Technology and Wonder

Many critiques of technology are technological critiques of technology. That is, they weigh technology by technological standards and find it wanting. So argues Antonio Lopez in an essay in Retrieving Origins and the Claim of Multiculturalism. Lopez spies a technological mindset behind the question: “what do we do with or in this technological world of ours?” (58; emphasis original). The question assumes that this technological world is another set of phenomena with which we are to “do” something, another bit of raw material for us to master intellectually and practically. Moral questions about technology are necessary, he argues, but before we judge some tool or instrument to be good or bad, we have to figure out what technology is.

Lopez proposes not a technological critique but an ontological and epistemological one. George Grant provide a starting point: Technology is, Grant said, “the basic way Western men experience their own existence in the world. Out of it come large organizations, bureaucracy, machines, and the belief that all problems can be solved scientifically, in some immediate quantifiable way. The technological society is one in which men are bent on dominating and controlling human and non-human nature” (quoted, 59). Following Grant’s lead, Lopez sees a “novel and peculiar relation between thinking and making” at the foundation of modern technology (59). Pre-moderns made things and used tools, but they did it differently. In what Lopez calls “the ancient-medieval worldview,” “singular beings are true because they participate in the divine logos.” Like other beings, humans were created to participate in that logos, and our work expresses this participation in God’s own creative logos. Human beings work “not to subjugate” the world but “to put it in relation with its Creator so that all created beings may attain the divine goal” of worshiping the Creator and being transparent to His glory. Thus, “techne is at the service of art and contemplation; thinking informs making” (65).

Relying on Joseph Ratzinger, Lopez argues that modernity disrupted this worldview by depriving truth of “its ontological dimension” and making is “a product of human making.” He cites Vico’s axiom, verum quia factum, translating it as “truth is what we have made ourselves” (65). Science is knowledge of causes, Vico argued, and we can only grasp the causes of things we have made. This is linked to a reduction of Aristotelian fourfold causality to efficient causality, and the result is a separation of logos from being. Time is likewise detached from eternity, leaving the door open for historical relativism and for the Marxian drive to change instead of contemplate the world. In the earlier worldview, singular beings were treated as wholes; now they are treated as “heaps” of fragments that can be disassembled and reassembled at will. In a reversal of the ancient-medieval model, “art has become subservient to techne; making informs knowing” (65-66).

Lopez lays a large part of the blame for this shift on Protestantism, specifically on Calvin, who taught, in Lopez’s view, that God was “radically other and omnipotent will” (73). Protestantism wanted to dismantle ancient metaphysics for theological reasons; early modern scientists wanted to overcome hylomorphism because it stood in the way of scientific and technological progress. In fact the very drive to reform – to reform religion or to improve conditions through technology – expresses a technological mindset that severs “the intrinsic relation between God and the world” (73). Channeling Weber, he argues that for Calvin “God’s salvific will can only be perceived in action, not in contemplation. Successful, ever-fruitful action is the only place where the human being can perceive whether he is pleasing to God or not” (73). (For a response to similar distortions of Calvin, see Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift.)

Lopez argues that our main stance toward the world shouldn’t be control, domination, or mastery but wonder. Each “singular being has the form of, and, in fact, is a gift” (76). As gift, each being points “to a giver intending a recipient,” and this means that “knowing takes place inside a prior being known” (76). Recognizing the gift character of every being means recognizing that being as other, and this produces a willingness to let it be, to delight in other beings for their own sake. Wonder “allows us to see that true knowledge also takes the form of fruition, that is, of selfless enjoyment of the rightness of being for its own sake” (77). Lopez sees this as a fundamentally theological attitude toward reality: “To let be is to acknowledge the singular’s otherness and its relation with the source that continuously makes the singular be. There is no fruition or wonder if the third, that is, the source that unifies the singular and the beholder while preserving each one’s irreducible wholeness, is not also acknowledged” (79). Technology is human making in a world without God.

Wonder and letting-be might seem to undermine the biblical emphasis on human dominion over the creation, but Lopez affirms the goodness and necessity of human work. He offers a version of the ancient-medieval worldview. Wonder enables us to see that “human work is a participation in a far deeper working.” A worker “participates in the fulfillment of the design that he is not able to master.” We inevitably change the world by our work, but “the change that human work is called to effect in the world is a participation in a deeper change that was neither begun nor will be completed by man alone” (83). Technology is right to see that our engagement with the world collaborates “in the revelation of what the world is.” What is false in technology is its “obliviousness to the truth that human making reveals a light that is not man’s own but the divine mystery’s, and that what man ‘produces’ reflects his finite glory only inasmuch as it reflects the mystery’s glory.” Detached from wonder, “technological making, under the guise of novelty, increases boredom and homelessness” (83).

Lopez’s dense essay offers a powerful critique of technological ontology and epistemology, but at some critical points it’s not altogether persuasive. First, modern science and technology aren’t as devoid of wonder as Lopez suggests. Galileo’s telescope and Leeuwenhoek’s microscope opened vast new worlds for human contemplation and exploration. Is anyone so numbed as not to be stunned by Hubble photographs of deep space or the unraveling of the genome? Awe at the “technological sublime” may be little more than awe at an enlarged reflection of ourselves, but wonder at human prowess is still a form of wonder. This may amount to a friendly amendment to Lopez’s argument, since it implies that what’s missing from technology’s epistemology isn’t wonder per se but a theological expression of wonder.

But the sense of wonder in modern technology, second, is partly driven by recognition of the usefulness of “singular beings.” That is precisely the mindset that Lopez attacks, but it’s not clear why perception of utility should be at odds with wonder. I am awestruck at the trees outside my office window, but my wonder only increases as I learn more about the intricate workings of the roots, trunk, branches, and leaves and their intricate cooperation. My wonder increases as I break down the whole into a “heap” of parts and begin to see how the whole is complicated by its parts. Every whole we encounter is a complex whole, and its glory is displayed in the unity-in-complexity. In short, there is a third choice between “whole” and “heap”; and that is harmony.

To make a similar point from another direction: Can I even know the qualities of a singular without some practical engagement with the thing? I might contemplate an apple tree, but doesn’t its beauty arise in part from the fact that it produces fruit for me to consume? Isn’t one of the wonders of a tree the fact that it’s made of wood, and that this wood can be used to construct human habitations? But how can I even know that a tree possesses these wondrous qualities unless I pick the fruit, unless I cut it into usable planks? Isn’t the tree’s capacity to be put into service to my neighbor part of its glory?

Perhaps Lopez means to cover this sort of use when he describes work as a collaboration in revealing “what the world is.” We fulfill the purpose and design of the tree when we turn it into a house or a meal. But Lopez appears to view our practical engagement with the world as a second moment, following on contemplative wonder. I am proposing that wonder and work are coinherent: Our wonder deepens as we make practical use of creation, and our use is guided by grateful wonder. And this, finally, points back to the ontological issues that Lopez raises. Lopez’s characterization of modern treatments of making-thinking is, at the very least, questionable. As Milbank has argued, Vico’s idea that verum and factum are convertible, the elevation of factum to a place among the transcendentals, is rooted in late medieval Trinitarian theology, developing the patristic insight that God Himself is eternally productive and fruitful, eternally producing an image that is His ars. The Son is not made but begotten; yet there is a transitive movement within the divine life, the Father begetting an other. Within the Triune life, there is not only praxis but also poiesis, not only actions that remain with the actor but actions that produce an other to the actor. The departure from ancient-medieval hylomorphic metaphysics doesn’t necessarily detach logos from created being, nor time from eternity. A poetic Trinitarian ontology instead supports something very like Lopez’s notion that our work participates in change that we neither initiate nor complete. Perhaps it provides sounder support that Lopez’s own ontology.