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Title: The Religion of Technology
Author: Alex Trotter
Date: 1998
Language: en
Topics: AJODA, AJODA #45, artificial intelligence, automation, christianity, Descartes, Europe, Genetic Engineering, history, industrialism, patriarchy, religion, review, science, technology, United States, women, World War II
Source: Retrieved on 2nd November 2018 from https://archive.org/details/AnarchyAJournalOfDesireArmedNoOne/page/n3
Notes: From Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #45, Spring/Summer 1998, Vol. 16, No. 1, held in Spirit of Revolt Archive, Glasgow.

Alex Trotter

The Religion of Technology

The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of

Invention by David F. Noble (New York: Knopf, 1997) 274pp. $26.00

(Canada $36.00) hardcover.

In this book David Noble examines the history and contemporary state of

the relationship between technology and religion in the Western world. A

major theme is the coevolution of scientific instrumental reason and

revealed religion; they are not as far apart, he says, as they might

appear. Another theme, familiar from an earlier book of his entitled A

World Without Women, is a study of the reasons why science and

technology have traditionally been male domains. Specific technological

projects such as artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, which

make headlines today, are examined in their ideological assumptions.

In his historical overview of the development of technology, or “the

useful arts,” as it was once known, Noble deals primarily with the

Christian clerical origins of science in medieval Western Europe and

takes us up to the present-day USA. He does not discuss scientific

developments in, say, ancient Greece or the medieval Islamic

civilization. He starts with observations concerning certain features of

Christianity inherited from Judaism: ideological elevation of humanity

over nature and of man over woman (as set forth, for example, in the

Book of Genesis), and messianism. The scientific revolution of the West

that took off in the seventeenth century may have been anticlerical

(i.e., at odds with the Roman Catholic Church) but was nevertheless very

Christian. The vision of the avatars of technology is an eschatological

one. Technology became implicated in notions of transcendence and

redemption, the attempt of men to recover Adam’s divine likeness,

reverse the curse of the Fall, and establish the universe of Paradise

regained.

The scientific culture we know today started, Noble says, with the

Carolingian renaissance of Charlemagne’s empire, among orders of monks,

and eventually spread beyond the cloister through the efforts of

mendicant friars. An early figure in the promotion of study of the

useful arts and crafts was Joachim of Fiore, who founded his own order

and inspired later movements such as the Franciscans. The monks pursued

the “holy labor” of activities such as tanning and blacksmithing. The

Benedictines were an order that worked on developing windmills,

watermills, and new methods of agriculture.

The spirit of invention in Christian Europe expanded with Renaissance

humanism and hermeticism in the works of men such as Marsilio Ficino and

Pico della Mirandola. The Age of Discovery that began in the thirteenth

century was fueled to a great extent by a vision of evangelical

challenge: to convert the Jews, Tatars, and Mongols, then crush Islam

for the final victory of Christ. Christopher Columbus subsequently took

this challenge on to begin the conquest of the Western Hemisphere. The

development of sciences such as geography and astronomy and technologies

such as navigation, metallurgy, and weaponry greatly assisted these

goals.

The Reformation excited millenarian hopes (though Noble does not discuss

this in connection with the great peasant jacqueries of that time), and

at about this time the secret occult society of the Rosicrucians emerged

to promote alchemy, divine illumination, and recovery of paradise.

It was in England in the seventeenth century, however, that the

scientific revolution started to accelerate as a prelude to both the

industrial revolution in that country and the political revolutions in

the United States and France. One of the key figures was Francis Bacon.

For Bacon, science was always conceived in utilitarian terms. “Truth and

utility are the very same thing,” as he put it. He was a perfectionist

who believed that men are not animals but “mortal gods,” and he even

predicted that man would create a new species. Bacon inspired

educational reforms of the Puritans in the English Revolution, in which

everything was to be made practical, but in pursuit of transcendent

purpose. Scientific academies and circles such as the Royal Society, the

Oxford Club, and the “Invisible College” emerged.

Scientists such as Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, James Clerk Maxwell, and

Charles Babbage (inventor of the “Calculating Engine, forerunner of the

computer) were all godly men. The new science was championed by many

Anglican churchmen.

The concept of God as craftsman and architect was increasingly

influential as the Freemasons came into their own. The Masons, a

brotherhood of sons of Adam, had its origins in medieval guilds of

stonemasons and in Rosicrucianism. It was in seventeenth century England

that what Noble calls “speculative Masonry” emerged (i.e., the guild

became a secret society) and developed ties to the Royal Society and

Anglican clergy. The Freemasons, among the earliest champions of

industrialization, were to become very influential in France and the

United States as well. The Masons became identified with engineering

(the “civil,” as opposed to military, kind) and created the Ecole

Polytechnique in France, which was to nurture Henri Saint-Simon, the

technophile utopian. Saint-Simon’s disciple Auguste Comte, founder of

the philosophical school of positivism, called himself the “Bacon of the

nineteenth century.” The technologies of transport associated with

American capitalism—steamboats, railroads, automobiles, airplanes, and

spaceflight—have all seen heavy Masonic involvement.

The main part of Noble’s history deals with the march of technology’s

utopia of progress in the United States, “the new Eden,” whose defining

myth has been intimately bound to millenarian Protestantism.

Nineteenth-century America was deeply involved in a host of utopian

currents that often wedded Christian and socialist concepts, a great

stew mixing the evangelical Protestantism of the Second Great Awakening

and its legacy with socialist ideas brought over by European emigres. In

the United States, scientific and industrial revolution followed fast on

the heels of religious revival. Many well-known writers and heroes of

invention were quite religious: Samuel F.B. Morse, Edward Bellamy, and

Thomas Edison, whom Noble calls “the ultimate utilitarian.”

America’s scientific mission was brought to a new level during and after

World War II with the arrival of atomic scientists fleeing fascism, such

as Albert Einstein, and subsequently German scientists who had worked

for the Nazis, such as Wernher Von Braun, who converted from the

Lutheranism of his upbringing to born-again Christianity upon his

transplantation to the USA. The development of rocket science and space

exploration occurred against the backdrop of cold war and renewed

millenarianism. Winston Churchill described the atomic bomb as “the

Second Coming in Wrath.” Christian theologians in the United States

post-1945 latched on eagerly to the apocalyptic possibilities presented

by nuclear weaponry. Billy Graham revived evangelical fervor, and Jerry

Falwell preached on nuclear war as the deliverance of Armageddon. Edward

Teller, scientific cold warrior, had a “religious dedication to

thermonuclear weapons.”

Von Braun named the early U.S. space program Adam and explained that it

was God’s purpose to send his Son to other worlds and bring the gospel

to them. NASA became a virtual nest of evangelical belief. During the

Christmas Eve 1968 flight of Apollo 8, a broadcast was made of the

astronauts reading from Genesis, an event that was not spontaneous but

carefully planned beforehand. The first astronauts were all devout

Protestants, but even Pope Paul VI hailed the Apollo 8 flight as a

“millennial event.” And during the lunar landing in 1969, Edwin Aldrin

held a communion ceremony on the moon. President Nixon called the

landing “the greatest week since...the Creation,” although Nixon’s

religious adviser, Billy Graham, had to remind him that he’d forgotten

the birth, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ.

In the section covering the Artificial Intelligence (Al) movement, Noble

takes us again back to the seventeenth century, where he finds its

origins in Cartesian rationalism. Descartes saw the mind as man’s

heavenly gift, separate from the body with its burden of mortality: “The

body is always a hindrance to the mind in its thinking.” He believed it

possible and desirable to think without the body. This posed the

question of how it might be possible to liberate the immortal mind from

its corporeal prison so it could better strive for perfection.

Descartes’ scientific and mathematical successors looked for ways to

codify thought on a precise logical basis and came up with a calculus of

reason that would mechanically simulate the human thought process. Noble

cites mathematician George Boole and the logical positivists Bertrand

Russell and A.N. Whitehead as other, sometimes reluctant, forerunners of

the Al concept (Russell was not pleased that theorems from the Principia

Mathematica could be automatically proved by a machine).

The early engineers of Al, such as Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, and John

von Neumann, started their work during World War II in the Manhattan

Project or in decoding German cryptography. Later they went on to

various cold war projects in the service of the American military and

the national security state. Marvin Minsky, who emerged as the foremost

promoter of Al, worked for the military’s ARPA (Advanced Research

Projects Agency), which was interested in developing high-speed computer

simulation of human cognitive processes. The first “virtual communities”

(the term actually used) were of tank crew members working on

large-scale, computer-aided armored maneuvers.

The visionaries of Al were wont to make such statements as “Technology

will soon enable human beings to change into something else altogether”

(Earl Cox) and “The manifest destiny of mankind is to pass the torch of

life and intelligence on to the computer” (Rudy Rucker).

Similarly, the goal of the genetic engineers is a pursuit of perfection,

a dream that Noble compares to Paracelsus’ speculations about creating

homunculi, Rabbi Low’s creation of the Golem, or God’s creation of Adam.

Genetics is a fairly young science. Only in the nineteenth century came

discovery of the patterns of inheritance of genetic traits according to

laws of mathematical probability with the work of Gregor Mendel, an

Austrian cleric. At about the same time nucleic acid was discovered. By

the middle of the twentieth century, the basic structure of DNA was

unraveled and described in a machine-based terminology of codes and

information processing. DNA came to be thought of as eternal in a sense,

the material basis for immortality and resurrection of the soul.

Some geneticists, in their perfectionism, became proponents of eugenics.

A manifesto was produced by Hermann J. Muller in the 1930s proclaiming

that the breeding of genius should be a human birthright. Not only could

livestock be made to produce more milk and plants be made to grow in

colder climates through genetic manipulation, but genes for IQ in humans

could be tracked down. In 1969 geneticist Robert Sinsheimer called for a

“new eugenics” to bring the unfit up to the highest level. By the 1990s

it became possible to isolate genes for certain inherited diseases and

to clone human embryos in laboratories.

Sinsheimer was one of the leaders of the effort to establish the Human

Genome Project (HGP), which got started in 1990 with federal funding and

whose purpose is to map and sequence all the genes of the human body.

The community of scientists working on this project describe the human

genome as the holy grail of genetics, reports Noble, who remarks upon

the enduring influence of the mythology of medieval Christianity in a

scientific community that now includes a high percentage of Jews and

atheists.

The HGP has many religious supporters. The majority of churches endorse

it. The director (as of the book’s writing) of the project, Francis

Collins, is a member of the American Scientific Affiliation, an

evangelical Christian organization. There is even an official dialogue

between genetic scientists and theologians.

In conclusion, Noble emphasizes the continuity of the technological

brotherhood from monks to hermetic philosophers to Masons to modern

engineers, and their elitism and service to official power through the

centuries. The new technologies were never meant to be universal and

don’t truly meet human needs. The roots of ecological crisis lie in the

Christian dogma of man’s transcendence of nature and the notion that the

needs of mortals are not of the most important consequence. Women have

not been identified with the religion of technology because Eve, lacking

perfection, could not regain it; as the proximate cause of the Fall,

woman can only be an impediment to its reversal. At the Resurrection,

sex (i.e. the female sex) will disappear and Adamic man will be restored

as if he had never sinned. Noble points out that to this day science,

and particularly applied science, remains a masculine realm; there are

few women in engineering, none at all in the Lawrence Livermore labs,

and there weren’t until recently women in the space program. Finally, he

describes cloning as a product of the desire to turn reproduction into a

“chaste male affair” without women. It’s not too hard, however, to see

that cloning could also be used to reproduce without men. And, surely,

if women were equally represented at Livermore Labs, that would hardly

constitute a social improvement!

Noble declares, in a strong statement, “Put simply, the technological

pursuit of salvation has become a threat to our survival.” He modestly

hopes to deflate otherworldly dreams of the technocratic elite and

“redirect our astonishing capabilities toward more worldly and humane

ends,” though he offers very little in elaboration of the shape this

goal should assume or what he thinks it would take to achieve it. He

points out that women were at one time well represented in the useful

arts, but were shunted aside and increasingly restricted from

Carolingian times on, and largely remain so today. It appears to be not

so much technology per se, but technology invested with Judeo-Christian

spiritual significance, that he objects to, but he’s somewhat vague

about this.

At one point Noble describes Marxism as “the most influential Western

prophetic system since that of Joachim of Fiore” because it neatly

complemented the Christian millenarian promise with its own promise of a

world liberated from labor by machines. If this is true (and it is to

the extent that Marxism became an ideology—or religion, if you like—of

economic development and socialism a crude imitation of capitalism), he

has almost nothing to say about it. One reason may be that his focus is

on the religion of technology in the United States, where Marxism has

had only a very small influence. Had his book concentrated on Europe and

Russia, it would have been necessary for him to treat that subject in

greater detail. Noble mentions only in passing the Soviet space program,

implying that everything worth saying about it is covered in his study

of the American space program.

In The Religion of Technology Noble mounts a powerful attack on the

patriarchal religious aspect of technology. But he makes no effort to

connect this to a critique of capital, and largely restricts his

critique of technology to a feminist one. Nevertheless, the book is well

written and a worthwhile read. As a historian of science Noble seems to

know his material very well. His book comes along at a time when there

is widespread and growing skepticism about technology and industrialism.

The space program no longer generates much popular enthusiasm, anxieties

proliferate about cloning and global warming, and evangelical Christian

millenarianism appears to be running out of gas. At least, let’s hope

so.