Technology Meets Human Ecology
Why Pope Francis includes technology in his climate change proposal.
Moral high ground in discourse quickly fell this week when the Vatican unveiled a new encyclical entitled Laudato Si’ aimed at opening up debate on human ecology in the world. As I am often angry at the way the national media interprets Pope Francis, I decided to spend my 2 hours at the DMV reading through the 40,618 word papal letter.
Consider this abridged version my gift to you.
I was fairly prepared at the outset to find your typical and truthful concerns of the Church inside: the harm of man to the planet, the lack of clean water and food for the poor, etc.
To my surprise, this piece was less a “climate change and environment” encyclical and more of an epistemological wake-up call to our fallen human behavior. Francis is summoning us to reflect on our “authentic human ecology” and remedy the way our sin has destroyed our relationship with each other and with God— THUS, hurting the environment and the poorest among us:
It can be said that many problems of today’s world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society. The effects of imposing this model on reality as a whole, human and social, are seen in the deterioration of the environment, but this is just one sign of a reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life. We have to accept that technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.
As children of the technological age, this should be incredibly alarming for us to read. Francis’s letter to the Bishops is directly attacking our tweets, our birth-control pills, Game of Thrones on Netflix, and any other idle luxuries you can thank technology for giving mankind. But his point here is not as insidious or luddite as we would like to think.
He’s simply demanding that we are intentional and consider the aims of our technological endeavours morally culpable. Put another way, Francis is asking us to consider what profound, rippling human effects our tweets or birth-control pills can possibly have rather than simply dismissing our choices as “progress.”
Yet it must also be recognized that nuclear energy, biotechnology, information technology, knowledge of our DNA, and many other abilities which we have acquired, have given us tremendous power.
This power, the progress we witnessed in the 20th century was so profound — who would dare to question the merits of such dominance over nature? We have stopped asking questions of dignity and it is precisely due to that absence that our culture has warped.
Francis notes “the array of technology which Nazism, Communism and other totalitarian regimes have employed to kill millions of people.” However, we need not look very far to see horrors of our own doing. Dr Jérôme Lejeune, the French geneticist known for discovering chromosomal abnormalities, could never have predicted that his discovery would lead to the selective murder of children with Downs Syndrome. Taken in by power, humankind often loses sight of the common good and focuses primarily on the prize.
Francis petitions us to challenge this way of thinking. But our culture has become so despondent that questioning our progressive aims yields merely a raucous laughter:
The idea of promoting a different cultural paradigm and employing technology as a mere instrument is nowadays inconceivable. The technological paradigm has become so dominant that it would be difficult to do without its resources and even more difficult to utilize them without being dominated by their internal logic. It has become countercultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same. Technology tends to absorb everything into its ironclad logic, and those who are surrounded with technology “know full well that it moves forward in the final analysis neither for profit nor for the well-being of the human race”, that “in the most radical sense of the term power is its motive — a lordship over all”. As a result, “man seizes hold of the naked elements of both nature and human nature”. Our capacity to make decisions, a more genuine freedom and the space for each one’s alternative creativity are diminished.
This line: “neither for profit nor for the well-being of the human race.”
Over and over in this letter, Francis redirects his focus to the improvement of an “authentic human ecology,” the destruction of which he says has come not as a direct result of technology, but also not without some help from mankind’s focus on conquering our material reality. Francis quotes Benedict XVI, that technology itself “expresses the inner tension that impels man gradually to overcome material limitations” (Caritas in Veritate).
We are, by our very nature, working to overcome the limitations of our mortal life. But this does not imply that our motives to improve our material existence are malicious or wrong. As C.S. Lewis would say, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” It’s simply a matter of revisiting how we use the tools we have created AND asking whether or not those tools make us better or not. We must persist in asking hard questions.
Finally, the best cognitive explanation of the digital world I have ever read, from Laudato Si’:
…when media and the digital world become omnipresent, their influence can stop people from learning how to live wisely, to think deeply and to love generously. In this context, the great sages of the past run the risk of going unheard amid the noise and distractions of an information overload. Efforts need to be made to help these media become sources of new cultural progress for humanity and not a threat to our deepest riches. True wisdom, as the fruit of self-examination, dialogue and generous encounter between persons, is not acquired by a mere accumulation of data which eventually leads to overload and confusion, a sort of mental pollution. Real relationships with others, with all the challenges they entail, now tend to be replaced by a type of internet communication which enables us to choose or eliminate relationships at whim, thus giving rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature. Today’s media do enable us to communicate and to share our knowledge and affections. Yet at times they also shield us from direct contact with the pain, the fears and the joys of others and the complexity of their personal experiences. For this reason, we should be concerned that, alongside the exciting possibilities offered by these media, a deep and melancholic dissatisfaction with interpersonal relations, or a harmful sense of isolation, can also arise.
In this beautiful paragraph, the Holy Father composes an anti-modern, pro-technology thesis, most extraordinary.
Contrary to what others will write, Francis is not asking us to throw away our cell-phones, dissolve the internet, or stop informing yourself.
He’s asking us to throw away our “throwaway culture.” He’s asking us to cleanse ourselves in daily life and pursue meaningfulness where there is currently none. To change everything we do and see the world upside down. I will leave you with a quote from G.K. Chesterton, incidentally on St. Francis of Assisi:
