When I was twelve or thirteen years old, I discovered an old compound bow in the deeper recesses of my parents garage. It had none of the accoutrements generally expected of the more advanced of these devices; it had no sight and nothing but a small shelf on the side of the handle to rest one’s arrows. Nevertheless, I was delighted with the relative simplicity of the bow and proceeded to spend a number of days shooting at a 3D deer in the back yard. At some point my father noticed what I was doing and declared that if I wanted to get into archery, I would need a real bow, and not the rusting hulk that I had been enjoying. My initial reaction to this was one of disappointment. There seemed to me something noble in this simplicity, in the use of rustic tools that required intense human involvement to achieve ends more readily available through sophisticated means. To this day, this simplicity and involvement has causes me to have greater respect for ancient weaponry, such as the bow and sword, than the gun.
This tendency to have a high, sometimes romantic view of simple tools is an apparently permanent feature of my character, and I have noticed it coming to the fore nearly every time I become interested in any pursuit involving technology (which is to say almost any pursuit whatever). I have a fascination for traditional carpentry techniques, for preindustrial farming tools (the scythe being a particular favorite), and I have always preferred to write with a pen and paper than on a computer (although a reluctance to transcribe often drives me to the keyboard). In my limited and intermittent artistic pursuits, I even find myself reluctant to employ such basic tools as a lightbox (and, in my more extreme moments, rulers). All of this is to say that I am a bit of a luddite—I have a suspicion of technology beyond a certain level of complexity. I do not believe I am hostile towards it, and indeed I am in many ways fascinated by computers and many of the more sophisticated technological inventions of our age. But for the most part, I want tools that I can understand, that foster a relationship and require skill to use. I see the development of such skill as a form of self cultivation, the discipline of extending one’s being into the material rather than relying on a device of such vast complexity that one can only bow to the simplified, abstract interfaces that stand between one and its operations.
All this to say that I have long believed the simpler tools to have greater human, even spiritual, value than the more complex and leaned into a romanticization of the rustic and anachronistic, holding a certain disdain for obsequious praise of the endless technological effluences of the modern day. Yet I was recently challenged in this belief by a remarkably insightful passage from an essay by Sergius Bulgakov, perhaps the most profound theological thinker of the 20th century. This is what Bulgakov has to say:
Contemporary technology uses its powers to convert nature into the raw material for artistic creation, so to speak, the raw material for the incarnation of ideas in images accessible to the senses. In this sense we may speak of the aesthetic character of technology and industry. Without contemporary machinery, representing this incarnation of ideas, there would be no artistic production of this kind. Just as the raw material of a block of marble, devoid of any kind of ‘ideal’ content, is transformed into an artistic miracle under the sculptor’s chisel, and gradually loses its materiality, its mortality, its lack of intelligibility and imperfect permeation by ideal structures, so too the forces of nature lose their materiality, i.e. their alienation from ideal reality, in the machine and become obedient servants to the idea. . . . The possible victory to be won over matter, and the spiritualising of the forces of nature, constitute the great task which humanity confronts in its history, and which is being carried through with such unprecedented success in our day.1
Everything in this passage struck me as correct—the Platonism, the Christian recognition of matter’s goodness to the degree that it participates in God (and thus spirit/idea), the appeal to aesthetics, and the view of humanity as a conduit for the incarnation of the ideal in the material. All struck to the marrow, and I was forced to admit that my hostility towards much technology is, as is hostility to any technology purely as technology, completely unjustifiable. Moreover, Bulgakov bases much of his thought on this subject on a truth that I believe to be self-evident: the corruptness of the natural world. It is not just humanity that is fallen, after all, but the entire cosmos, and so the natural order is one ruled by despotic laws, corruption, death, demons. This is not nature’s essence, and it is not all that nature is even in its fallen state (one can perceive the sun even in a broken mirror), but it is a dominant fact of current ecological existence. Nature is fallen—there is no pristine and perfect order beyond the toxic confines of civilization. Technology, then, cannot be regarded as inherently problematic, and even the most advanced technology ought to be regarded as potentially correcting the brutalities of the material realm by granting humanity the power over it which was meant to be ours from the beginning. Moreover, Bulgakov’s insistence that the spiritualization of matter is one of humanity’s central tasks clearly encapsulates perhaps the most positive imaginable use of humanity’s unique powers. The human race is a mediator between the spiritual and the material; we are able to draw down the ideal and incarnate it in as yet unformed material substrates, clever demiurges sculpting the thoughts of heaven. Technology in a very real sense allows us to achieve this end and thus must be involved in one of our highest callings.
Despite all this, however, I was unable to shake the discomfort I feel towards a great deal of modern technology. Pondering this, I came to the conclusion that there must be some other source of this anxiety, not the mere fact of a given technology’s complexity or its being technology, but something more relevant to the aims of humanity and the ideals that I am wont to profess. Unsurprisingly, I found that Bulgakov himself was able to provide an answer. In the essay quoted above, Bulgakov is primarily concerned with discussing economics. More specifically, he is arguing for the evaluation of the ends of economics as a science on a basis that transcends the field itself. He describes economics as “technic,” a tool to be used to achieve a given end that cannot be evaluated by that tool but must, by default, be held as absolute. The valuation of this end is a philosophical, and ultimately religious, question. For him, the end of political economy is rightly understood as the furthering of the aims of the human spirit, namely the destruction of eternal necessity so as to grant the freedom necessary for humanity to foster moral growth. For the oppression of external necessity—poverty, hunger, homelessness, and the like—forces one away from the inner life, from the fostering of internal freedom that is necessary for the full realization of the human essence. Even the ascetic who fasts and lives in a hovel gains by this because it has been freely chosen.
I should be clear that the kind of freedom I am speaking of here is not simply the freedom of choice as an end in and of itself, but rather the freeing of the human essence to be what it is without the shackles of external necessity. This essence is the image of God, who is himself free from all necessity, and so the destruction of poverty, starvation, and so on is a foundation for the creation of internal freedom—that is, freedom from sin, from all that is foreign to what one truly is. The ultimate goal of the human spirit is, in short, deification, the indwelling of God that can pour forth light upon the whole of creation, and all technic must serve this end and be evaluated by its capacity to do so. As with political economy, then, so too with technology, and thus each technological advance and invention must be evaluated by the degree to which it fosters the deification of humanity, judged by its effect upon humanity’s external and internal conditions. Only once this task has been accomplished can we speak of humanity properly spiritualizing matter, for one cannot illumine the external without an internal light. The end of technology is thus twofold: the removal of external necessity for the purposes of allowing humanity to foster deification, and the incarnation of spirit in the material. The former is primary under fallen conditions, and yet spiritualization of matter is by far the higher.
This, then, is the source of the discomfort I feel with much modern technology: it does not serve the ends of the human spirit. It does not tend towards deification but rather towards dehumanization and the enslavement of the person to the technical. This enslavement is the great specter of our age, which manifests itself in endless portrayals of human subservience to the technological. Having created machines of vast complexity, humanity has largely stepped into an artificial interface wherein the connection and elevation of the material is replaced by subservience to small, abstract systems. Of course this is not universally true. Even computers can and do serve many useful ends that can foster much good in humanity, both external and internal. Nevertheless, it is too often the case that the most advanced of modern technology becomes a barrier between us and the real, and we are required to the employ the mediation of machines to interact with more immediate realities.
Of course, the primary purpose of technology is not to foster spiritual growth directly any more than this is the primary goal of economics. Its primary goal is to free humanity from external necessity, to free up the spiritual capacities by removing concerns for the basic material necessities of life so that inner freedom may be pursued. When evaluating any technology, then, this is the first area that must be considered. However, it is not the only thing that must be considered, as technology often has internal consequences, and it is sometimes the case that a technology that is able to eliminate certain external constraints has a corrosive effect on one’s internal life. Technology must therefore be evaluated on two levels: the external and the internal. While the external is primary because this is the primary goal of technology, it is anything but exclusive. It is all too easy to imagine a situation in which whole populations are freed from external necessity and yet internally enslaved to vice and ignorance. One need only think of the society of Huxley’s alarmingly prescient Brave New World.
While examples of this are numerous, I believe the problem can be most clearly seen in the realm of agriculture. While it is certainly true that agricultural technology has done much to eliminate the hunger of many, it has also done much to alienate humanity from its natural environment, fostering a utilitarian, exploitative attitude. In the excesses of modern agriculture, it is not uncommon for farmers to spend almost no time in direct contact with the land. The work of plowing, planting, weeding (read, poisoning), fertilizing, and harvesting are all done by proxy with machines. Under such circumstances, the human becomes not so much a cultivator of a natural environment as the servant of a machine, through which the natural environment is engaged indirectly. This is, moreover, indicative of an attitude that sees the act of production in a purely utilitarian light, as one in which there can be no possible end other than the generation of goods.
This has reached new heights with the advent of self-directed agricultural robots. At present, these machines are largely reserved for tasks such as weeding, which they perform by a combination of weed-detection software (variants of facial-detection software) and lasers that burn away unwanted plant matter. Yet the replacement of all agriculture labor with such machines is not inconceivable, and I do not doubt that the producers of these robots have precisely this end in mind. Indeed, there is now talk of fully automated greenhouses and other high-tech agricultural systems that will remove human labor from the picture altogether.
Besides the obvious questions of efficiency, cost, and sustainability that such machines raise, it is worth evaluating them and all similar technologies along the lines that I have outlined above. First, one must admit that (if successful) such machines do achieve the first ends towards which technology aims: the alleviation of external necessity in the form of the elimination of hunger and human labor, thus freeing humanity to pursue internal freedom. The use of such technology is, moreover, at least superficially the subjugation of the earth to humanity, the taming of the wild and chaotic fallenness of nature in the interest of order and productivity. In this sense, it is a kind of “spiritualization” of the natural world, the imposition of form on the otherwise formless. Of course this is what agriculture largely already is, and automated farm robots only represent a new means of achieving this same end.
Given these very real external benefits, then, what can be said of the internal consequences? I have already mentioned the most obvious of these, namely the alienation of the human and natural worlds. Having reduced nature to the pure utility of a slave, it is forgotten, left to the care of the machines. These machines, moreover, become the primary concern of the farmer, whose job is transformed from the management of nature to the management of mechanisms and, in the case of automated machines, the management of the digital interfaces through which such machines are controlled. In the latter case, not only is the farmer made distant from nature but the concrete world itself becomes lost behind an abstraction. The sensory is brought to its most tenuous in the pixelated images of the mediating device. Nature and all of its fecundity are reduced to an abstraction, managed at a distance, and understood primarily as a quantity, as a measure of productivity and management schemata. The inevitable result is that nature becomes a set of numerical resources to be exploited, Heidegger’s “standing reserve,” rather than an integral and living reality to be negotiated and (one may hope) loved.
Moreover, the attitude towards nature and human destiny that such machines foster is one that should be questioned. At best, the implementation of such technology would be based upon a view of the spiritualization of matter as the domination of nature by machines. This may be true to a superficial degree, but it assumes that such spiritualization is a primarily technological process. Bulgakov himself speaks about this issue in his engagement with the Russian religious philosopher Fedorov. Fedorov believed that it was God’s will for humanity to bring about the resurrection of the dead through advanced technological means. Bulgakov points out, however, that this would be merely to revive the fallen human form and—at best—force disincarnate spirits to inhabit reanimated flesh. This is not the resurrection as Christianity understands it, for the true resurrection involves the transfiguration of the flesh into a spiritual body, free from the corruptibility and impenetrable limitedness of the current human form. The same error is being committed if one sees the enslavement of nature to technology as representative of the Christian calling to spiritualize the material world. It is not the mechanical systematization of nature that is called for, but its transfiguration, the development of matter’s transparency to the ideal and ultimately the divine.
Of course, this is not a task that can be completed by human effort in isolation, as it necessarily involves the work of God in creation. Nevertheless, this spiritualization is the end to which human engagement with the external world ought to strive. Moreover, the result of high-tech applications to agriculture, as to many other areas of life, is not the orderly transformation of its object into a highly efficient system reflective of any spiritual ideal, but rather its destruction. The poisoned fields devoid of all but the most modified of monocrops can hardly be considered a more spiritualized place then even the wildest of jungles, much less the well-tended garden.
Yet we have are speaking about an eschatological end rather than a contingent postlapsarian end, which is to step beyond the bounds of the technological goal of eliminating external necessity. Nevertheless, I believe it is a mistake to hold that the activities of production must concern themselves solely with the task of eliminating said necessity, however much this must be emphasized as the first and foremost task of all production. In the case of agriculture, the relationship that farming fosters between humanity and nature is of the utmost value, for it allows the natural world to be engaged in directly, as a living, organic unity responsive to the human touch and especially to the spiritual integrity of the person. This is to say that the spirit in which a person engages with the natural world is able to foster the transparency of nature to the divine, to beauty. This is only possible, however, if that relationship is one of loving directness, of intimate knowledge between the human agent and the matter with which he or she engages.
To summarize, then, my point is that technology should not only foster production but also beauty. While the latter is necessarily subservient to the former in the current cosmic economy (at least as far as productive technological applications are concerned), the latter should not be unduly sacrificed. Pure utilitarianism is too devastating to the human soul and thus to the relationship between humanity and the natural world. This inevitably leads to ecological devastation and de-spiritualization, and so it must be balanced by deeper concerns. Luckily, I believe that this balance often leads to even greater efficiency. In the realm of agriculture, biointensive gardening and permaculture methods have proven themselves capable of nearly the same output as modern industrial farming techniques and provide ordered and sustainable habitats for a vast diversity of other species. The result of such practices is neither wilderness nor barrenness, but harmony in which natural systems are augmented without being distorted, and beauty, both sensory and intellectual, finds a prominent place within such systems without sacrificing productivity.
In the end, we may find that the task of meeting our needs and of spiritualizing nature, even to the vastly inferior extent that this may be done in a fallen world, is not so much one of strict engineering, but of gardening. The potentiality of the chaotic forces of nature yields sooner to the design of diverse and beautiful systems that work with the environment than to those that attempt to dominate it. This does not mean, of course, that engineering does not have its place, only that it must be balanced by an ethos of intimate relationship and a concern for beauty. Our self-driving farm robots and the ethos they embody thus prove themselves insufficient, and we may find that the technologies that meet these criteria are simpler, more direct, and paired with a concern for design and technique more than with brute force.
Rowan Williams, ed. Sergii Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology, 42–43.
There's a book I think you'll really enjoy that speaks to a lot of this, especially in the day of Media and Social Media we find ourselves in. It's called "The New Media Epidemic" by Jean Paul Larchet, an Orthodox philosopher from France, it really goes into the dehumanizing nature of modern media and how so much of the modern age enslaves us