Black Sabbath sings, “I’ve seen the future and I left it behind.”[1] Technology that pushes the frontiers at risk to humanity compels us to the forbidden future; a potential world where unwarranted curiosity with speed something we experience daily by riding cars, watching TV, using computers and cell phones to communicate, seduces us into an irretrievable chain of events that would have otherwise been avoided. Belief in “Speed Demons” is not uncalled for or fanatical. Extinction, in the words of Jonathan Schell, is “a human future that can never become a human present.”[2] Any endeavor that sacrifices survival for instant gratification is obviously absurd. Immediate gains that endanger posterity are self-defeating and therefore irrational. When there is more to lose than there is to gain wisdom counsels a different path. It was believed during the nineteenth century that technological advances would raise society’s spiritual condition automatically, so that there could never be any discrepancy between morality and progress. Science would solve ethical quandaries by improving the material world: feed the poor, cure the sick house the needy and abolish war by beating swords into plowshares. The fundamental contradiction in modernism is that technological progress will inevitably lead to war not peace. The Maxim Machine Gun and the British Dreadnought were super weapons believed to make an army or navy invincible, unassailable making challenge unthinkable−ending warfare. This logic is repeated today, we know however, that efficiency in killing does not make war less likely. We cannot end war by building greater and more horrible weapons. Proliferation only leads to genocide.
Technology is a means to an end, but when the end justifies the means, the agents of progress exceed their limits. This is the will-to-power, as Berdyaev declared, “The will to power is the will to murder . . . the will to power can only be realized through murder.”[3] Science is murder when grounded in power instead of truth and renounces reverence for life. It loses moral authority as humanism’s vanguard, turning into its radical opposite (another example of the reversal of values caused by excess and lack of restraint) posing the greatest threat to survival by treating people like gambling chips thrown down in pursuit of convenience. This was the case with the atom bomb. The Trinity test-explosion in 1945 was the early design towards genocidal technology. To terrorize life for the unknown, immediate benefits−the bomb brought a speedy end to World War Two which otherwise would have dragged on for month or years, nevertheless it also brought with it a nuclear arms race that threatens the world with destruction−to risk the world for knowledge, to chase forbidden fruit is to acquire dark-light under the guise of enlightenment contributing to our fall from grace. To prevent injustice instrument and purpose must cohere. Like bad company corrupting good morals, so unjust channels produce unholy results by giving rise to anarchy, which leads to tyranny, law’s end. Tyranny is anarchy come to power. And since the atom bomb the problem of power has eclipsed all others.
Knowledge is power encapsulates the technosecular belief system. The prevailing nihilism was not supposed to happen; although it was entirely predictable. The law of regression asserts that as power increases choice decreases. An irresistible global techno-order invariably destroys any independent spiritual existence. Absolute political systems produce alienation for the individual. People cannot survive long in a world without choice. Voter apathy prevalent today is a good example. The ballot appears useless in affecting change because volition is coerced by limiting the range of candidates and issues. “Free . . . and meaningful choices are eliminated. They simply cannot co-exist with the necessity of efficient planning [campaigns, TV ads].”[4] The Faust legend teaches that power and knowledge comes at the price of your soul. Jesus was emphatic about the obstacle materialism presented to salvation. “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul” (Mark 8:36 NIV). Likewise, the Buddha announced, “It is the law of humanity that though one accumulates hundreds of thousands worldly goods one still succumbs to the spell of death.”[5] Power’s depraved influence does not cease when it changes accent from politics and religion to science and technology corrupting its handlers after eradicating dissent, so technological over-extension turns users into victims. The conquest of nature leaves the eclipse of God and Mankind in its wake. Total Systems Control creates a void, the abeyance of negation or the lack of established values[6] Necessary boundaries that provide spiritual compass disappear making restraint impossible. Negation is the path to limits and revival. The “no” of faith will establish the “yes” for technology. But the “no” must come first otherwise we will simply lose control of our technology. A world that knows no fear proceeds with great know-how, but no wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Engineers rush in where poets fear to tread. Nietzsche understood the importance for limits. “Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge” he said and T. S. Eliot confirmed, “where is the knowledge lost in information? Where is the wisdom that is lost in knowledge?”[7]
The technological future is predictable because it races toward a predetermined end established by its own inner logic. Like Oedipus Rex we cannot change our destiny through cunning reason, which ensnares us further. In trying to avoid fate we seal it by giving it credence. Knowing future events insures their arrival. Like Ebenezer Scrooge we ask the Ghost of Christmas Future upon witnessing our own tragic demise are these visions of what, “Will be” or, “are they shadows of the things that May be only?”[8] The future is worse than useless; it appears to be dangerous, if we cannot envision more than one potential outcome.
If we disallow for an irrevocable course, we must allow for a conditional one, open to difference and subject to change. Inevitable returns exist when we decline to vary cause and effect. We stubbornly maintain the present trajectory regardless the cost. This has been called “technological determinism” by philosophers of technology, which believes technological progress toward an inevitable goal, such as the Singularity, human advancement to a higher level of existence or a universal civilization a one world system of government is inevitable by the nature of advancement. Technology has a built in purpose that will automatically lead to its end. Adversaries of this this view, such as French critics Jacques Ellul and Gabriel Marcel assert that the ultimate results of technological growth may just as easily end in disaster or what I have called “the forbidden future.” We change the future by changing ourselves. Scrooge remade himself in selflessness: to care for the needy, feed the poor, and to love the unlovable. Similarly, Captain Kirk refused to relent to the confines of the inevitable, when as a Space Cadet on the authority of faith he changed the Kobayshi Maru Simulator by reprograming the computer not to permit a lose-lose scenario. “I don’t believe in a no-win situation,” was his only defense. Ambitious faith is needed to counter our hopeless belief in materialism and determinism. If logic dictates that certain outcomes are inescapable, a no-win dilemma, a lonely death or doomsday, then, these futures can be altered through causal reversal. This removes the causal agent in the cause and effect sequence. The absolute inevitable becomes the conditional. Things that were once must be change to may be. This is a simple but not an easy process. We must look at the direction technology is taking us and if we do not like the results we redirect it with better causes which brings different effects to avoid an unwelcomed end. Nothing is predetermined. We are responsible for self-control, all other power is illusory. We can spend ourselves on stupid fleshly pleasure with immediate gratification or commit to saving the future by reversing our direction today.
Technology was once liberator, freeing us from stifling tradition and unremitting nature, Old World Order; it is now characterized by the opposite. The doctrine on limited government that defines the modern Republic from absolutism cannot preclude a new ethic surrounding technological limits. Government over-reach and technological acceleration are co-extensive and interdependent. Unlimited returns will be the end to democracy as the recent death in privacy proves. In the nineteenth century technological nerve replaced liberation as core belief. The Industrial Revolution and Manifest Destiny overpowered Jefferson’s simple agrarian republic. So long as technology remains the bases for progress, “the rest will care for itself,” the automatic hand of techno-providence will direct our culture. Instrumental value remains the all controlling motif; freedom, equality, harmony, beauty and the pursuit of happiness revert to secondary status−nominal at best. Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood. “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge to the Ghost; “But if the course be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you have shown me!”[9]
[1] Black Sabbath, “Supernaut” Black Sabbath Vol. 4 (Record Plant, 1972).
[2] Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth (New York: Avon 1982), 138.
[3] Nicolas Berdyaev, Towards a New Epoch (London: Bles 1949), 9 (Second Thessalonians 2:1-12).
[4] Lawrence J. Terlizzese, Trajectory of the 21st Century: Essays on Theology and Technology (Eugene, OR: Resource, 2009), 47;https://www.amazon.com/Trajectory-21st-Century-Theology-Technology/dp/1606081292/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0
[5] Buddha quoted in Jesus and Buddha: The Parallels Sayings, Ed., Marcus Borg (Berkeley, CA: Ulysses, 1997), 71.
[6] Lawrence J. Terlizzese, Into the Void: The Coming Transhuman Transformation (Cambridge, OH: Christian Publishing House, 2016); https://www.amazon.com/INTO-VOID-Coming-Transhuman-Transformation/dp/0692744479/ref=sr_1_1
[7] Fredrick Nietzsche and T. S. Eliot quoted in Terlizzese, Trajectory of the 21st Century, 131.
[8] A Christmas Carol: By Charles Dickens: Illustrated by Roberto Innocenti (Italy, 1990 [1843]), 135.
[9] Ibid., 135, 138.