Pope Benedict XVI and Technology

Another excerpt from Caritas in Veritate :

The challenge of development today is closely linked to technological progress , with its astounding applications in the field of biology. Technology — it is worth emphasizing — is a profoundly human reality, linked to the autonomy and freedom of man. In technology we express and confirm the hegemony of the spirit over matter. “The human spirit, ‘increasingly free of its bondage to creatures, can be more easily drawn to the worship and contemplation of the Creator’”. Technology enables us to exercise dominion over matter, to reduce risks, to save labour, to improve our conditions of life. It touches the heart of the vocation of human labour: in technology, seen as the product of his genius, man recognizes himself and forges his own humanity. Technology is the objective side of human action whose origin and raison d’etre is found in the subjective element: the worker himself. For this reason, technology is never merely technology. It reveals man and his aspirations towards development, it expresses the inner tension that impels him gradually to overcome material limitations. Technology, in this sense, is a response to God’s command to till and to keep the land (cf. Gen 2:15) that he has entrusted to humanity, and it must serve to reinforce the covenant between human beings and the environment, a covenant that should mirror God’s creative love.

 Technological development can give rise to the idea that technology is self-sufficient when too much attention is given to the “ how ” questions, and not enough to the many “ why ” questions underlying human activity. For this reason technology can appear ambivalent. Produced through human creativity as a tool of personal freedom, technology can be understood as a manifestation of absolute freedom, the freedom that seeks to prescind from the limits inherent in things. The process of globalization could replace ideologies with technology, allowing the latter to become an ideological power that threatens to confine us within an a priori that holds us back from encountering being and truth. Were that to happen, we would all know, evaluate and make decisions about our life situations from within a technocratic cultural perspective to which we would belong structurally, without ever being able to discover a meaning that is not of our own making. The “technical” worldview that follows from this vision is now so dominant that truth has come to be seen as coinciding with the possible. But when the sole criterion of truth is efficiency and utility, development is automatically denied. True development does not consist primarily in “doing”. The key to development is a mind capable of thinking in technological terms and grasping the fully human meaning of human activities, within the context of the holistic meaning of the individual’s being. Even when we work through satellites or through remote electronic impulses, our actions always remain human, an expression of our responsible freedom. Technology is highly attractive because it draws us out of our physical limitations and broadens our horizon. But human freedom is authentic only when it responds to the fascination of technology with decisions that are the fruit of moral responsibility . Hence the pressing need for formation in an ethically responsible use of technology. Moving beyond the fascination that technology exerts, we must reappropriate the true meaning of freedom, which is not an intoxication with total autonomy, but a response to the call of being, beginning with our own personal being.

Pope Benedict XVI not only doesn’t reject technology but understands it to be a genuine dimension of our uniquely human freedom and an instrument of our natural inclination, sometimes paradoxically expressed against nature, towards “being more”. In fact, despite the depersonalizing consequences that can follow from a reductionist techno-scientism, the fact of technological “aspiration” illuminates the extent to which human thought is irreducibly personal always being the expression of our not fully natural “personal being”. The problem of technology is similar to the Augustinian problem with philosophy—that our “fascination” and “intoxication” with it deludes us into accepting it as evidence of our “total autonomy” and an “absolute freedom” that “seeks to prescind from the limits inherent in things”. Our technological freedom, the Pope argues, must always be understood in conjunction with our moral responsibility, which is rooted in a recognition of that which limits us. Our gravitational pull towards “being more” should never be confused with the possibility of “being anything”— the pernicious pretense that our being is ultimately the result of ex nihilo self-construction has the consequence of reducing our existence to “being nothing”.