God has seen his whole creation to be good. As Christians, we are delighted with this kindness. We are delighted with the beauty of the sun and the moon, in the smell of the sweet olive, in the taste of flesh, poultry and grains, in the minds that raise morale, in the conjugal link which leads life to birth. All in moderation, let’s say, moderation is not except. And if we are somewhat sensitive in our treatment of temperance, we have the right to note that God gave us the goodness of his creation as a channel of this grace by which ourselves are ourselves.
Not rarely, we are also told that technology too, with a particular reference to things such as laptop and smartphone, is morally neutral. It all depends on how we use it. With my iPhone, I can type this test, or I can find pornography. I can put my taxes, or I can play my savings. I can call my friend for a long -awaited conversation, or I can scroll over the troubled seas and maintained social media. The choice is mine. How will I use this thing that money and cunning put in my pocket?
The church has long stressed The dangers of technology, even with the first pages of the entries noting the link between technology and Cain line. John Paul II asked in Redeemer Hominis The question of whether the modern world, with its great technological advances, was not a groaning world in work either. As Walker Percy put it The second comingMan has never invented a weapon he has not used, and we never seem about to use the very weapons which, thanks to our technological progression, gave us the key to our own destruction. And the priority necessary for the ethics of technology that Jean-Paul considered as essential to any real development of human life has not materialized.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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I fear, in fact, that technology as it came to live in and inform our way of being in the world is no longer a neutral question but rather that which is officially ordered at the expense of the development authentic human. I fear, in fact, that technology as it came to inhabit it and inform our way of being in the world is no longer a neutral question, but rather a case which is officially ordered at the detriment of the ‘Authentic human development. Tweet this
Behind my concern, and under a large part of the reflections of John Paul II on the subject, is the thought of Martin Heidegger in his test “The question concerning technology”. In this document, he maintains that the essence of technological perspectives, as it was in her time and has become more and more became in ours, lies in a tendency to be a standing reserve. So far, if neutral. A pen makes a permanent ink reserve to be drawn at will. A dam made a reserve standing from a river, and the result – as anyone who has known the diamond lakes of the center of Arkansas, for example, can testify – can be both useful and extreme and play.
The problem, as Heidegger has seen, is that technology tends to make man himself a standing reserve. The obvious example lies in something like the way in which a technologically advanced permanent army requires an immense supply of humans to serve it. More critical, however, I think of the iPhone. The iPhone has insinuated in the fabric of life – by putting our banking services, our education, our insurance, our entertainment and our trips so easily and effectively – that we think we must have one. In addition, the phone creates endless ways to make me feel that I have to pick it up, look at it, interact with it. In any inactive moment, my mind and my hand go to the phone. And therefore, Apple has created a permanent reserve of customers who will faithfully buy the next iPhone model when it comes out.
In other words, Technologies that are not neutral are idols – and not idols by accident, as everything in the world can be, but idols by design, forcing our attention to their continuous existence. Low -end estimates place the use of the intelligent phone for the average person at around three and a day per day, which represents around 24 hours per week. The iPhone, that is to say, demanded the day of his Lord and obtained it, while the authentic Sunday cult continues to weaken.
Technology of this type is not neutral. He often seeks and reaches our worship.
As Heidegger underlines in his essay, however, based on the poet Holderlin, the poison so often lies healing. Pernicious technology requires our gaze and the use of our hands, and the appropriate direction of our eyes and our hands can bring us out of the servitude to this new pharaoh and in the desert of worship.
Look at the Eucharist. Let the eye follow the extraordinary lines of a beautiful church. Look at the trees. Look at the birds and learn their names. See the sun to get up and look at the wonder that lights the face of a child a thousand times a day.
Use your hands. Play an instrument. Plant and maintain a garden. Learn to repair an engine or clean a fish or a rabbit. Our hands are where our reflection responds to the world, and by learning to use them, we get human again. No wonder Jesus spent so much from his life in silent and hidden work.
Technology is not neutral. But admitting that it means having to make a change. “You have to change your life,” says Rilke’s archaic torso of Apollo “. “And Christ also tells us about these words, burning in the Eucharist, inviting us to look, to see, to shape things of these hands so beautifully, in a frightening way.
