Modern Technology and the Sacred

A summary of:
Szerszynski, B. (2005). Nature, Technology and the Sacred: Religion and Spirituality in the Modern World. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.
Chapter 4: Modern Technology and the Sacred

It is facile to say, “technology is our new religion.” This is not precisely accurate. But modern society has attached very important meanings to the development of technology, which are important to understand. We get some clues to the evolution of this meaning in the etymology of the word itself.

Technologousi, used up to the 12th Century, connoted “reasoning subordinated to craft and artfulness” (55). This changed with the Reformation (and Puritanism in particular), which brought with it a “new emphasis on reducing the arts to universal, univocal methodological principles – on finding the logos of techne itself, the science that defines all the arts, and thus overcoming the recalcitrance of matter and making it subservient to logos”… and then… “Technologia, and its synonym technometria, emerged as Latin terms in the work of the sixteenth-century French Protestant rhetorician Peter Ramus, who used them in the more modern sense of ‘the logos of the relations among all technai. But it was the eighteenth century, for example in the work of Johann Beckamann, that the concept of technology as ‘a functional description of the process of production’ emerges in its recognizably modern sense (Mitcham, 1994; 128-31)” (55-6).

The important point for understanding the meaning of technology in the modern world is this:
“It was only with the collapse of the sacred into the empirical world, the shift from an ordering of society according to the transcendent axis to a biopolitical, immanent ordering of the social, and began to constitute things in the world as Heidegger’s ‘standing-reserve’. The ultimate purpose of society was no longer to praise of the creator but the reproduction of itself; numerous sciences and technologies emerged to provide the knowledges necessary to ensure the continuation and optimization of the life process. The last vestiges of classical and Christian meanings in the technological sublime were all but swept away. Technology became measured against neither quotidian nor supernal human needs and interests, but against its own, technical criteria. Technology became the measure of man – became autonomous, became sublime” (64).

For the rest of this post, I’m going to inartfully paste some good passages that relate to other works in my literature review.

1. I always try to relate my research back to Foucault – not just because it’s a fun game, but because I understand Foucault’s interpretation of how power operates: “In the modern period, by contrast, the biological becomes seen as a self-sufficient mode of existence; what modern power administers is no longer ‘legal subjects’ but ‘living beings’ (Foucault, 1979: 142-3). And in such societies technology alters radically from the forms it took in pre-modern times. Technology becomes systematized, with an explosion in the scope and purchase of technique, and its harnessing to the goal of shaping and optimizing life itself” (59).

2. This passage relates well to what Vowell was talking about in The Wordy Shipmates: “The sublime thus became a key figure for the self-understanding of American, able not only to underscore the ‘lofty materialism’ of the Jeffersonian vision of government…, but also to combine a sense of the unique grandeur of the vast natural landscape of the new country with a celebration of the human capacity to transform the same landscape. A very specific ‘technological sublime’, exalting the power to dominate nature, provided a new, non-denominational civil religion to unite a pluralistic nation through awestruck moments of Durkheimian collective effervescence in front of public technological projects such as bridges and skyscrapers, and later atom bombs and rocket launches” (61).

3. And this theme keeps coming back, the idea that we have stopped asking “why” questions: “Technologies grated this form of sublimity advance without any awareness of questions of purpose which lie outside their own way of framing the world; questions like ‘why?’ hand in the air, with no expectation of an answer (Szerszynski, 2003a)” (63).