Nature, Technology and the Sacred: a Postscript

A summary of:
Szerszynski, B. (2005). Nature, Technology and the Sacred: Religion and Spirituality in the Modern World. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford.
Chapter 11 – Nature, Technology and the Sacred: a Postscript

I find myself pasting huge chunks of Szerszynski, but it is mostly because the author articulates his nuanced argument incredibly well, so it would be a shame to dilute it. I like this summary he provides of his mission: “As Weber himself put it in a different context, under conditions of modernity ‘[t]he many gods of old, without their magic and therefore in the form of impersonal forces, rise up from their graves, strive for power over our lives and begin once more their eternal struggle amongst themselves’ (Weber, 1989: 22-3). I have been similarly suggesting in this book that in contemporary society we can see not a decline but a profusion of the sacred; dispersed across the social, natural and technological landscape, the sacred becomes feral. / But the contemporary sacred is not thereby without order and pattern” (171).

The important nuance with Szerszynski is to understand that technology does not disgod nature, or indeed strip an meaning from it; but rather it “serves ceremonial functions in maintaining a particular sacral ordering of nature” (172). So, if we are going to try to answer the question of “which enchantment of nature might offer a genuine alternative to the domination of nature and humanity by modern technology” (124), we have to start by understanding these “sacral meanings” (172). And here is yet another excellent question to consider: “But what should be our guide in such a process [of achieving the right relation to nature and to technology]? (172). Here is the problem: “I have suggested that the characteristic form of the sacred in contemporary culture is a postmodern sacred where the ultimate ground of value and meaning has been drawn into human subjectivity itself. This ordering of the sacred is not without its distinctive modes of truth. Yet it seems unable to provide either a place outside the social and technological world, or an inherent rationality within it, on which could be grounded a critique of modern society. It thus seems only able to generate either celebrations of the contemporary extension of consumer choice that simply sacralize the modern technological condition, or at best offer purely symbolic escapes from that condition that ultimately leave it unchallenged (Roberts, 2004)” (172).

I think the lesson to take away from this book is that a critique of technology cannot be done well without taking into account the “historical conditionedness” (174) of the unique, Gestalt ordering of the world; i.e. the worldview or mindset of the users and producers of that technology. Technology offers the misleading promise of “overcom[ing] finitude”; and therefore, the author suggests that, “the very embracing of our historical conditionedness, and ultimately of our embeddedness in the ongoing transformation of the sacred, can itself be seen as an anti-technological move, a negation of the negation of finitude” (174). In other words, the truly radical thing to do is to, as a first step in technological innovation, is to recognize the historical conditioning of that innovation. So it is silly, really, to “refuse what is handed us by the past; such is the impossible dream of Enlightenment. Instead, the task must be to receive that past more consciously and responsibly” (174). We must be humble, but we must also humble science: “Thus the embracing of finitude is likely to involve a humbling of science as only one way of knowing nature, and of technology as only one way of dealing with it” (177-8).

The author concludes with this: “…technologies need to be engaged with more fully, to be ‘read’ in a far richer way: in terms of what relationships they bear to our past trajectory, how they might be harnessed to non-technological goals in the present, and upon what future trajectory they might set us. Understanding the embeddedness of our ideas of nature and technology in the ongoing transformation of the Western sacred is an essential component of that task” (178).

Now my PhD is seeming incredibly daunting! – if I have to, as part of the process, contextualize the modern epistemology and the modern relationship between technology and nature… and humanity. But what’s somewhat heartening is the suggestion (between the lines) that if we change what technology means to us, it may change our relationship to nature, possibly ushering in an epoch of greater environmental stewardship.