Technology and Transcendence

Ellen Rose

The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention by David F. Noble (Alfred A. Kno f, 1997).

In the 1997 film, Contact, Jodie Foster plays Dr. Ellie Arroway, an astronomer who spends her life in pursuit of life on other planets. Informing Ellie's search for extraterrestrial life is her quest for meaning in a universe which has dealt with her rather cruelly, taking both her parents from her at an early age and leaving her to fend for herself in a harsh and often unjust world. Ellie repudiates religious faith, and claims to believe only in that which she can see for herself, and which she can verify through scientific analysis. When asked whether she believes in God, she responds, "As a scientist, I rely on empirical evidence and in this matter I don't believe there is data either way." Ellie and her lover, Palmer Joss, a religious scholar and man of faith, would seem to be, as the blurb on the video case has it, "on opposite ends of the spectrum." But it becomes increasingly clear both to the viewer and to Ellie herself that faith is after all the unmistakable basis of her scientific enterprise. While her gaze into the heavens may be mediated by radio telescopes, satellite dishes, sophisticated computer hardware and software, and a host of other high-tech devices, Ellie's search for alien life in the end comes down to a personal quest to understand the nature of the universe and humanity's place within it. In other words, it is intensely religious.

At first glance, David Noble's The Religion of Technology might seem to have little in common with a media spectacle about the search for extraterrestrial life. Noble, a professor of History at York University, has written a careful, thorough, and engrossing compendium of historical research intended to show that, while religion and technology are traditionally opposed in our society, they are actually inseparable constructs which have evolved in synch with each other for the past one thousand years. Nevertheless, reading Noble's book shortly after watching Contact, I was struck by the connections between these two apparently dissimilar texts. Both The Religion of Technology and Contact approach in intelligent, meaningful, albeit very different ways the points of connection between categories traditionally viewed as entirely inviolable and distinct from each other: science/technology and religion. Both texts explore the similarities between those individuals who believe that they will discover truth through the investigation of experiential phenomena and those who believe that an understanding of the meaning of existence can only be derived through absolute faith in mystical realms and powers which cannot be seen. In one case, those similarities are epitomized in the relationship between two people; in the other, the similarities are traced through the panorama of one thousand years of human history.

The notion of a connection between religion and technology which both Contact and The Religion of Technology explore is fundamentally contrary to the accepted wisdom of our times. As a society, we find it necessary to insist upon firm distinctions between things religious and 'things technological, to deny that fate or faith might have any part in the creation and maintenance of those secular technologies upon which our life now depends-the computers which pilot our planes, the procedures which unclog our arteries. Yet it is also undeniable that the apparently inviolate domains of religion and technology penetrate each other in many and unforeseen ways. Ministers and priests explore the innovative use of multimedia in the delivery of religious services. Cyber-sinners go to confession on-line, selecting their shortcomings from a menu of sins and then letting the computer determine the appropriate penance. Society as a whole is transferring its niillennial fears of divine retribution to concerns with the devastating impacts of a massive computer "outage." And, ultimately, human progress and destiny are increasingly linked to technological advancement, in the same way that medievals once conceived them to be linked to a divine order.

While Contact explores the links between the traditional categories of technology and religion by resolutely directing its gaze, like Ellie Arroway's telescopes, towards the future, The Religion of Technology seeks to offer insight into the present situation by providing a view of the past which is at once panoramic and microscopic. Noble's book is panoramic in the sense that it spans the entire millennium, tracing the simultaneous development of religious and technological thought since 1000 AD, and microscopic in the sense that it provides a remarkable and fascinating wealth of historical detail. We learn, for example, that Charles Babbage, whose Calculating Engine is generally considered to be the predecessor of the modem computer, used his device to demonstrate the truth of miracles and the probability of resurrection (p. 72); that Jacob Bigelow, the Harvard professor who coined the word "technology" in the 1860s, believed that technologists were God-like in their ability to extend humanity's dominion over nature (p. 93); and that in 1958, NASA engineers attempted to "repair" a faulty rocket by wiring a St. Christopher medal to it, with the hope that the rocket's inexplicable failures would be remedied through the "Addition of Divine Guidance" (p. 136).

In taking this historical perspective, Noble continues a long tradition of writings about the history of technology, including Louis Mumford's classic, Technics and Civilization (1934)-in which the author also summarizes a thousand years of technological achievements-and Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (1964). I have long believed in the importance of the historical perspective which such books provide in helping us come to terms with the social and cultural meanings of cur-rent technological developments. The tendency in contemporary discourse on technology, and computer technology in particular, is to contemplate technological developments as isolated phenomena of our time, and to sever connections to the past by referring to these developments as "innovative" and "revolutionary." In The Religion of Technology, Noble continues the tradition of Mumford and Ellul by tracing the emergence of the current state of affairs across the centuries, and by viewing technology not simply as machinery rooted in time and place but also as an historical accretion of ideas and understandings which accompany the physical form.

However, Noble breaks with the tradition represented by the likes of Mumford and Ellul in one key respect. The latter tend to argue that religion has become increasingly secularized, sublimated like all social phenomena to technology's demands for utility and efficiency. "It was," says Ellul, "formerly believed that technique and religion were in opposition and represented two totally different dispensations.... But we can no longer hold such a boundlessly simplistic view. Ecstasy is subject to the world of technique and is its servant" (p. 423). Noble, however, essentially turns this argument on its head by claiming that, for the past one thousand years, religious longings to regain the Adarnic perfection lost with the Fall have been the main impulse behind scientific endeavours. Scientific and technological achievements may seem to be the inevitable product of a thought-world which valorizes rationality and computer-like logic, but according to Noble, they are really the expression of deep-rooted desires for salvation and transcendence. In short, he contends that "the present enchantment with things technological-the very measure of modem enlightenment - is rooted in religious myths and ancient imaginings"(p.2).

Noble traces this connection between technology and transcendence to the early Middle Ages, when monastic orders began elevating the "useful arts"-weaving, forging, glass-making, metal-casting, and so forth-as a means of recovering mankind's original divine image. Once associated with the idea of transcendence, technology soon became firmly wedded to a millenarian mentality, which perceived the attainment of human perfection through the practice of the useful arts as a means of hastening the End of the World. Thus, like many other explorers of his time, Christopher Columbus "believed himself divinely sent to open up a new way for the friars to fulfill the prophecies of the apocalypse, to convert the heathen, and to hasten the millennium" (p. 30). New navigational, map-making, shipbuilding, and other technologies were merely perceived as a means of achieving the promised recovery of perfection.

Ironically, it was in Columbus' New World, where the quest for progress was driven by a simultaneous enthusiasm for industrialization and religious revivalist movements, that the union between technology and transcendence would achieve its most potent manifestation. There, religious impulses would drive high-tech projects such as the development of atomic weaponry, the space program, artificial intelligence research, and the human genome project. Noble demonstrates that key figures in all of these projects were extremely religious and were motivated by the desire to achieve human salvation and God-like omniscience. In the case of the space program, for example, Wemer von Braun code-named the first effort to put man into space "Adam." Von Braun also justified the need to send humans into the heavens, when unmanned rockets could accomplish as much in the way of data collection, by stipulating that space travel was the final phase of man's "divinely ordained destiny" (p. 126).

But if technological development was once associated with the possibility of a return to Eden-the creation of a world in which people would be provided with a higher quality of life and freed from the need to perform repetitive and back-breaking tasks-scientific and technological developments have increasingly seemed to proceed with their own motive force, despite their consequences for human life. Indeed, our lives seem increasingly sublimated to the mandates of the technological imperative:

the notion that what can be done with technology will be done, regardless of the consequences. Space travel, artificial intelligence research, and other high-tech, high-cost projects continue apace, despite tangential or highly questionable benefits for humanity. Contact explores this theme by depicting technology ambiguously. It is the means by which Ellie is propelled into another world and enabled to achieve a transcendent vision of the universe. At the same time, however, the film depicts the continual struggles for power and domination, on both an individual and an international level, which underlie technological developments, and which seem to thwart rather than extend the possibilities for human freedom. The film thus compels us to question, with Palmer Joss, whether the world is indeed fundamentally a better place because of science and technology. Palmer concludes that it is not, and that as a result of the imperative to technologicize the world, we are more cut off from each other, and more unsure of our place in the universe, than ever before.

Like Palmer Joss in Contact, Noble is concerned with the way in which the scientific quest for truth and riieaning has disintegrated into a deification of technology and technological developments for their own sake, regardless of their impact upon human lives. Indeed, having established the connection between technology and transcendence, he proceeds to problematize that connection, and to suggest that it is "a menace." Now distilled into the secular language of orporate, govemment, and other interests, the popular yeaming for deliverance through technology diverts our attention from the serious social consequences of technological developments. Thus, says Noble,

 unrestrained technological development
 is allowed to proceed apace, without serious
 scrutiny or oversight-without reason. Pleas
 for some rationality, for reflection about
 pace and purpose, for sober assessment of
 costs and benefits-f6r evidence even of
 economic value, much less larger social
 gains-are dismissed as irrational. From
 within the faith, any and all criticism
 appears irrelevant, and irreverent.
 (p . 207)

Noble argues that technology and transcendence must be decoupled in the human imagination if we are to survive. This, however, entails a massive shift in a way of thinking that has been a thousand years in the making. Is such a decoupling possible, or even likely? We all know that science and its technological outcomes are now threatening as much as improving our way of life, but science nevertheless remains the valorized perspective. And if technological development began, as Noble contends, with the quest for Adamic perfection, it is increasingly motivated by an even more hubristic yearning for God-like powers to create life and control the universe. As the techno-gods of the new millennium, we no longer need to perceive the universe in terms of a divine order because technology has increasingly enabled us to impose our own order upon the world. As Ellul wrote, "It is unnecessary to evoke spiritual powers when machines give much better results" (p. 423).

In the end, skeptical scientist Ellie Affoway gives the final twist to Noble's argument when she suggests that God may be an idea we created "so we wouldn't feel so small and alone." Her suggestion invites us to speculate that the cultural phenomenon which Noble calls "the religion of technology," the quest to achieve pre-lapsarian perfection through technological development, is an offshoot of what we might call "the technology of religion." The latter phenomenon might suggest that all our frantic activity is a quest to emulate and claim the powers of a noumenal God who is, after all, the ultimate technology-an extension, not as Marshall McLuhan would have it, of the central nervous system, but of the bewildered and yearning soul.

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