in the promise of technological progress. Humanity had lost control over the process, which now threatened the very survival of life on earth, while drifting ever further from the service of genuine human needs. All the darkness and danger that once lurked in the wilderness beyond the city walls had reappeared in the very heart of civilization.
In his 1950 essay Das Ende der Neuzeit (The End of the Modern World), the German philosopher-theologian Romano Guardini reflects on the causes and consequences of this new attitude. The apparently apocalyptic title of the work is really meant as a neutral, descriptive statement: for good or ill, the ebullient age of Enlightenment, Liberalism and Progress has ended. This new fear of the dangers of progress is radically incompatible with the spirit of the 16th-19th centuries, signaling that a turning point has been crossed, and a new historical epoch is at hand.
Although the existential terror of Guardini’s time has relaxed substantially, our technology continues to show itself remarkably resistant to moral control. Social media companies, to take one contemporary example, find themselves with a business model of maximizing users’ screen time in order to increase advertising revenue. This objective was not the fruit of anyone’s personal decision. Many of the top executives seem to think that this effort actually harms the users, given their reluctance to allow their own children to use these products. Rather, this organizing principle spontaneously appeared in the course of the initial growth of the pioneer companies, as the most natural way of monetizing their inventions.
Although it is certainly true in a broad sense that our technology is just another form of tool-making — a basic characteristic of the human species — the persistent phenomenon of “uncontrollability” suggests that this new form has some special features that render it particularly impervious to ethical guidance. This is where Guardini’s analysis is especially enlightening, as he searches out the long-term structural causes of this situation. By tracing the problem back to intrinsic, morally neutral characteristics of technology itself, he avoids the “false pessimism” of despair — which he contrasts with a different, “correct” pessimism “without which nothing great is accomplished.” This objective assessment of the difficulties lifts them from the realm of mere moral condemnation, and converts them into opportunities for unleashing new energies of goodness and heroism, “preparing the strong heart and the creative spirit for long-term effort.”2
Guardini’s text contains a bewildering quantity of compact and insightful observations about these deep causes, but there are two central dimensions that seem to underlie all the rest. The first is epistemological, resulting from the new way of knowing and manipulating the world that undergirds the vast expansion of power over nature and human society. The second is political, and concerns the new forms of large-scale social organization required by the sheer magnitude of contemporary technological projects. These two changes in the way humans relate to the world and to each other have a profound effect on the nature of moral responsibility (Verantwortung). The remote abstractness of the new way of relating to nature combines with the anonymity of mass organization to undermine the “automatic” sense of responsibility that humans naturally feel in ordinary face-to-face interactions. The basic structure of technology thus raises the bar on moral maturity. “Being good” is no longer enough. Without a deliberately cultivated sense of justice and of reverence for the human person founded on sufficiently deep spiritual roots, one inevitably ends up excluding moral criteria altogether from one’s professional life.
These three themes — the epistemology and politics of technology and their effect on moral responsibility — provide a powerful framework for organizing a vast body of literature on the perils and promise of technology. In the next three essays, I will present each one of these themes in more detail, providing a fuller account of Guardini’s own argument, and elaborating it with related observations from other authors. In case you want to read along, here are the main texts I’ll be looking at:
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams.
Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, Caritas in Veritate
Pope Francis. Laudato Si’, Fratelli Tutti.
Grant, George. In Defense of North America.
Guardini, Romano. The End of the Modern World.
Havel, Václav. The Power of the Powerless.
MacDonald, George. “The Voice of Job.”
Maritain, Jacques. The Degrees of Knowledge.
McGilchrist, Iain. The Master and his Emissary.
Noble, David. America by Design.
del Noce, Augusto. The Crisis of Modernity.
Voegelin, Eric. Science, Politics and Gnosticism.
“Die Wildnis in ihrer ersten Form ist bezwungen: di unmittelbare Natur gehorcht. Sie kehrt aber innerhalb der Kultur selbst wieder, und ihr Element ist eben das, was die erste Wildnis bezwungen hat: die Macht selbst.” Das Ende der Neuzeit, ed. 1, p. 104.
ibid., p. 106.