Man and Machine: Part Three

They Have Brains, and They Think Not; Hearts Have They, and They Feel Not

Their idols are silver and gold, even the work of men's hands.
They have mouths, and speak not: eyes have they, and see not.
They have ears, and hear not: noses have they, and smell not.
They have hands, and handle not; feet have they, and walk not: neither speak they through their throat.
They that make them are like unto them; and so are all such as put their trust in them. (Psalm 115: 4-8,from the Great Bible Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer)

Man began to measure time, by noting the position of the sun in the sky. He improved his time-telling technique with the invention of tools such as sundials and hourglasses. In the Middle Ages he invented a device that would not just assist him in measuring time, but would actually keep track of time for him through its own internal workings. It would, as long as it was maintained properly, operate on its own. This device is the clock. As man’s technology advanced in the Modern Age, he developed more machines that could be turned on and would then proceed to do what they were designed to do with little-to-no further input from man. Their function is built into them and, apart from a breakdown of some sort, will be fulfilled each time they run.

These machines accomplish their function without thinking about it. Rational thought is still a property of living human beings, and not of machines. Future situations where this is no longer the case is one of the staples of the dystopic side of the science fiction genre. Usually, the scenario involves the machine gaining sentience and turning against its maker. Since science fiction is a pop culture expression of the modern spirit, the spirit of the age in which man turns his back on his Creator and attempts through his conquest of nature to build a new world in accordance with the values he has chosen, it is fitting that it would express such fears that man’s creation would in turn do the same, much as the Titan king Saturn in ancient mythology feared that his son would rise up to depose him, the way he had deposed his father Uranus. Perhaps the first example of the expression of this fear is Mary Shelley’s early nineteenth century science-horror novel Frankenstein, although it is not a machine, but life in a monstrous creature, that Dr. Victor Frankenstein creates. The idea of robots with artificial intelligence, rebelling against mankind was such a popular theme in early robot fiction, that Isaac Asimov deliberately set out to do the opposite, to depict robots incapable of turning against a mankind and the popular fear of the robotic as irrational. Probably the best known example of the sci-fi meme of machines that turn against man is to be found in director James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator and its various sequels and spinoffs. This film depicted an assassin cyborg, sent back in time from a future where a military computer system Skynet had gained consciousness and declared war on humanity.

A scenario in which machines gain consciousness and turn against their creators is not the only way in which a future different from the present status quo of thinking human beings and unthinking machines can be depicted. The other alternative is to present a future in which mankind has lost the capacity for rational thought. To a limited extent, this scenario is used in stories which depict a general populace that is oppressed by being prevented from perceiving the world as it is, whether through the brainwashing of a police state as in George Orwell’s 1984, or living out their lives in a simulated reality generated by now dominant machines, as in the Wachowski Brothers’ popular The Matrix trilogy. This scenario is more fully utilized by Pixar Studio’s 2008 computer animated film WALL-E, in which, the earth having become a giant garbage dump, mankind has gone on an interstellar cruise, leaving robots such as the title character to clean up his mess. The cruise spaceships take care of all their passengers needs and schedule their daily routine so that they live out their lives in a kind of pleasure-induced trance.

Fanciful, as the scenarios depicted in these works of fiction are, the ideas contained in their general themes, the idea of machinery taking over the world and the idea of man himself becoming more like an unthinking, unfeeling machine, are worth reflecting upon. Do these represent valid concerns about the direction in which modern technology is taking us?

The question is a legitimate one. Originally tools were invented by man to assist him in doing his work, to lighten his load. In the Modern Age man began to develop machines that would not so much assist him as do his work for him. Initially, the work machines were invented to take over from men was mostly physical labour. As far back as the Renaissance, however, Blaise Pascal had invented a functioning calculator that could perform simple arithmetic. In the twentieth century, this branch of technology, that of machines that do mathematics, solve problems, and otherwise take over tasks for which man used his brain instead of his hands, really took off. Computers began as large machines, used for military purposes and by scientists for calculation in their research, but within decades of their invention smaller, personal models for use in the home were invented, and by the end of the century portable “laptop” models were available. As the size of computers shrank, the number of functions they could perform increased, and in the last few decades computer technology has been incorporated into all other kinds of technology and into every aspect of our lives. Telephone communication is now mostly done through small, mobile, telephones with built-in computer functions allowing access to the internet and all sorts of other functions. Automobiles now have built-in computers that remind you of things you may have forgotten, that inform you when your car needs maintenance, that help mechanics diagnose problems, and which in some cases help you plan your route and even park your car for you. Everything from agriculture to medicine is computerized these days.

The incorporation of the computer into so many different aspects of our lives has inevitably and radically altered the way we live them and the societies in which we live them. While these changes have enriched our lives in many ways, there are also many ways in which they are cause for concern. The more we build machines to do our work for us, the more we become dependent upon those machines. The more dependent upon machines we are, the more serious is the difficulty we will find ourselves in if those machines break down or if for some other reason they are not available to us and we must again do the work for ourselves. This is a danger that gets progressively worse because the more collectively dependent upon machines we become, the less likely we are to pass on to future generations the skills and know how necessary to do the tasks that machines do for us. When we start to rely upon machines to do tasks that are part of rational thought, like making calculations, solving logical problems, or even making decisions, we run the risk of allowing our very thought processes to atrophy. If you doubt that is the case, then observe what happens at the till of a coffee shop or grocery store when the computer system crashes and the person behind the till is required to calculate your change manually.

If through the development of robotic and computer technology which performs an ever increasing number of man’s mental tasks for him man is creating machinery after his own image, the surrender of these tasks to the machine and allowing of our own mental powers to atrophy would seem to be making man ever more like a machine. This is not the only way in which this is true. As we develop our technology through modern science, we increasingly organize our societies according to the principles of technology, and human existence becomes more and more mechanical.

As Jacques Ellul put it about sixty years ago “No social, human, or spiritual fact is so important as the fact of technique in the modern world.” (1) While Ellul meant something more than just the mechanical by “technique” – he meant every application of reason towards the goal of efficiency – the mechanical is certainly included and in explaining why technique is more than machine, he wrote “the machine is the most obvious, massive, and impressive example of technique, and historically the first…Technique certainly began with the machine. It is quite true that all the rest developed out of mechanics; it is quite true also that without the machine the world of technique would not exist.” (2) As a principle of social organization, the technical is radically different from anything that had preceded it. It meant that all of society would now be directed, not towards a vision of the Good, such as that represented in the culture of the countryside and organic community or that represented in the laws and civilization of the city, but towards maximum efficiency to be achieved by knowledge and reason harnessed in the service of the will to dominate.

If technique became the primary principle of social organization in a kind of technical revolution and if technique began with the machine which remains the most impressive example of technique, it follows that a society completely touched by and organized by technique could to some degree or another be described as mechanical. Owen Barfield, in a book we will shortly take a closer look at, said of the machine “The whole point of a machine is, that, for as long as it goes on moving, it ‘goes on by itself’ without mans’ participation.” (3) While obviously a human society in which man does not participate is a contradiction in terms, when Barfield says that a machine moves without man’s participation he is speaking of man as someone external to the machine. The men in a society that has become mechanical are not analogous to the man who owns a clock but to the gears and cogs within it. In saying that a society has become mechanical we are saying that the society has been organized so that to a certain degree the motion within it men within it, including that of the men who live within it, has become automatic, determined by routines and patterns established by planners with technical efficiency as their end. That human activity ought to be in harmony with the natural rhythms of life, which are instead interrupted and trampled upon by technical efficiency is a theme that runs throughout the writings of poet, novelist, essayist and farmer Wendell Berry. Surely the best word to describe activity that is out of sync with life and driven by ends to which such harmony is irrelevant, is mechanical.

That the more man becomes dependent upon the machine the more like the machine he becomes himself and that the more dependent upon technology human society becomes the more mechanical it becomes itself is something that was predictable long before the modern experiment. The basis of the prediction is right there in the eighth verse of the one hundred and fifteenth Psalm quoted in the epigram to this essay. “They that make them [idols] are like unto them; and so are all such as put their trust in them.” Modern man has made idols out of his machines and technology, and having put his trust in these idols, has come to resemble them.

The idols of which the Psalmist wrote, were images made of stone or metal that represented the various deities the pagan nations worshipped. The making and worship of idols was a practice forbidden to the Israelites in the second of the Ten Commandments. The point of the psalmist’s mockery of pagan idolatry is that man-made idols, rather than being the hosts of powerful deities, are just lifeless images. The craftsmen who built them gave them the appearance of having mouths, eyes, ears, noses, hands and feet, but these were merely appearances. The idols were dead stone, dead metal, and by making and putting their faith in them, men became like them, killing their spirits by focusing on these idols the attention and worship due to the true and living God, thus cutting themselves off from the Source of life.

The idols men build today are in one sense more impressive than statues of Chemosh, Ba’al, Moloch, Dagon and Astarte. They are designed to actually do things, from moving goods and people to calculating complex equations. It is not just hands and mouths, modern man has given his idols, but brains and hearts as well, in the computers that direct their functions, and the sources from which the power that keeps the machines in motion circulates. Yet despite this greater resemblance to living beings, it is still just an artificial imitation. To paraphrase the psalmist, they have brains and they think not, hearts have they, and they feel not. Unlike Dr. Frankenstein, modern man has been unable to give life to his creation and in transferring his faith from God to the machines his science has enabled him to build and the techniques his reason has enabled him to devise, he has again broken his connection with the Source of his life, and come to resemble his moving but lifeless creation.

There is another aspect to the idolatry in modern science and technology that is worth contemplation. Earlier I had quoted Owen Barfield’s remark that the point of a machine is that it moves by itself without man’s participation. This remark was made in the context of a paragraph in which Barfield was arguing that the machine is the model by which the modern mind conceives the universe. In the next paragraph he explained that this is not how science itself conceives of nature, but rather the conception that science has created in the minds of ordinary people. This is part of a larger argument that modern man, by confusing his conception of the world with the world as it is in itself, is committing a form of idolatry.

This argument is part of a book entitled Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, which out of all of Barfield’s books is the one most likely to be remembered today. (4) The book begins with a discussion of the Kantian difference between things as they appear and things as they are in themselves. The difference, of course, is that the way things appear always involves the interpretations of our senses and minds. What is called “post-modern” thought has taken this difference and run with it in a most unhealthy direction, but the argument Barfield made is very different. Noting that the appearances involve a collective interpretation – whether an individual perceives things correctly or wrongly is generally judged by holding his interpretation up to the standard of the collective perception – Barfield argued against the positivist belief that ancient man and modern man live in the same world but that modern man’s perception, understanding, and explanation of that world is better, more in line with the world as it actually is, than the ancients. Instead, he argued, it would be more accurate to say that ancient and modern man do not live in the same world, because the world they live in is the ever changing world of appearances. Man’s role in generating this world of appearances, he called participation, and the way man participates in the world of appearances and even his recognition of his own participation, changes with his thoughts through time. In earlier eras man recognized that the world they saw, was something in which they participated themselves, as did the unseen that lay beyond the appearances. In the modern, scientific era, recognition of man’s participation has been pushed back to a second and even third degree of awareness, whereas recognition of the reality of anything beyond the appearances other than that which appears in scientific hypotheses is mostly absent.

The difference between the ancient and the modern perception of the world is not, Barfield therefore argued, that primitive man sought the same kind of understanding that modern science seeks but through a less developed mythology that “peopled the world” with spirits. Rather the modern perception has come about through a change in thought about the nature and purpose of science.

Plato, Barfield reminded us, recognized three levels of knowledge – the first and lowest being sensory observation, the third and highest being intellectual perception of the divine ideas, with geometry or mathematics as the intermediate level. What we call science today corresponds with the second level. The purpose of scientific hypotheses was to “save the appearances” (5), i.e., to provide a working explanation of what is observed in the first level of knowledge. This working explanation was understood to be man’s own creation and not to be confused with the truth, or the world as it is.

This understanding has largely been lost. The knowledge obtainable by science, Barfield explains by analogy, is “dashboard knowledge” rather than “engine knowledge”, i.e., a knowledge of how to drive a car rather than knowledge of its internal workings. (6) Sir Francis Bacon understood this when he declared knowledge to be power. There may still be an understanding of this among scientists themselves. Plato and Aristotle, however, believed that a knowledge of truth, of the permanent, unchanging, reality beyond the world of appearances was also accessible to man and with the evaporation of this belief, the idea that scientific hypotheses themselves can explain the reality beyond the appearances became the vogue among scientists and among the general public this became the idea that the explanations of scientific hypotheses are the reality beyond appearances. Since scientific hypotheses are themselves part of the world of appearances, the confusion of scientific hypotheses with the world as it is, the idea that nothing other than scientific explanations lie beyond the appearances, is a form of idolatry, Barfield reasoned, because it is an attribution of ultimate reality to what is merely an image.

On a somewhat similar note Simone Weil wrote:

Idolatry comes from the fact that, while thirsting for absolute good, we do not possess the power of supernatural attention and we have not the patience to allow it to develop. Lacking idols, it often happens that we have to labour every day, or nearly every day, in the void. We cannot do so without supernatural bread. Idolatry is thus a vital necessity in the cave. Even with the best of us it is inevitable that it should set narrow limits for mind and heart. (7)

The cave she refers to is Plato’s, i.e., Plato’s allegory illustrating the difference between the realm of appearances as opposed to the realm of true Forms. Those who see only things as they appear in the physical realm, Plato said, were like prisoners chained in a cave, who see nothing but shadows cast from a fire behind them upon a wall, and mistake that for reality. Surely nobody in the history of the world could be better described as “in the cave” than modern man who in his positivism has rejected the metaphysical and theological, and sees nothing beyond the appearances than the scientific explanations he devises for them, who mistakes what Barfield’s most famous student and friend, borrowing from the same Platonic allegory, called “the Shadowlands” for the ultimate reality.

If we consider this alongside what we have already discussed about modern man’s having made idols out of his machines it would appear that modern man is engaged in multiple, related, layers of idolatry. First he made idols out his images of the world and his scientific explanations of them, then, with the power over nature his science obtained for him, he created machines, to do his will and to do his work for him, upon which he became dependent and in which he placed his faith, turning his machines into idols too.

The more man’s technology advances, the more of an idol he makes it. The more of a technolator he becomes, the more mechanical his life and society becomes, and the more he begins to resemble his own soulless, lifeless, creations.


(1) Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), p. 3. This is a translation by John Wilkinson of La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle, completed in 1950 and published in Paris by Librairie Armand Colin in 1954.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (New York and London: Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957, 1965), p. 51.

(4) Barfield himself is probably more likely to be remembered today for his association with C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams than for his own writings.

(5) This phrase, translating the Greek sozein ta phainomena (σῴζειν τὰ φαινόμενα), was borrowed by Barfield from the commentary by Simplicius of Cilicia on Aristotle. It is more frequently rendered “saving the phenomena”. Barfield preferred the translation appearances because the transliteration phenomena has taken on weaker connotations.

(6) Barfield, p. 55.

(7) Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952), p. 109, a translation by Arthur Wills of La Pesanteur et la grâce, first published in Paris by Librairie Plon in 1947. Weil died in 1943. This book is not something she wrote for publication, but was posthumously compiled from her notebooks by her friend Gustave Thibon.

Man and Machine: Part One

The Cost of Modernity

Throughout history, man has used tools or instruments to achieve his ends and to make his work lighter, quicker, and more efficient. A tool may be something that man finds in nature and co-opts for his own purposes. A man, for example, might, wishing to break open a hard-shelled nut, pick up a stone he finds lying around and use it to crack the shell. A tool might also be an instrument that man has designed and fashioned to serve his needs. Desiring to cut down a tree and chop it up into fuel for a fire, he may fit a sharp blade into a handle to make an axe.

At one time the making and use of tools was thought to be the trait that distinguished human beings from other animals. This is no longer the case because study and observation of the animal kingdom has revealed that that some other animals are capable of using and even making simple tools. Most often these are simple weapons, such as sticks used as spears or clubs. The point is that we now know that the making and use of tools per se, is not solely the property of our own species.

Of course, man’s capacity for making and using tools is a lot greater than that of any beast. Chimpanzees have the greatest tool-use capacity of any animal other than man. (1) They can make several different tools and can even make some very simple, compound tools. Even still, they do not come remotely close to man’s ability to create instruments to help him in virtually any task, to redesign his existing tools to make them better serve his purpose, and to create increasingly complex machines to perform larger and more complex tasks.

In what aspect(s) of human nature lies this ability?

One aspect of human nature that immediately presents itself as the answer to that question, and which in fact is an indispensable element of man’s capacity for making and improving tools, is his reason. Reason is the ability to evaluate ideas and facts, relate them to each other, and draw valid conclusions from them. Through reason, man is able to anticipate problems he will face and needs that will arise. By using his reason, man can deduce what the effect of a particular action will be and to calculate the ultimate effect of arranging actions in a series. He can also reason in reverse and thus figure out the steps necessary to achieve a desired effect. Thus reason allows him to prepare to deal with anticipated problems and needs. These are among the various functions of reason that contribute to the development of tools.

Essential as it is, human reason is an insufficient explanation. Science is also indispensable to the process of tool development and science utilizes several other human faculties in addition to reason. The chief of these is man’s ability to obtain and to store knowledge. Science originally just meant knowledge or, in a slightly narrower sense organized knowledge. Today, in the English speaking world, science has two meanings. It can refer to a very specific kind of knowledge, the systematic knowledge of the physical world. It can also refer to the methodology by which that knowledge is obtained. This methodology involves the use of the faculty of observation and the faculty of reason. Man accumulates raw data about the physical world around him through observation, and then uses his reason to form explanations of that data and to devise experiments to test those explanations. Apart from this methodology and the knowledge of “how things work” obtained by it, man could never have built the things he has built or devised the tools to have helped him build it.

Although there was an epistemological debate among philosophers a few centuries ago in which reason and science were pitted against each other as opposing paths to truth, a debate that still recurs from time to time, reason and science are clearly mutually dependent upon one another. Reason is itself a part of the scientific method and needs the information accumulated through science to be of any use.

There is a third human capacity which is even more fundamental than reason or science. Apart from this capacity science, in the modern science of the term, would be virtually impossible. This is the human ability to receive from those who have gone before him, the knowledge that previous generations have accumulated, to add to that bank of knowledge, and to pass it on to future generations. We have a term that we use to refer to both the use of this ability and to that which is handed down through the generations by means of it. That term is tradition.

Were it not for tradition, each generation of men would have to make the same rational deductions as the previous generation from scratch. Apart from tradition, men would have to make the same basic scientific discoveries every generation and would never be able to build upon what has been done previously. Without tradition man would be forever reinventing the wheel.

Modern man does not like to acknowledge tradition’s fundamental importance to human thought, science, and the invention and development of human equipment. This is because modern man, who lives in an era that has seen an unprecedented explosion in the invention and development of tools, has staked everything on the hope that the development of technology will continue indefinitely, (2) while adopting the idea that the path to the future lies in the rejection of the past.

Note that I said modern man has pinned his hopes on the development of “technology”. The word tools does not really adequately describe what mans instruments, devices, and contraptions have evolved into in the Modern Age. The Greeks used the word mekhane (μηχανή) for various inventions, such as cranes, engines of war, and theatrical devices. The literal meaning of the word was contrivance, i.e., something contrived or thought up as an artificial means to an end. This word has come down into modern language as the word “machine”. Five hundred years ago it still had its classical meaning but in the Industrial Revolution it came to be used to refer to a contraption that had moving parts driven by water, steam, or some other non-human source of power. The word most commonly used, however, to embrace everything man has invented to accomplish his purposes, is technology. (3)

While man has been making and improving his tools since the beginning of human history, in the last five centuries, the period known as the Modern Age, his technology has grown exponentially. This occurred in several bursts of creativity, starting with the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the period of European cultural renewal and scientific discovery and invention which launched the Modern Age, and including the two Industrial Revolutions in which the power of water, steam, coal, and eventually electricity were harnessed allowing man to greatly increase his production of food and other commodities and his ability to transport himself and these goods. Another burst of creativity began in the twentieth century and which has yet to run out, the burst which has produced today’s rapidly evolving communications and information technology, which has sent men into space and given us laser surgery, and accomplished so many other amazing things.

The men of the Modern Age, as we noted earlier, are loath to acknowledge that they are at all dependent upon tradition for the benefits of modern technology. The Modern Age is the age of progress and modern men pride themselves on being progressive and forward thinking people, who have set their back to the past and their eyes upon the future. According to the founding mythology of the Modern Age, tradition was a chain that held men back in darkness and superstition until man, reason, and science were liberated by the “Enlightenment”.

That viewpoint is in many ways utter nonsense. We have already seen how tradition is itself an essential part of any reasoning or science that wishes to build upon what was done in the past rather than to be continually starting over from scratch. Furthermore, the elements in the Western tradition that the “Enlightenment” mythology maintains were holding reason and science back, are in fact foundational to the principles of the scientific method. The idea that man can by observing the world around him, figure out the principles by which the world operates, presupposes that there is an order in the world to be observed, which itself is far more consistent with the idea that that order was put there by the God Who created the world, than with either the idea that it just happens to be or that it came into being on its own. Thus the basic principles by which empirical discoveries were made in the Modern Age were laid down by Christian scholars such as the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, back in the supposed darkness of the Middle Ages.

Now an objection might be raised that the fact that this massive explosion of technology took place in an age which adopted an anti-tradition philosophy tends to support the idea that tradition held reason, science, and technology back. This is an important objection which needs to be carefully considered. I do not think that it can negate my point that apart from tradition, man’s ability to receive the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of past generations, and pass it on to future generations, neither reason nor science could function. Is it possible that tradition both facilitates and constrains science?

Yes, in fact that is the case. There is one sense in which it is correct to say that tradition holds back science. The bank of accumulated human knowledge and wisdom that is passed down through the generations as tradition includes moral knowledge which places constraints upon the human will. In traditional ethics, the end of human activity and of the organization of human society is declared to be the Good, and particular human behaviour is either praised and encouraged as being right or denounced and discouraged as being wrong according as it contributes to or detracts from the Good. Man’s desires, passions, and appetites, unconstrained, pull him away from the Good, and so man must rule his passions with his will. Man’s will, however, will also move man away from the Good if itself unconstrained by moral limitations. Whether in classical pagan or Christian formulation, this basic traditional ethics was foundational to all pre-modern Western civilization.

It may not be apparent at first how all of this relates to science and technology. Think about how and why man invents tools. He first of all desires to do something. Let us say he wants to keep rain from falling on his head. He then decides that he will do that thing. Next, he figures out a way of doing it, and then invents the instrument, in this case an umbrella, that will help him achieve his end. The whole point of inventing the tool, and of obtaining the knowledge necessary to invent it, is to accomplish the end that he has willed. Science and technology serve the will of man and are therefore themselves limited by what man wills. Limitations placed upon man’s will are therefore also limitations on science and technology.

Here we see how tradition, apart from which there could be no science and technology, also limits and constrains science and technology. It is also apparent why the Modern attitude towards tradition would correspond with an explosion in science and technology. The spirit of the Modern Age is one of rejection of constraints upon the will. Several Modern philosophers regarded the will as the fundamental fact of human existence. (4) Modern thought has so equated freedom with the rejection of constraints upon the will, as to make the classical Athenian and Christian concepts of freedom, a good compatible with moral limits on the will, virtually incomprehensible to modern man.

This brings us to the moral dilemma of modern technology.

Modern technology presents us with a moral dilemma but it is not one of the simplistic questions that are immediately evoked by speaking of a moral dilemma of modern technology. It is not a question of whether technology or even modern technology is good or bad. Nor is it a question of the right uses of modern technology versus the wrong uses. It is rather a question of cost, of the price modern man has had to pay to obtain the blessings of modern technology and whether those blessings are worth that price. (5) That this is the true dilemma should already be apparent in what we have discussed. If the rapid growth in the invention and development of technology in the Modern Age is due to that age’s having rejected traditional moral constraints upon the exercise of man’s will this renders the other two questions moot for the criteria by which to judge these questions lies in man’s knowledge of the Good, which is precisely what was given up to obtain the technology. This is the cost of modernity.

A little under a century ago, a book came out, written by a then unknown German teacher, philosopher, and historian named Oswald Spengler. (6) In that book, Spengler objected to the standard modern view of Western history as moving in a linear direction through three ages – classical, middle, and modern. In his view history was the story of cultures, spiritual communities that lived and died like any other organism, in a cyclical pattern, each having its own soul. The souls of these civilizations he classified into types according to the symbols by which they understood the world and the ideals for which they strove. For the classic Greek and Roman civilizations, for example, he used the term Appollonian as it had been expounded by Nietzsche to characterize the souls of cultures that strove after beauty and order. (7)

Spengler used the seasons of the year to designate the stages he saw in the life-cycle of a culture-civilization and he argued that Euro-American Western civilization, which he dated back to the tenth century, was in its winter. Hence the title of the book, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, which means The Decline – or Twilight – of the West. It is not Spengler’s prediction of the imminent collapse of Western civilization and the rise of a new Caeserism that is relevant to our discussion, however, but his interesting characterization of the soul of Western civilization. Since the essence of modern Western civilization is the rejection of limits and the pursuit of the infinite – Spengler identifies the West’s prime symbol as “pure and limitless space” – he dubbed the Western soul-type “Faustian”.

This term, of course, comes from the legend of Faust, the scholar who, bored with his academic pursuits, strikes a deal with the devil. The legend has been told and retold many times, in books, plays, and operas, but the version that Spengler was alluding to is the nineteenth century play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Whereas in earlier versions of the story, youth, worldy pleasures, and supernatural power are the temptations to which the scholar succumbs, in Goethe’s rendition it is the somewhat higher goal of infinite knowledge that is Faust’s chief desire. This is the whole point of the comparison made by Spengler in assigning Faust as the soul type of Western man.

Note, however, that while Goethe’s Faust may be a nobler fellow with higher goals than the character who appears in earlier versions of the story such as Christopher Marlowe’s, the price he agreed to pay was exactly the same – his very soul. (8) Is this also the price that was required of modern man for all the benefits of modern technology?

I don’t think that it is stretching the metaphor too far to ask that question. Since the dawn of time, man has invented tools to accomplish his ends. Where did these ends come from? Some arose out of practical necessity. He needed food, water, clothing and shelter to survive and so directed his activity towards providing himself with these things. It was in pursuit of a different set of ends altogether, however, that he built his higher civilizations. Men perceived a need for justice, and so built cities and enacted laws. Men yearned after beauty and so they created art. These things are not physical necessities but spiritual. Man’s spirit yearns for them the way his body craves food and drink. The highest of these is the Good. The greatest accomplishments of pre-modern higher civilizations were achieved in pursuit of these spiritual ends, which pursuit involved submission to them as external authorities and judges. If modern man’s technological advances were made possible by the liberation of his will from all traditional constraints then he seems to have purchased those advances at the expense of what lay at the heart of his earlier civilizations. If that cannot be described as the selling of the soul what can?

We now come to the question of whether the benefits of modern technology were worth paying this cost. It may seem like we are addressing this question at the point where we have just answered it. After all, did not the highest of authorities once poignantly make the point that nothing was worth this price by asking “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (9)
Against this, however, there is an argument to be made and, for those of us who enjoy and depend upon the advantages modern technology provides, it is a strong and compelling one. This argument takes the form of a question and it is simply this: would you, who live with the comforts and conveniences of a reduced workload, extended leisure time, electricity, refrigeration, indoor plumbing, air conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter, motor vehicle transportation, and modern communication and information technology, be willing to give all that up and live without it? Or for that matter, would you who live in the age of antibiotics and anesthesia, laser surgery and robotic prosthetics, and all the other advantages of modern medical technology, be willing to take your chances in a world without them?

Most people, we can safely assume, would answer no to both of those questions. The modern mind finds it very difficult to comprehend the idea that the men of previous ages might have possessed something that modern man has given up and that this something might actually be more important to human fulfillment and happiness than the things modern man has which previous ages did not have. Modern men look at those, like certain religious sects, who to varying degrees have opted to live without the benefits of modern technology, as objects of wonder and sources of amusement. (10)

Herein lies the strength of the argument. We would not be willing to give these advantages up and most would laugh at the very idea of it. Since we are not willing to live without those advantages, we clearly value them over anything that man has given up to obtain them, and hence for us they are clearly worth the cost. (11)

This argument is not as ironclad as it first appears, however.

Consider what would happen if we were to take the argument’s question, remove the examples of the positive benefits of modern technology listed and substitute the following: nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, industrial pollution, antibiotics-resistant superbugs, killer bees, computer viruses and identity theft we would expect the opposite answer. Some of these were intentionally invented by modern science in the same way that the positive examples were, others are unintended consequences, but they are also the products of modern science and technology. If we were to ask the question again with these inserted, I suspect we could expect the opposite result, i.e., that most people would say yes, they would gladly be willing to live without these things. Clearly modern science and technology has given us something other than an unmixed bag of blessings.

If that were the only thing that could be said against the argument it would not be worth saying for the discussion would degenerate into cherrypicking the positives and negatives of modern technology and setting them against each other, which would be a pointless exercise. There are two other points that need to be made against the argument.

The first is that it rests upon an assumption which we have already refuted, namely, that the blessings of modern technology are to be attributed solely to modern reason and science. Although modernity does not acknowledge it, reason and science, even modern reason and science, could not accomplish anything apart from tradition. This is the great paradox of modern science and technology. On the one hand, its achievements would not have happened had modern man not radically broken with the traditions of previous ages. On the other hand, they could not have happened had modern man not built upon the achievements of previous ages contained in that same tradition.

My point is not that we ought to take the results of modern science, divide them into positive and negative, and attribute the positive results to modern science’s continuity with past ages and the negative to its break with the past. My point is that science is not something that man came up with in the modern age. Science was transformed in the modern age, in some ways for the better, in others for the worse, but modern science, in however many ways it differs from the science of earlier ages, could not have just come into existence on its own, without that earlier science.

There is another assumption behind the argument, and that is the assumption that the answer to the question of whether modernity was worth the cost paid for it is determined by what we wish and will. This is the second point – that this very assumption is itself the problem with modernity.

Think back to the origins of modernity. In the traditional understanding, good and evil, right and wrong, were not what man decided they were, they were what they were. Man’s responsibility was to seek and to serve the Good, rather than whatever he happened to desire. He was to use his will to rule over his own inner desires and was to submit his will in obedience to the Good.

The Modern Age was born out of rebellion against this understanding. Against the traditional understanding, modern man declared that the good was whatever he decided it was and that he had decided that the highest good was the freedom of his will from traditional constraints, and that his liberated will was best put to use in pursuing whatever he desired.

The reason this produced an explosion of science and technology is because the freedom man had declared for his own will translated into slavery for all the rest of creation. Man’s emancipated will was the will to dominate all he surveyed, and just as a country at war will conscript all of its resources into serving the war effort, so modern man mobilized all of his reason and knowledge towards achieving the desired human control over all of nature. This is the essence of modern science. (12)

When you organize all of your resources towards achieving your goals you can accomplish an awful lot. When man mobilized all of his intellectual resources to the end of bending and transforming the world around him to serve his will he accomplished the wonders of the modern world. Much of what he accomplished would be considered good even by the traditional understanding of that concept. Man’s will, emancipated from traditional moral constraints, was now enslaved to his own inner passions and appetites, (13) but not all human desires are bad. Man desired to prevent and reverse blindness and invented laser surgery as a means to achieving this desire. That this desire and its accomplishment are good by the traditional understanding is evident in the first words Jesus offered to the messenger of John the Baptist as evidence that He was the Messiah “the blind receive their sight”. (14)

The problem is not with the good things we have accomplished through modern science and technology. The problem is with what we have become through liberating our will and appetites from traditional constraints, bending and transforming creation to serve our will and appetites, and making even good and evil, right and wrong, into our servants, by declaring good to be what we decide it is rather than what it is.

To illustrate, consider a barren couple, who desire to have a child but have been unable to conceive. Their own parents are all eager to be grandparents, they can provide children with a good home, and are heartbroken over their inability to produce a child. The modern scientist comes along and tells them that through the miracle of the technology of in vitro fertilization, they will now be able to have a child. Undoubtedly, the desire is a good desire, and the end is a good end. To achieve that end hundreds of extra fertilized embryos have to be produced. Science has a use for those embryos, however. Research on embryonic stem cells can potentially help scientists develop cures for chronic conditions and perhaps even regenerate limbs. These too are good desires and good ends.

Now think about that for a second. To achieve the first good desire, the blessing of an infertile couple with a baby, we have to produce large numbers of human lives (15) knowing that they will never develop into mature, adult human beings. In other words, we have turned human life into a product to be manufactured, the manufacturing of which produces a surplus beyond what we can use. Since we have that surplus anyway, and can accomplish other good things by subjecting it to scientific research, we reason we should go ahead and do so, thus turning manufactured human lives into laboratory rats. Yet many in the modern world in which we live see no problem with science going ahead and achieving these good ends through these means. (16)

We cannot bend and transform nature and the world to serve our will without also bending and transforming ourselves in the process, and when we refuse to acknowledge the rule of good as it is over our own will, but insist upon making good be what we decide it to be and making our own will and desire the final judge over everything, we transform ourselves into something very ugly and inhuman indeed.

(1) Christopher Boesch and Hedwige Boesche. 1990. “Tool use and tool making in wild chimpanzees.” Folia Primatologica, 54:86-89.

(2) This is part of what French Calvinist Jacques Ellul called “the technological bluff” in his volume of that title, first published in French in 1988, the English translation of which by Geoffrey W. Bromiley was published by William B. Eerdmans of Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1990. In his foreword Ellul wrote “The bluff consists essentially of rearranging everything in terms of technical progress, which with prodigious diversification offers us in every direction such varied possibilities that we can imagine nothing else…And when I say bluff, it is because so many successes and exploits are ascribed to techniques,…because technique is regarde in advance as the only solution to collective problems…or individual problems…and because at the same time it is seen as the only chance for progress and development in any society.” (p. xvi)

(3) Ellul did not use the term this way. He used “technique” to refer to “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity” and “technologie” to refer to the systematic study of the same. His English translators do not always follow his usage. John Wilkinson’s translation of his 1954 La Technique, for example, was published in English by Alfred A. Knopf of New York in 1964, under the title The Technological Society. It is from the latter that the definition of technique is taken. Canadian philosopher George Grant, who was much influenced by this book, disagreed with Ellul’s usage, and made the case that technology was the best possible word to describe the phenomenon. Formed by the combination of the Greek words for art (in the sense of that which is made) and science (in the sense of that which is known), technology, Grant argued, denoted a combination and absolute co-penetration of making and knowing which was unique to modern times. Examples of this argument can be found in his 1975 lecture to the Royal Society of Canada “Knowing and Making”, published on pages 407-417 of The George Grant Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), compiled and edited by William Christian and Sheila Grant, in his Massey College lecture “The Computer Does Not Impose On Us the Ways It Should Be Used”, found on pages 418-434 of the same volume, and in “Thinking About Technology”, a re-worked version of the same lecture, published as the first essay in his Technology and Justice (Toronto: Anansi, 1986) on pages 11-34.

(4) Examples include Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818) and Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Will to Power.

(5) The thought that such blessings would come with a price tag attached is foreign to modern thought, despite modern man’s resemblance to Oscar Wilde’s cynic, who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is well to keep in mind the Spanish proverb George Grant was fond of quoting “take what you want, said God, but pay for it.”

(6) The first volume of Der Untergang des Abendlandes, with the subtitle Gestalt und Wirklichkeit, was published in Munich by C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung in 1918. The second volume, subtitled Welthistorische Perspektiven, was published by the same company in 1922. The English translation by Charles Francis Atkinson, was published by Alfred A. Knopf of New York under the title The Decline of the West. The first volume of the translation, Form and Actuality, came out in 1926, and the second volume Perspectives of World-History in 1928.

(7) Nietzsche, in his first book The Birth of Tragedy (1872) characterized the two sides in the struggle between chaos and order, as Dionysian (after the god of wine and revelry) and Appollonian (after the god of light and beauty). The ancient Athenians, he believed, had created a balance between the two by imposing the Appollonian order of dramatic dialogue on the Dionysian music of the chorus in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, a balance that was promptly destroyed in the New Tragedy of Euripides and by the rationalism of Socrates.

(8) I say “agreed to pay” because Goethe altered the ending of the story. In the original legend, based loosely upon a sixteenth century alchemist who blew himself up, the story ends with Faust being torn to pieces by demons and his soul dragged down to hell. Goethe’s version ends with the redemption of Faust.

(9) Mark 8:36

(10) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOfZLb33uCg


(11) It is worth pointing out here, what George Grant noted about “values”, that they are the modern substitute for the Good. Whereas the Good was, values are chosen, created, and made. The concept is Nietzschean in origin, although, as Grant ironically observed, many who would hate to see themselves as followers of Nietzsche, have borrowed it. See Grant’s Time as History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), his essay “Nietzsche and the Ancients: Philosophy and Scholarship”, the fourth essay in Technology and Justice found on pages 79-95, and the excerpts from his 1964 talk “Value and Technology” found on pages 387-394 of The George Grant Reader.

(12) As George Grant put it “the modern unity of the sciences is realized around the ideal of mastery”, Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1969), p. 116.

(13) That allowing oneself to be led by one’s appetites enslaves rather than truly liberates, is where Athens and Jerusalem meet, having been taught by Plato and Aristotle in the former, and by Jesus Christ and St. Paul in the latter.

(14) Matthew 11:5

(15) When a human sperm fertilizes a human egg resulting in a zygote, the result is immediately both alive – growth through cell division and replication begins immediately – and human, possessing a full set of human chromosomes marking it as human and belonging to no other species. A human embryo is indisputably a human life.

(16) As the previous notes will indicate,my thinking on this subject has been heavily influenced by George Grant. His 1986 Technology and Justice, which begins with the essay “Thinking About Technology” ends with two essays co-written with his wife Sheila, “The Language of Euthanasia” and “Abortion and Rights”, addressing two ways in which human life is degraded in the modern technological society.

Caution and Change

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up” – Robert Frost

Lucius Carey, the 2nd Viscount Falkland, who died fighting for the House of Stuart in the English Civil War, once said “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” He made this remarkable statement in the context of a speech given in 1641. The previous December, the Puritans of London had presented the “Root and Branch” petition to Parliament which called for the abolition of the episcopal government of the Church of England. Out of the petition arose the Root and Branch Bill, which would have replaced the episcopacy with a presbyterian church government . The Bill passed the House of Commons but was defeated in the House of Lords. Lord Falkland’s speech, including the famous words quoted above, was given in response to the Root and Branch petition, and in defense of the Anglican bench of bishops.

When the radicals won the English Civil War they deposed and murdered King Charles I, placing Britain under the dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, and abolished the house of bishops. Puritan rule proved so disastrous that after Cromwell’s death, Parliament restored the episcopacy of the Church of England, its Prayer Book and its authorized Bible, and brought Charles II back from exile and placed him upon his father’s throne.

The English were lucky that they were able to undo the damage which the Puritans had done. There are other countries which have not been as fortunate. Their revolutions were so complete that the will and ability to go back was simply not present. In this we see the wisdom of Lord Falkland’s words. It is often far easier to make a change than to undo it once you have made it and found you didn’t like it. Therefore, we should exercise a great deal of caution before tampering with things, especially things that have been established for a long time and have the weight of precedent and prescription behind them.

There is a common saying which expresses this same truth that Lord Falkland stated 371 years ago. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

Lord Falkland died fighting for his king and for the established episcopal Church of England. By the end of the 17th Century, those who supported the cause for which he fought and died, had organized themselves into the Tory Party, which in the 19th Century would be reorganized into the Conservative Party. While the party often seems to have moved far from the principles upon which it was founded, if asked for a quote that summarized the ideas of small-c, philosophical conservatism in a nutshell, Falkland’s remark about change would fit the bill nicely.

Liberals and progressives frequently misconstrue the conservative view of change in two ways.

The first is to say that we are blind supporters of the status quo who oppose all change. But Falkland’s maxim does not preclude all change, only unnecessary change. “Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation”, Russell Kirk wrote, in the sixth of his “canons of conservatism” (1).

The second is to say that once a change proposed by a liberal or progressive has been accomplished, we conservatives are forbidden by our own philosophy, to try and undo that change, because undoing the change is itself also a change. The word “reactionary” was originally a term of abuse coined by progressives and liberals to refer to someone who tried to undo the changes they had accomplished. “A true conservative”, the progressive claims “cannot be a reactionary”. That is nonsense, however. A large part of the reason the conservative recommendation of caution and prudence before changing something is sensible is because it is easier to make the change than to undo it if we find the change is for the worse. If that is the case, it makes no sense to take that same recommendation of caution and prudence as precluding all attempts to undo a change for the worse if it is possible so to do. Prudence, of course, should be exercised in deciding to undo a progressive change as much as it should be exercised before making the change in the first place. But conservative principles do not mean that once progressives have saddled us with an obnoxious change we must therefore consider ourselves to be forever stuck with it. A conservative can, and often should, be a reactionary.

This is all the more true because of the unfortunate fact that the wisdom of the caution and prudence counseled by conservatism, is very often best seen after the time to exercise it has passed, and an ill-conceived innovation has been made.

The period beginning with the end of the Second World War has been an era that has seen rapid and tremendous social changes in Western countries. By social changes, I mean changes to the ways we interact with other people and to the contextual framework of rules and institutions within which that interaction takes places. The social changes to which I refer are not changes to minor customs, manners, and rules. They are changes to fundamental patterns of behaviour. Indeed, the most radical changes have been to the most fundamental pattern of behaviour of all.

Human beings belong to one of two sexes, male and female. The physical union of the sexes is the means whereby the human species propagates itself. Since human beings are not immortal the propagation of the species is absolutely necessary for human survival. There is not much of a threat that the species will die out from people losing interest in sexual intercourse. The urge to seek out and form a union with someone of the other sex is one of the strongest instinctual drives hardwired into human beings. There is, however, a threat to ordered, civilized society that comes from the opposite direction, the threat that we will follow our urges wherever they may lead us.

The reason this is a threat should be obvious. The propagation of the species requires more than just sexual reproduction. Human children are not born with the ability to survive on their own. They cannot feed or clothe themselves at birth, they cannot find shelter, they cannot protect themselves if attacked. They need others to do these things for them and to train them to do these things for themselves. Furthermore, human children require more than just the basic training necessary for survival. They also need training in how to interact with and cooperate with other people in the society to which they belong.

Who are they supposed to get all of this from?

The best people to provide for and protect children when they are helpless, to train them to take care of themselves, and to raise them to be functioning members of society, are the people who brought them into the world in the first place, their father and their mother. Now that is clearly not always possible. Sometimes a child is orphaned, for example. There also needs to be the qualification that in saying that parents are the best people to raise their own children we do not mean parents by themselves. Obviously a father and mother, with the help and support of their own fathers and mothers and their siblings, is better than a father and mother by themselves, and it is better yet when the family has the further support of their friends and neighbors in the community in which they live. This qualification itself needs to be qualified, however. As valuable as the contribution of friends, neighbors and community may be, it is valuable as a support for parents in their role of child raising and not as a substitute for them. (2)

For this reason, human societies have traditionally imposed rules regarding sexual behaviour on their members. The exact details of the rules have varied from society to society but they all encourage the same basic pattern of behaviour in which a man and a woman marry each other and raise their children together, and they all discourage people from irresponsibly indulging their sexual appetites in a selfish pursuit of sensual gratification.

Surely if there is any area which requires long and hard serious thought and a high degree of caution and prudence before making any changes it is to this pattern of behaviour and to this set of rules. Yet the post-World War II era has seen change after radical change in just this area. These have not been merely cosmetic changes to the details of the rules either. The opposite of the message conveyed in the old rules is now being openly and actively proclaimed throughout society. The pattern of man and woman marry and raise their children together is now dismissed as antiquated and obsolete in many circles. Social restraints on sexual behaviour, even those not backed up by the force of law, are now widely considered to be intrusions into what is a “private” matter.

Those who defend these changes often do so on the grounds that technological advancements have rendered the old rules obsolete. (3) This argument is based upon a misunderstanding of why these rules were there in the first place. It is based upon the idea that the rules existed primarily to protect individuals from such consequences of sexual activity as unwanted pregnancies and venereal disease. Since the development of effective contraception, treatments and preventative technology for venereal disease has lessened the consequences of sexual activity, the need for the old rules has been largely eliminated.

This argument is not entirely wrong. The protection of individuals from harsh consequences to sexual behaviour was part of the purpose for the old rules. It was not the whole purpose, however, or even the primary purpose. The primary reason we had those rules was because it is in the best interests of an orderly, civilized, society that children be brought up, whenever possible, by a father and mother committed to each other and the raising of their children and that it is against the interests of society and civilization for people to allow their actions to be dominated by their instinctual appetites and drives. This reason for the old rules has not been diminished in the slightest by technological developments.

That civilization rests upon human beings controlling their animal instincts and passions rather than being controlled by them is an insight as old as civilization itself. Plato, in his Republic, wrote that the human soul included reason, will, and appetite and that in the rightly ordered soul the will would enforce the rule of reason over the appetites. The rightly ordered city, he further argued, would mirror this, being governed by the philosopher-kings, whose laws would be enforced by the guardians, over the workers. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, described virtues, i.e., positive character traits, as habits of consistently choosing the middle path between the extremes of self-indulgence on the one hand and excessive austerity on the other. The cultivation of virtue in a rightly-ordered society was how these philosophers of ancient Athens conceived civilization, the closest approximation of ideal justice attainable by men on earth. (4)

Human beings are capable of civilization because of those elements of our nature which set us apart from the other animals not those elements which we have in common with the other animals and depends upon the former being in control of our actions rather than the latter. While this means that the exercise of reason and will is necessary for civilization it does not mean that they are sufficient. The last century provided abundant evidence that reason and will can be used against society, civilization, and the good of mankind, as much as they can be used in support of these things. Something else then must be necessary as well.

Another ability human beings possess, in addition to reason and will, is the ability to learn from the experience of those who have gone before us, to add our own experience to that, and to pass this cumulative, collective, body of experience down to future generations. It is this ability which enables us to acquire and pass on the skill of making right decisions, of using our reason and will wisely and well.

In the Modern Age we came to place a very high value on one part of our cumulative body of experience and knowledge at the expense of other parts. Michael Oakeshott in his essay “Rationalism and Politics” wrote that “Every science, every art, every practical activity requiring skill of any sort, indeed every human activity whatsoever, involves knowledge”. (5) He then went on to say that “universally, this knowledge is of two sorts, both of which are always involved in any actual activity.” These he identified as technical and practical knowledge. (6) Technical knowledge is knowledge of techniques or methods, i.e. of systematic ways of achieving ends. Oakeshott wrote that technical knowledge is “susceptible of formulation in rules, principles, directions, maxims – comprehensively in propositions.” Practical knowledge is knowledge which cannot be so formulated but without which “the mastery of any skill, the pursuit of any concrete activity is impossible”.

According to Oakeshott:

Rationalism is the assertion that what I have called practical knowledge is not knowledge at all, the assertion that, properly speaking, there is no knowledge which is not technical knowledge. The Rationalist holds that the only element of knowledge involved in any human activity is technical knowledge, and that what I have called practical knowledge is really only a sort of nescience which would be negligible if it were not positively mischievous. (7)

It is difficult to argue with Oakeshott’s contention that our concept of knowledge has been so truncated. (8) This sheds light on the matter which we have been considering in a number of different ways.

As we have seen, those who regard the social changes since World War II favourably, argue that modern technology has made the old rules obsolete by solving the problems which made those rules necessary. This is demonstrably false. Out of the sexual revolution came a demand for legal, easily obtainable, abortions, a demand which makes no sense if the development of effective contraception just before the sexual revolution, solved the problem of unwanted pregnancies. This claim, however, does point us to the real genesis of the revolution – faith in our unlimited ability to solve all our problems through the application of reason and science to the development of technology. Such faith could only have developed in an intellectual climate heavily influenced by the modern Rationalism of which Oakeshott wrote, which rejects all but technical knowledge. (9)

If we abandoned social rules and norms because of a misguided belief that our state of technological advancement has eliminated our need for them then the reverse side to this same coin is that we have abandoned these rules and norms because we no longer appreciate the wisdom contained in them. Moral wisdom is not technical knowledge. It is not concerned with the question of how to achieve our ends fastest, cheapest, and with the greatest ease. It is concerned with whether the ends we are seeking to achieve are right or wrong and whether the means we employ to achieve those ends are right or wrong. To someone who believes that technical knowledge is the only real knowledge, moral questions are unnecessary impediments to the achieving of goals. What does it matter that human embryos are brought into existence and made the subject of laboratory experiments if it allows us to achieve our end of preventing male pattern baldness? Such moral objections are standing in the way of our progress!

It is moral knowledge, however, and not technical knowledge, that civilization is built upon. It is more important to know how to live together and cooperate with other members of your community and society than it is to know the most efficient way of making a kitchen table. The ability to decide to do the right thing and to do so consistently so as to form a virtuous habit and build a moral character is more important than any conceivable marketable skill. This sort of knowledge cannot be formulated as a technique. It is to be found in the bank of accumulated human experience however. It can be acquired and it can be imparted to others. Moral upbringing in the home, from one’s father and mother, supported by one’s extended family, is the best way known to man of passing this kind of knowledge down. We could employ our reason and science for a million years and still not be able to improve upon it.

Perhaps then, we should have exercised a bit more prudence and caution before we introduced changes which threaten the stability of the family and the loss of the moral knowledge passed down through it.




(1)Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, Seventh Revised Edition (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 1953, 1986) p. 9. The sixth canon begins with the words “Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress” and ends by saying “a statesman’s chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.”

(2) This qualification is necessary because there is a kind of pseudo-communitarianism today which uses this kind of language as a cloak for what is essentially the idea that the state should take over the responsibility of raising children, and delegate that responsibility back to parents as its closely supervised and easily replaceable deputies. This, for example, is what I understand US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to mean by “It takes a village”, the African proverb she borrowed for the title of her 1996 book.

(3) For a recent example of this kind of reasoning see Michael Lind’s article for the e-zine Salon.com entitled “What Killed Social Conservatism?” : ) http://www.salon.com/2012/05/22/what_killed_social_conservatism/singleton/


(4) The word civilization comes from the Latin word for city, which was the sovereign political society at that time. In Greek the title of Plato’s Republic is Politia which refers to the condition of living in a polis, i.e., a city-state. Aristotle’s Politics which is a continuation of his Nicomachean Ethics is Politika. This term means “things which concern a city” and is, of course, the root of our English politics, which originally meant “the art of statecraft” before it degenerated to its current, less noble, meaning.

(5) Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, (London: Metheun & Co., 1962), p. 7. The essay “Rationalism in Politics”, which was originally published in the Cambridge Journal in 1947, is the first essay in this book and the only essay from it which I will be quoting in this essay.

(6) This does not mean that all human knowledge can be classified as either “technical” or “practical”. He was only talking about knowledge that is required for doing things.

(7) Ibid., p. 11. The bold indicates italics in the original. The previous quotations about technical and practical knowledge come from pages 10 and 8 respectively.

(8) Consider the way the meaning of the word “science”, which our language borrowed from the Latin word for “knowledge” has changed. Originally “science” encompassed all forms of knowledge, the way the German equivalent Wissenschaft does. Today, it is limited in meaning to empirically acquired knowledge of the material world. The relationship between this and what Oakeshott was talking about is this: empirical science is primarily the means for improving technique. The explosion of empirical science in recent centuries has been driven by the search for the optimal technique for achieving our ends – the optimal technique being the one which has the best overall balance in speed, cost, ease and efficiency.

(9) There may be significance to the fact that these changes have all taken place since World War II. Historian John Lukacs maintains that we are living at the end of the Modern Age. Others maintain that the age which began with the Renaissance has already come to an end. The event that I have seen most often identified as the end of the Modern Age, by those who maintain it has already passed is World War II. “Post-modernists” usually maintain that the Modern Age ended in failure, that the calamitous events which marked its close brought about disillusionment with its ideals and a new skepticism towards all meta-narratives (theories that purport to be able to explain everything). John Lukacs, on the other hand, argues that forces which have shaped and driven the Modern Age have been victorious. He argues, for example, that liberalism is a spent force because it has accomplished all of its goals. Whatever one makes of all of this, if the rationalism that Oakeshott described as “the most remarkable fashion of post-Renaissance Europe” is a denial of all knowledge but the technical, then that Rationalism would appear to have triumphed around the time of World War II. For despite the fact that the conflict ended with the supreme demonstration of how the application of reason and science to the development of technique can be used to accomplish previously unimaginable evil this did not prevent the spread immediately thereafter of faith in technology.