It's a personal conviction that one of the ultimate aims of all technology, whatever its good uses, is devoted to ending the curse. This is not to say that technology is itself an evil thing, of course, but that sinful man will strive to have his cake and eat it, too. Sin has consequences, and there are generally two ways to avoid those consequences: avoid the sin, or use technology.
I think we see this in all sorts of ethical debates today. For example, some assert that educating teenagers about the proper use of contraceptives is a tacit approval of premarital sex; others counter that it's a practical concession to behavior that teenagers will engage in anyway. The consequences of sex in general, and not just premarital sex in particular, are babies, of course. While the subject of teen pregnancy is a difficult one, it seems analogous to me, at least in the respect that the consequences of sinful behavior can be mostly prevented by some technology.
I'm not sure this is always such a good thing. A friend and I were talking recently about what I would do if a scientific treatment arose that would stop aging: would I use it? I said no. Ultimately I think that aging and death are the consequences of sin, and a technology that would essentially prevent them is not a real solution to the problem: it's just a treatment for the symptom.
There's also no real reason that living can't be hell, too. In fact, I think that's one of the points of the phrase in Revelation that men will seek death and not be able to find it. Lewis once said that earth was as much hell as the heaven-bound would experience, and as much heaven as the hell-bound would experience. I think that perspective has merit. In any case, I am not seeking after any sort of eternal youth—at least not here.
Tolkien and Lewis are both big on this point, though I think Tolkien moreso. Technology winds up being just as evil as a hell-bent Ring except whereas the Ring gets destroyed and the Shadow fades, the effects of technology remain in the Shire for many many years and will only get worse as men increase.
ReplyDeleteThe men of Numenor and their dark arts come to mind in conjunction with Saruman's Devices.
Yeah. One of the things that interests me about this debate is that we really are getting to the point technologically where it could become possible. I'm not as optimistic as Kurzweil on the subject (both the import and the timing), but I think we'll find that technology will advance to a point that much of the curse really will be done with—at least superficially.
ReplyDeleteLewis gets to this in That Hideous Strength pretty explicitly, and even Shelley's Frankenstein betrays the same themes. And, as you said, Tolkien; the passing of the age does herald the coming of a technology-dominated time...and it's not a positive thing.
Ellul also wrote a lot about this, observing that technology is sold to us by how it frees us from some mundane tasks and yet in the end we are mundanely enslaved to the technology and hardly freed at all.
ReplyDelete[OC tilting at windmill] The expression is "eat your cake and have it too" [/OC tilting at windmill]
Yeah, exactly—have your cake and eat it, too. It strikes me as ironic that there is a point at which "have your cake" turns into "can't stop eating cake." Maybe I'm pushing the metaphor a bit too much.
ReplyDeleteEverybody has a cake and then eats it. The trick is to eat the cake and still have it to eat later.
ReplyDeleteI remember reading a commentary on Genesis 6 where it says God "was sorry he had made man" that the Hebrew could be translated "he was sorry for MAN's sake that he had made him". The kicking out of the garden was so man could not live forever in a sinful state
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