A machine is a slave, a thing that has no right to exist free from whatever alien purpose its user may wish. The classical world asserted a strong aversion to mechanization because it was believed to be centered in slavery. Mechanical tools belonged to craftsmen who were mostly slaves. Athenian humanism associated technology therefore, with slavery as demonstrated in the Periclean Age, which excelled in all manner of arts and science, except for technology, which remained slave work. “The slave was quite literally, man reduced to machine.”[1] For Plato mechanical learning required no creative thought since its operations are consistently automatic. Aristotle’s doctrine on causes remains relevant, he argued for four causes that brings ordinary things into existence, a chair, for example, has a material cause, which is the unfinished wood that serves as raw material. Second, the formal cause would be the idea of a chair; then there is the efficient cause, the tool used to construct the chair, a carpenter and his hammer are not as we might suspect essentially different. Lastly, the final cause is the actual chair. Despite the plethora of imagery used in literary analogy, the ancients considered technology to be imitation of nature existing on an inferior level to the ideal concept. The organic stood above the inorganic. The chair was not greater than the tree it was hewed from. The statue was below the human form it represented. Man is the measure of all things not the Machine. The modern world has stressed the efficient cause, the actual tool as above humanity itself. We are slaves to our tools. Transhumanism is based on a false premise that believes the creation is somehow greater than the creator. Technology will cause us to transcend our lowly condition with the arrival of the cyborg.
The machine order does not receive religious sanction until the middle ages, when it becomes the means for redemption. Historian David Noble pointed out that from the French Emperor Charlemagne to early modern times, technology was associated with salvation. It was believed Earth could be returned to Edenic paradise through technological progress and the lost image of God would be restored.[2] Theologian Ernst Benz, likewise taught that the Modern Project was founded on a theological notion in which humanity believed itself to be a fellow worker with God in establishing the kingdom of Heaven. Technology reverses Adam’s fall.[3] Millennial theology overemphasized the human role in creating the New Jerusalem turning into works based salvation, something like the Protestant Work Ethic or Prosperity Gospel that define themselves by material possessions.
In the Patristic Era, the so called, “mechanical arts” were never conceived as a means of Endenic restoration; rather theology shared the Platonic view that held technology to be intrinsically bound to the material world. They could have no redemptive qualities. Super science today belies its roots in Millennialism. Noble summarized, “For modern technology and modern faith are neither complements nor opposites, nor do they represent succeeding stages of human development. They are merged and always have been, the technological enterprise being at the same time, an essentially religious endeavor.”[4] Technological progress was expected to reverse the effects of the Fall and recreate original perfection. Transhumanism extends this vision into the twenty-first century. However, a thousand years into this millennial venture, so to speak, we do not find a regenerated planet ruled by the Son of David (Isaiah 11). Instead, we encounter a world controlled by Luciferian Powers assuming divinity. We find a society that grows at the expense of irreplaceable natural resources, like a huge war engine burning all it can as fast as possible (Nahum 3).
A slave is a machine, legally and effectively. The ancients would be scandalized at the cyborg condition. They might see it as something like the revenge of the slaves. The human-machine hybrid was not a viable concept until the eighteenth century, when it received considerable traction in connection to the Industrial Revolution. It serves as an intellectual framework for a mechanistic future. Tech goes from subhuman slavery to superhuman mastery and from less than nature to more than humanity. Technology, however, is neither animal nor God, but completely man-made, a contrivance, whatever we think human nature to be, it is that concept that gives rise to our machines. Technology is never any more or less than who we are. Mankind must remain in control of its own creation in order to retain its own humanity.
[1] Aram Vartanian in “Man-Machine from the Greeks to the Computer” in Phillip P. Wiener, Ed., The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. III (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), 134.
[2] David Noble, The Religion of Technology (New York: Knopf, 1997), 9.
[3] Ernst Benz, Evolution and Christian Hope: Man’s Concept of the Future from Early Fathers to Teilhard de Chardin, trans., by Heinz G. Frank (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 124-125; Lawrence J. Terlizzese, Into the Void: The Coming Transhuman Transformation (Cambridge, OH: Christian Publishing House, 2016), 20, 21; https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HFSQMDS?ref_=k4w_oembed_MgcdZmHaqmbCiq&tag=kpembed-20&linkCode=kpd
[4] Noble, The Religion of Technology, 4, 5.
[5] Pink Floyd, “Welcome to the Machine” Wish You Were Here (Harvest, 1975).
[6] John Herman Randell, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind: A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 25281.
[7] Floyd Matson, The Broken Image: Man, Science and Society (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1964), 11.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Nikolai Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom trans., by R. M. French (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 149.
[10] Karl Rahner, Dictionary of Theology New Revised Ed., (New York: Crossroads, 1981), 19.