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Technology and Religion
By Emmanual G. Mesthene

"The crisis of the churches is in the fear of irrelevance born of man's recovery of nerve... The resolution of this crisis may lie in the very power and temper of mind that have brought it about. The point ...is that man's newfound power and confidence enable him to pick up once more his partnership with God in doing the work of the world. His need to know God is therefore relatively greater now than it was in an earlier, more frightened time, when just to trust him seemed enough. By the same token, the churches are freed of the burden of doing man's work, and may find their new vocation in doing God's: in knowing God and showing him to man."

WHAT is new about our age, and what are the implications of What is new for the enterprise of theology and for the role of the churches in society?

The fact itself that there is something new is not new. There has been something new about every age, otherwise we would not be able to distinguish them in history. What we need to examine is what in particular is new about our age, for the new is not less new just because the old was also at one time new.

The mere prominence in our age of science and technology is not strikingly new, either. A veritable explosion of industrial technology gave its name to a whole age two centuries ago, and it is doubtful that any scientific idea will ever again leave an imprint on the world

A member of the faculty of Harvard University and director of its Program on Technology and Society, Dr. Mesthene was invited to present his views on his special field as related to religious values at the World Council Conference on Church and Society, Geneva, July, 1966. This is the full text of Dr. Mesthene's address; a shorter version has appeared in the Saturday Review, Nov. 19, 1966.

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so penetrating and pervasive as did Isaac Newton's a century before that.

It is not clear, finally, that what is new about our age is the rate at which it changes. What partial evidence we have, in the restricted domain of economics, for example, indicates the contrary. The curve of growth, for the hundred years or so that it can be traced, is smooth, and will not support claims of explosive change or discontinuous rise. For the rest, we lack the stability of concept, the precision of intellectual method, and the necessary data to make any reliable statements about the rate of social change in general.

I would therefore hold suspect all argument that purports to show that novelty is new with us, or that major scientific and technological influences are new with us, or that rapidity of social change is new with us. Such assertions, I think, derive more from revolutionary fervor and the wish to persuade than from tested knowledge and the desire to instruct.

Yet there is clearly something new, and its implications are important. I think our age is different from all previous ages in two major respects: first, we dispose, in absolute terms, of a staggering amount of physical power; second, and most important, we are beginning to think and act in conscious realization of that fact. We are therefore the first age that can aspire to be free of the tyranny of physical nature that has plagued man since his beginnings.

I

The consciousness of physical impossibility has had a long and depressing history. One might speculate that it began with early man's awe of the bruteness and recalcitrance of nature. Earth, air, fire, and water-the eternal, immutable elements of ancient physics -imposed their requirements on men, dwarfed them, outlived them, remained indifferent when not downright hostile to them. The physical world loomed large in the affairs of men, and men were impotent against it. Homer celebrated this fact by investing nature with gods, and the earliest philosophers recognized it by erecting each of the natural elements in turn-water, air, earth, and fire-into fundamental principles of all existence.

From that day to this, only the language has changed as successive ages encountered and tried to come to terms with physical necessity, with the sheer "rock-bottomness" of nature. It was submitted to

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as fate in the Athenian drama. It was conceptualized as ignorance by Socrates and as metaphysical matter by his pupils. It was labeled evil by the pre-Christians. It has been exorcized as the Devil, damned as flesh, or condemned as illicit by the church. It has been the principle of nonreason in modern philosophy, in the form of John Locke's substance, as Immanuel Kant's formless manifold, or as Henri Bergson's pure duration. It has conquered the mystic as nirvana, the psyche as the Id, and recent Frenchmen as the blind object of existential commitment.

What men have been saying in all these different ways is that physical nature has seemed to have a structure, almost a will of its own, that has not yielded easily to the designs and purposes of man. It has been a brute thereness, a residual, a sort of ultimate existential stage that allowed, but also limited, the play of thought and action.

It would be difficult to overestimate the consequences of this recalcitrance of the physical on the thinking and outlook of men. They have learned, for most of history, to plan and act around a permanent realm of impossibility. Man could travel on the sea, by sail or oar or breaststroke. But he could not travel in the sea. He could cross the land on foot, on horseback, or by wheel, but he could not fly over it. Legends such as those of Daedalus and Poseidon celebrated in art what men could not aspire to in fact.

Thinking was similarly circumscribed, There were myriad possibilities in existence, but they were not unlimited, because they did not include altering the physical structure of existence itself. Man could in principle know all that was possible, once and for all time. What else but this possibility of complete knowledge does Plato name in his Idea of the Good? The task of thought was to discern and compare and select from among this fixed and eternal realm of possibilities. Its options did not extend beyond it, any more than the chess-player's options extend beyond those allowed by the board and the pieces of his game. There was a natural law, men said, to which all human law was forever subservient, and which fixed the patterns and habits of what was thinkable.

There was occasionally an invention during all this time that did induce a physical change. It thus made something new possible, Eke adding a pawn to the chess game. New physical possibilities, are the result of invention; of technology, as we call it today. That is what "invention" and "technology" mean. Every invention, from

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the wheel to the rocket, has created new possibilities that did not exist before. But inventions in the past were few, rare, exceptional, and marvelous. They were unexpected departures from the norm. They were surprises that societies adjusted to after the fact. They were generally infrequent enough, moreover, so that the adjustments could be made slowly and unconsciously, without radical alteration of world views, or of traditional patterns of thought and action. The Industrial Revolution, as we call it, was revolutionary precisely because it ran into attitudes, values, and habits of thought and action that were completely unprepared to understand, accept, absorb, and change with it.

Today, if I may put it paradoxically, technology is becoming less revolutionary, as we recognize and seek after the power that it gives us. Inventions are now many, frequent, planned, and increasingly taken for granted. We will not be a bit surprised when we get to the moon. We would, on the contrary, be very surprised if we did not. We are beginning to use invention as a deliberate way to deal with the future, rather than seeing it only as an uncontrolled disrupting of the present. We no longer wait upon invention to occur accidentally. We foster and force it, because we see it as a way out of the heretofore inviolable constraints that physical nature has imposed upon us in the past.

Francis Bacon, in the sixteenth century, was the first to foresee the physical power potential in scientific knowledge. We are the first, as I have suggested, to have enough of that power actually at hand to create new possibilities almost at will. By massive physical changes deliberately induced, we can literally pry new alternatives out of nature. The ancient tyranny of matter has been broken, and we know it. We found, in the seventeenth century, that the physical world was not at all like what Aristotle had thought and Aquinas had taught. We are today coming to the further realization that the physical world need not be as it is. We can change it and shape it to suit our purposes.

Technology, in short, has come of age, not merely as technical capability, but as a social phenomenon. We have the power to create new possibilities, and the will to do so. By creating new possibilities, we give ourselves more choices. With more choices, we have more opportunities. With more opportunities, we can have more freedom, and with more freedom we can be more human.

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That, I think, is what is new about our age. We are recognizing that our technical prowess literally bursts with the promise of new freedom, enhanced human dignity, and unfettered aspiration.

II

At its best, then, technology is nothing if not liberating. Yet many fear it increasingly as enslaving, degrading, and destructive of man's most cherished values. It is important to note that this is so, and to try to understand why. I can think of four reasons.

First, we must not blink the fact that technology does indeed destroy some values. It creates a million possibilities heretofore undreamed of, but it also makes impossible some others heretofore enjoyed. The automobile makes real the legendary foreign land, but it also makes legendary the once real values of the ancient market place. Mass production puts Bach and Brueghel in every home, but it also deprives the careful craftsman of a market for the skill and pride he puts into his useful artifact. Modern plumbing destroys the village pump, and modern cities are hostile to the desire to sink roots into and grow upon a piece of land. Some values are unquestionably bygone. To try to restore them is futile, and simply to deplore their loss is sterile. But it is perfectly human to regret them for a time.

Second, technology often reveals what technology has not created: the cost in brutalized human labor, for example, of the few oases of past civilization whose values only a small elite could enjoy. Communications now reveal the hidden and make the secret public. Transportation displays the better to those whose lot has been the worse. Increasing productivity buys more education, so that more people read and learn and compare and hope and are unsatisfied. Thus technology often seems the final straw, when it is only illuminating rather than adding to the human burden.

Third, technology might be deemed an evil, because evil is unquestionably potential in it. We can explore the heavens with it, or destroy the world. We can cure disease, or poison entire populations. We can free enslaved millions, or enslave millions more. Technology spells only possibility, and is in that respect neutral. The new opportunities it gives us include new opportunities to make mistakes. massive power can lead to massive error so efficiently perpetrated

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as to be well-nigh irreversible. Technology is clearly not synonymous with the good. It can lead to evil.

Finally, and in a sense most revealing, technology is upsetting, because it complicates the world. This is a vague concern, hard to pin down, but I think it is a real one. The new alternatives that technology creates require effort to examine, understand, and evaluate them. We are offered more choices, which makes choosing more difficult. We are faced with the need to change, which upsets routines, inhibits reliance on habit, and calls for personal readjustments to more flexible postures. We face dangers that call for constant re-examination of values and a readiness to abandon old commitments for new ones more adequate to changing experience. The whole business of living seems to become harder.

This negative face of technology is sometimes confused with the whole of it. It can then cloud the understanding in two respects that are worth noting. It can lead to a generalized distrust of the power and works of the human mind by erecting a false dichotomy between the modern scientific and technological enterprises on the one hand, and some idealized and static prescientific conception of human values on the other. It can also color discussion of some important contemporary issues, that develop from the impact of technology on society, in a way that obscures rather than enhances understanding, and that therefore inhibits rather than facilitates the social action necessary to resolve them.

Because the confusions and discomfort attendant on technology are more immediate and therefore sometimes loom larger than its power and its promise, technology appears to some an alien and hostile trespasser upon the human scene. It thus seems indistinguishable from that other, older alien and hostile trespasser: the, ultimate and unbreachable physical necessity of which I have spoken. Then, since habit dies hard, there occurs one of those curious inversions of the imagination that are not unknown to history. Our newfound control over nature is seen as but the latest form of the tyranny of nature. The knowledge and therefore the mastery of the physical world that we have gained, the tools that we have hewed from nature and the human wonders we are building into her, are themselves feared as rampant, uncontrollable, impersonal technique that must surely, we are told, end by robbing us of our livelihood, our freedom, and our humanity.

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It is not an unfamiliar syndrome. It is reminiscent of the longtime prisoner who may shrink from the responsibility of freedom in preference for the false security of his accustomed cell. It is reminiscent even more of Socrates, who asked about that other prisoner, in the cave of ignorance, whether his eyes would not ache if he were forced to look upon the light of knowledge, "so that he would try to escape and turn back to the things which he could see distinctly, convinced that they really were clearer than these other objects now being shown to him." Is it so different a form of escapism from that, to ascribe impersonality and hostility to the knowledge and the tools that can free us finally from the age-long impersonality and hostility of a recalcitrant physical nature?

Technology has two faces: one that is full of promise, and one that can discourage and defeat us. The freedom that our power implies from the traditional tyranny of matter-from the evil we have known-carries with it the added responsibility and burden of learning to deal with matter and to blunt the evil, along with all the other problems we have always had to deal with. That is another way of saying that more power and more choice and more freedom require more wisdom if they are to add up to more humanity. The malaise of our age, as many have noted, is that our power increases faster than our ability to understand it and to use it well. But that, surely, is a challenge to be wise, not an invitation to despair.

An attitude of despair can also, as I have suggested, color particular understandings of particular problems, and thus obstruct intelligent action. I think, for example, that it has distorted the public debate about the effects of technology on work and employment.

The problem has persistently taken the form of fear that machines will put people permanently out of work. That fear has prevented recognition of a distinction between two fundamentally different questions. The first is a question of economic analysis and economic and manpower policy about which a great deal is known, which is susceptible to analysis by well-developed and rigorous methods, and on the dimensions and implications of which there is a very high degree of censensus among the professionally competent.

That consensus is that the level of employment is a function of overall economic growth rather than principally of the mechanization and automation of production; that there is little prospect of enforced leisure for large segments of the work force; that there is no

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evidence either of a growing group of unemployables in the society, or of a progressive impoverishment of the labor force resulting from the increasing efficiency of machines.

There are, of course, and there always will be, serious problems for particular individuals, particular occupations, and particular industries resulting from shifts in machines and skills as economic and technological changes continue to occur. But the theoretical and empirical knowledge, the policy instruments, and the social mechanisms to deal with such problems are better developed than in any comparable field of social action. They include measures to signal and cushion the shocks of transition that are inevitable in a changing economy, no matter how high and consistent its overall rate of growth. Where action still falls short of need in, this field, it is for lack of political will, not knowledge, that it does so.

There is not much that is significantly new, in other words, in the probable consequences of automation on employment. Automation is but the latest form of mechanization, which has been recognized as an important factor in economic change at least since the Industrial Revolution. What is new is a heightened social awareness of the implications of machines for men, which derives from the unprecedented scale, prevalence, and visibility of modern technological innovation. That is the second question. It, too, is a question of work, to be sure, but it is not one of employment in the economic connotation of the term. It is a distinct question, that has been too often confused with the economic one because it has been formulated, incorrectly, as a question of automation and employment.

This question is much less a question of whether people will be employed than of what they can most usefully do, given the broader range of choices that technology can make available to them. It is less a technical economic question than a question of the values and quality of work. It is not a question of what to do with increasing leisure, but of how to define new occupations that combine social utility and personal satisfaction.

I see no evidence, in other words, that society will need less work done on some day in the future when machines may be largely satisfying its material needs, or that it will not value and reward that work. But we are, first, a long way still from that day, so long as there remain societies less affluent than the most affluent. Second,

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there is work of education, integration, creation, and eradication of disease and discontent to do that is barely tapped so long as most people must labor to produce the goods that we consume. The more machines can take over what we do, the more we can do what machines cannot do. That, too, is liberation: the liberation of history's slaves, finally to be people.

That, I think, is the real meaning of technology for work. To claim the contrary, that machines will impoverish and dehumanize us, is to stand our time on its head, and to misread the evidence before us. It is to abandon reason for despair and argument for cant, and it prompts me to recall, for a new generation, Franklin Roosevelt's insight that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

III

Such basically irrational fears of technology have a counterpart in popular fears of science itself. Here, too, anticipatory despair in the face of some genuine problems posed by science and technology can cloud the understanding.

It is admittedly horrible, for example, to contemplate the unintentional evil implicit in the ignorance and fallibility of man as he strives to control his environment and improve his lot. What untoward effects might our grandchildren suffer from the drugs that cure our ills today? What monsters might we breed unwittingly while we are learning to manipulate the genetic code? What are the tensions on the human psyche of a cold and rapid automated world? What political disaster do we court by providing 1984's Big Brother with all the tools he will ever need? Better perhaps, in Hamlet's words,

to bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of.

Why not stop it all? Stop automation! Stop tampering with life and heredity! Stop the senseless race to the moon! The cry is an old one. It was first heard, no doubt, when the wheel was invented. The technologies of the bomb, the automobile, the spinning jenny, gunpowder, printing, all provoked social dislocation accompanied by similar cries of "Stop!" Well, but why not stop now, while there may still be a minute left before the clock strikes twelve?

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We do not stop, I think, for three reasons: we do not want to; we cannot, and still be men; and we should not.

It is not at all clear that atom bombs will kill more people than wars have ever done, but energy from the atom might one day erase the frightening gap between the more and less favored peoples of the world. Was it more tragic to infect a hundred children with a faulty polio vaccine than to have allowed the scourge free reign forever? It is not clear that the monster that the laboratory may create, in searching the secret of life, will be more monstrous than those that nature will produce unaided if its secrets remain forever hidden. Is it really clear that rampant multiplication is a better ultimate fate for man than to suffer, but eventually survive, the mistakes that go with learning? The first reason we do not stop is that I do not think we would decide, on close examination, that we really want to.

The second reason is that we cannot, if we would retain our humanity. Aristotle saw a long time ago that "man by nature desires to know." He will probe and learn all that his curiosity prompts him to and his brain allows, so long as there is life within him, The stoppers of the past have always lost in the end, whether it was Socrates, or Christ, or Galileo, or Einstein, or Bonhoeffer, or Boris Pasternak they tried to stop. Their intended victims are the heroes.

We do not stop, finally, because we would not stop being men. I do not believe that even those who decry science the loudest would willingly concede that the race has now been proved incapable of coping with its own creations. That admission would be the ultimate in dehumanization, for it would be to surrender the very qualities of intelligence, courage, vision, and aspiration that make us human. "Stop," the end, is the last desperate cry of the man who abandons man because he is defeated by the responsibility of being human. It is the final failure of nerve.

I am recalling that celebrated phrase, "the failure of nerve," in order to introduce a third and final example of how fear and pessimism can color understanding and confuse our values. It is the example of those who see the sin of pride in man's confident mastery of nature.

The phrase, "the failure of nerve," was first used by the eminent classical scholar, Gilbert Murray, to characterize the change of temper that occurred in Hellenistic civilization at the turn of our era. The Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. believed in the

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ultimate intelligibility of the universe. There was nothing in the nature of existence or of man that was inherently unknowable. They accordingly believed also in the power of the human intelligence to know all there was to know about the world, and to guide man's career in it.

The wars and mixing of cultures that marked the subsequent period brought with them vicissitude and uncertainty that shook this classic faith in the intelligibility of the world and in the capacity of men to know and to do. There was henceforth to be a realm of knowledge and action available only to God, not subject to reason or to human effort. Men, in other words, more and more turned to God to do for them what they no longer felt confident to do for themselves. That was the failure of nerve.

The burden of what I have been saying thus far is that times are changing. We have the power and will to probe and change physical nature, to control our own biology and that of the animals and plants in our environment, to modify our weather, to alter human personality, to reach the moon today and the rest of the heavens tomorrow. No longer are God, the human soul, or the mysteries of life improper objects of inquiry. We are ready to probe whatever our imagination prompts us to. We are convinced again, for the first time since the Greeks, of the essential intelligibility of the universe: there is nothing in it that is in principle not knowable. As the sociologist Daniel Bell has put it, "Today we feel that there are no inherent secrets in the universe, and this is one of the significant changes in the modern moral temper." That is another way of stating what is new about our age. We are witnessing a widespread recovery of nerve.

Is this confidence a sin? "Probably most Christians," according to Gilbert Murray, "are inclined to believe that without some failure and sense of failure, without a contrite heart and conviction of sin, man can hardly attain the religious life." I would suspect that this statement is still true of most Christians, although it is clear from the recent literature that a number of theologians are coming to a different view. I think myself that to see a sense of failure as a condition of religious experience is a historical relic, dating from a time when an indifferent nature and a hostile world so overwhelmed men that they gave up thought for consolation. To persist in such a view today, when nature is coming increasingly under control as a result

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of restored human confidence and power, is both to distort reality and to sell religion short. It surely does no glory to God to rest his power on the impotence of man.

IV

Such misconstruings of the nature of our age as I have been describing-whether of its economy, its science, or its temper-threaten the religious enterprise by blinding it to the new role it must define for itself if it is to remain effective in the world. They come from men who have yet to recover their nerve-or who have lost it anew -and who therefore see only evil in power, danger in knowledge, and sin in human confidence. They thereby obscure the crucial question that technology raises for religion: the question of its relevance. Religion is in crisis today because it has largely lost its old role and has yet to find its new one. "After twenty centuries of doing man's work," I once wrote in a parenthesis, the churches "are now having to learn to do God's."

What is man's work, and what is God's? Man's work is to be wise and good. It is God's work to reveal himself to man as wisdom and as goodness. It is man's work to discern value and to realize possibility. It is God's to be ultimate value and eternal possibility, and to imbue man with the grace to know and to worship him. It is man's work to know God, and God's to be knowable by man. God and man are partners in the work of the world, in other words, which means at least that man must do his part.

But his part is precisely what man has not done for most of the centuries since the time that Murray wrote about. Abandonment of the belief in intelligibility 2,000 years ago was justly described as a failure of nerve because it was the prelude to moral surrender. Men gave up the effort to be wise, because they found it too hard. They gave up the hope of bliss in this world, saw value only in the next, and attributed power only to God. They thus left their work undone. The churches, if only by default at first, sought to fill the void and do it for them, by doing their knowing, their building, their, ruling, and their moral suasion. Opinions differ and disputes have; raged about how well or ill they did, but there was never a question of their relevance to men's concerns, for it was men's concerns they made their own. The churches were doing man's work.

Renewed belief in intelligibility 2,000 years later means that man

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takes up his own burden once again. That, as I have tried to show, is what is really new about our age. It means that the churches are out of man's work, because man now chooses to do his own and has the knowledge and the skill and the will to do it. It is idle to tell him that he cannot because he is ignorant, or weak, or a sinner. He will not listen.

Does renewed faith in intelligibility also mean, therefore, that the churches are completely out of work? They have served, throughout their history, as man's crutch. Is their history to end, now that man can walk again? These are the questions, if I see clear, that animate the present theological debate. They moved Bonhoeffer to plead that man has come of age and must be recognized as such. They lead R. A. Buchanan to note that it takes men, not sheep, to change the world, and to warn that "if the clergy go on treating their parishioners like sheep, they need not be surprised if the numbers of their parishioners continue to decline." It is the same questions, and the worry they express, that lead our clergymen to Alabama, our theologians to shock us into thought with announcements of God's death, and Roger Shinn to ask the churches to serve the God of Jesus Christ "in the present age."

The crisis of the churches is in the fear of irrelevance born of man's recovery of nerve. It is an agonizing crisis, because there is nothing so dead as irrelevance, which leaves not even a memory.

The resolution of this crisis may lie in the very power and temper of mind that have brought it about. The point has been prefigured in my text. It is that man's newfound power and confidence enable him to pick up once more his partnership with God in doing the work of the world. His need to know God is therefore relatively greater now than it was in an earlier, more frightened time, when just to trust him seemed enough. By the same token, the churches are freed of the burden of doing man's work, and may find their new vocation in doing God's: in knowing God and showing him to man. I say their "new vocation," because the churches have very often in the past been too busy with man's work to give their undivided attention to God's. And I say they "may find" it, because they may not. If they do not, someone else will. It is occasionally sobering to recall that, while God is eternal, the churches are not, and that ,even the oldest among them are but recent additions to the immemorial span of human religious experience.

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What does it mean to know God? It means, in Saint Paul's terms, to look "not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." And what does it mean in our terms, in the terms of man bringing to bear the best knowledge and skill he can muster in the hard and unending struggle to attain the highest in human living and character? I choose my text from my teacher, John Herman Randall, Jr. It means, he says, that

. . . in this struggle man is not alone. The powers he mobilizes are as "natural" as those he is forced to oppose. In attacking disease, the physician is cooperating with the universe; he is successful in the measure in which he has discovered the possibilities of cure and health. And in leading the moral life, man is likewise cooperating with the grounded possibilities the world reveals to him. He uses the highest in himself, that which has discerned the highest in the world, to combat the lowest. And the highest in the world is a revelation of Good which the world itself forces on men... In cooperation with that central reality, man finds his life meaningful and significant, and from it he draws inspiration and strength and steadiness of purpose. That the highest discoverable in this cooperation with the world is most real and insistently demands to be made controlling in human life is what religions mean by "faith." That highest they call God.

I have said that technology gives man the power to create new possibilities, and the will to do so. As he exercises that power and will, he encounters the problem of how to see and choose the good amid all that is possible. I have also suggested that God reveals himself as goodness and as eternal possibility. That is why man's need to know God grows, the more competent he himself grows in the performance of his work.

V

And what does it mean to show God to man, which is the other part of the vocation I urge upon the churches? I take my text here, once more, from Professor Shinn:

Christian faith has always been concerned with the meeting of the ultimate with the concrete [he says]. It can be content neither with visions of eternity nor with purely pragmatic that see decisions only in their immediate contexts ...the Church knows a gospel, which constantly reminds it that the test of any social pro-

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posal is not loyalty to treasured traditions but concern for the welfare of persons who are loved by their Creator and Redeemer... A major part of its calling in our day is to keep questioning society-asking for the purposes, the values, the effect upon persons of the processes the society takes for granted.

There seem to me to be three indispensable prerequisites for the churches to perform that office. First, the churches must be of, but stand a bit apart from, the society. I occasionally detect a danger of oversecularization of the church itself, which would put it back into man's work again, only alongside rather than just for him this time.

Second, the churches must stand a bit apart from society, but not be wholly sundered from it. The Arian heresy was justly condemned, and it is neither less heretical nor more helpful in some of its present forms.

Third, if they would criticize society constructively, the churches must above all know whereof they speak. They must know the society's knowledge, appreciate its power, and understand its aspirations. They must show God to man as he is, not as they would have him be, for that would be blasphemy.