Between Possibility and Necessity: Get Online with God

Photo: Geiste Kincinaityte (2012)

In the 1960-ies Lynn White Jr. has made a major contribution to the history of technology by introducing a new concept of Middle Ages as a highly technologized era. Among many points he made in his thorough research (here I'm referring to: Lynn White Jr., "Cultural Climates and Technological Advance in the Middle Ages", Viator 2 (1971)), was one regarding the role of technological achievements within the context of Christianity. Medieval Church (mostly Western European, as opposed to the Orthodox East) was quick to embrace and institutionalize various technological inventions. For example, right after the mechanical clock was introduced, the metaphor of a perfect "heavenly mechanics" was born. The precision of a mechanical device was representing the precision of a divine logos. Every church—since then campanellas became equipped with clocks—became an institutionalized representative of a mechanized divine time. Every technological improvement not only contributed to the expansion of a power network, but also sustained and strengthened the bonds between technological and religious practices. White puts it this way:

About 1450 European intellectuals began to become aware of technological progress not as a project (. . . this came in the late thirteenth century) but as an historic and happy fact, when Giovanno Tortelli, a humanist at the papal court, composed an essay listing, and rejoicing over, new inventions unknown to the ancients. . . . It was axiomatic that man was serving God by serving himself in the technological mastery of nature. Because medieval men believed this, they devoted themselves in great numbers and with enthusiasm to the process of invention. (White, 199)

Considering the further historical trajectories of Western thought and praxis, this insight obviously resonates with contemporary post-religious discourse. It is the servitude to the (Western) "values of democracy" which is now spontaniously associated with the techno-scientific progress (e.g., the idea of democratically positive transparency of hi-tech-savy societies vs the fundamentalist opacity of "developing" societies; think Egypt revolution and Arab Spring events).
What deserves our critical attention here is the "self-explanatory" and seamless reversal of this modified Medieval equation—i.e. the false logic of the notion that every technological achievement is an inevitably valuable contribution to the democratization. The problem here is the actual lack of the etchical dimension in technology proper for this equasion to be possible in the first place. The "self-explanatory" presence of an ethical (and thus democratically correct) justification in contemporary post-industrial technology can be paralleled with the "self-explanatory" presence of a Holy Ghost manifesting itself in the technology of Middle Ages.
The distortion becomes apparent when the two sides of the equation are attributed to the categories of necessity (of technology) and the possibility (of God or the secular Good). In both cases of the justification of technological servitude, possibility is allowed to function as a (mode of) necessity.

To be continued