Thoughts on Today’s Techno-Culture

In just a few years we as a nation have elevated a collection of poorly educated but technically competent men and women to a level of undeserved importance. How high is this level? So high they have come to believe they are destined to control all that we hear and see and read and think. Having watched some of their recent Senate testimony, I was amazed at their arrogance and their dishonesty. These technocrats seem to think that because they have mastered their little slice of technology and all the power that comes with it, they are smarter, more worthy, and more virtuous than the masses...and that’s us. This should give us cause for concern.

Some time ago, I made a note of the following comment. Unfortunately I failed to note the writer, so I trust he won’t object to this bit of accidental plagiarism. He described what he called our “technical wizards” as “slaves to their own technology, and without it they are impotent. They are synthetic men, uprooted from the good that God has given us, the strength of our forefathers is not ours.” 

I really liked that comment. But someone else, the late great, Romano Guardini, wrote something truly prophetic almost 100 years ago. Writing as a young theologian, he saw the movement of technology, it’s growing influence, and its disdain for the traditions and the cultural norms that shaped his world, a world he believed was disappearing. It’s a world I experienced many years ago, a world that has dissolved into barbarism. Guardini wrote these words:

“On the basis of a known formula, materials and forces are put into the required condition: machines. Machines are an iron formula that directs the material to its desired end. Time and space are made subject as well as materials and forces. They are mastered by means of communications. What is to come is calculated in advance, and what has taken place is preserved” [Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como, p. 46].

I don’t know the answer to pervasive technology and those that strive to control it and us. I suppose just pulling the plug is overkill.