A Grateful Reader writes:

You write often about the dangers that modern technologies pose to persons and to their interaction in community–dangers that arise from a turning away from reality, from what is true, good, and beautiful. An article by Russell Hittenger, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, expounds upon Christopher Dawson’s apocalyptic remarks about technology. Dawson did not define modern technology as only what we think of as “labor-saving devices, such as automated implements or pistons, which replace repetitive human acts.” Rather, he writes, “most distinctive of contemporary technology is the replacement of the human act.” And by contemporary technology he refers to medical and psychological as well as engineering advances. For instance, “the contraceptive pill supplants chastity; the cinema supplants recreation, especially prayer; managerial and propaganda techniques replace older practise and virtues of loyalty, etc.” He sees in the application of this technology a change in habits and customs of peoples, making their interactions less humane and human, less cognizant of human dignity, and encouraging them to treat each other and even themselves as objects in a material world rather than subjects of a metaphysical world.

In the end, Dawson (or Hittenger) suggests, “In the face of the technological society, the culture-forming mission of Christianity will have to begin from scratch–but begin at a much lower level than did the missionaries of the dark ages, who brought the vestiges of high Roman culture to the barbarian peoples of northern Europe.  The Venerable Bede and St. Boniface, however, did not have to teach those Celtic and Gothic peoples the rudiments of culture itself…The terrifying thing about modern barbarism is that it is not only more culturally primitive than barbarians of old, but it is immeasurably more powerful, prosperous, and ruthless.”

Hittenger concludes, “At least for me, it indicates that Dawson was on the right track when he called our attention to the dominion of technology, and why it has changed the nature of the game. As a cultural historian, Dawson understood that the core of culture is found once we locate the thing that the culture would never relinquish, or even imagine itself relinquishing. I submit that in our case it is not individual liberty, or sex, and certainly not religion. It is not even the machine. Rather, it is the machine [or technique] insofar as it promises an activity superior to the human act.”

Alas, “by 1942, Dawson concluded that this transition [to the technological order] was complete, and that for any foreseeable future, irreversible.”

So I shall conclude with a paraphrase of Chesterton who suggested that hope is only meaningful when the situation is hopeless. Our seemingly hopeless situation gives us an opportunity to make our hope have meaning!

— End of Intiial Entry —

H.A. writes:

That was such a prescient thought by Christopher Dawson. Now truer than ever.

It reminds me once again that we are here “to work out our salvation with fear and trembling” because this is just a test, “a bad night in a bad inn.”

Christopher Dawson must be one of the most underrated thinkers of the 20th century. Probably because his traditional Catholicism gained him quite a few enemies in the academic environments he moved. Yet he managed to prevail and his legacy is that of a champion of the faith.

Grateful Reader writes:

Nikolai Berdyaev, a contemporary of Dawson, came up with similar conclusions. Hittenger points to Dawson’s observation that humanistic liberalism progressed toward a dehumanizing technologism. Berdyaev, in his 1935 book , The Fate of Man in the Modern World, observes the morphing of humanism/liberalism into a state of dehumanization, or what he terms bestialism.  Berdyaev writes, “Just now bestialism is set up higher than humanism as the next degree to which we should progress. But bestialism at all events is worse and lower than humanism, although the latter is powerless to resist it… According to this morality, everything is permissible: man may be used in any way desired for the attainment of inhuman or anti-human aims. Bestialism is a denial of the value of the human person, of every human personality; it is a denial of all sympathy with the fate of man.”

He observes, “Such values as of those of technics bestialize man; for the sake of these sorts of power, any desired treatment of the individual is permitted…Modern bestialism and dehumanization are based upon idolatry, the worship of technics…”

He continues, “Inhumanity has begun to be presented as something noble… Modern bestialism is conscious, deliberate, self-justified. It refuses to consider every man as of real value, as the likeness and image of God…” Even most Christians “do not associate dehumanization with the fact that the image of God in man is being darkened, that man is losing the sense, which Christianity revealed to him, of being a son of God.”

Like Dawson, Berdyaev concludes that The Church has not yet faced such a situation. Berdyaev writes,  “[N]ow we face something quite different. The image of man has been shaken and has begun to disintegrate after it was revealed…Dehumanization has penetrated into all phases of human creativity. In making himself God, man has unmanned himself.”

Buck writes:

This entry is has been haunting me, sort of. My immediate thought – which is what troubles me – was of Theodore John “Ted” Kaczynski. I was thinking about it, as I’m fifteen feet up atop two levels of shaky, tied-off, wood-blocked-up on a hill scaffolding, struggling with shingles, my nerves and my balance, tending to a too long neglected steeply curved, impossible to safely reach, cedar shake gazebo roof. The whole structure wobbles within the tension of my ropes. What am I, nuts?

 I’m six years younger than the nut-job “Unabomber”, who is now seventy-two and rotting away in prison. I went back and skimmed his “manifesto,” which is worth a close reading.

 We know that he is a ruthless terrorist, who killed three people and brutally maimed twenty-three others as he terrified people for almost two decades before capture. But even so, when reading his articulate, often sensible thinking, when you come upon his casual, incidental mention of his brutal terror-bombing killings, it’s chilling.

 Kaczynski is a committed, but Godless, fanatic. He committed to both “ink and blood.”

 Laura writes:

Kaczynski is yet another argument for the death penalty.

I don’t think it’s worth losing sleep over the similarity between these two. They had entirely different theological presuppositions. Technology itself is not the main problem in Dawson’s view. The sinfulness of man is.

Buck writes:

The death penalty was on the table. Perhaps Kaczynski’s kind of “insane” should not be protected from the death penalty. But, clearly he was not right in the head. As Kaczynski himself explains, his lawyers played him during the trial. They waiting until sentencing to spring the insanity ploy, which was the last thing that Kaczynski wanted. He would rather have risked death than a questioning of his sanity. He cuts his defense team some slack though. He accepts that they felt ethically obligated to do what they must to avoid his execution.

Another bizarre aspect of his mental state that I read about, was his confused sexuality. He went to the University of Michigan Health Center and began the process of applying for his sex-change operation. He thought that he was really a female. At the last minute he freaked and changed his mind. He continued to seek help in order to overcome his inability to relate to women.

Kaczynski appeared to have no theological presuppositions. My limited search finds no thoughts at all about religion. If he worshipped something, he worshipped nature, at least the nature within his reach. He was a Neo-Luddite loner who turned to violence when his personal natural environment was degraded by man’s progress. He hiked to the sight of his favorite valley, only to discover a new highway. That is when the bombing began. But, just destroying construction equipment didn’t do it for him. He wanted revenge. That’s when he began to target people.

Kaczynski is said to have been influenced by the Christian anarchist and French philosopher, Jacques Ellul, who wrote The Technological Society (1964). The phrase “the technological society” is used more than once by Hittenger in his writing about Dawson. Hittenger writes: “In fact, Dawson’s criticism of the technological society is one [of] the most persistent themes in his books and lectures.” So perhaps Kaczynski was unknowingly influenced by Christopher Dawson.

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