While we may think of phones and laptops when we hear the word “technology,” it can also be thought of as a way of viewing the world: the belief that knowledge of reality means the ability to predict, experiment, and transform it, and that nature is completely open to that process. But while this approach to the world and how we understand it makes us very good at solving problems, it also blinds us to an entire realm of thought. Science and technology can neither ask nor answer the “big” questions: what is a human being? What is a good life?
Michael Hanby—professor, writer, and postliberal thinker—joins Grant to dig into some of those questions. Does technology as ontology serve human persons as a tool, or act upon them as objects? Can a Christian political order coexist with this worldview? In a time when technology has made it possible to change our very bodies in ways that would have been unimaginable to previous generations, are we less human than before?
Technology=techne+logos=the bringing together knowing and making, or knowing through making
Technology as ontology views reality as knowable through experimentation
“It regards nature is a kind of machine and therefore knowledge of nature is a kind of engineering”
Science can ask and answer “how” questions and solve problems, but it can’t answer big “what is” questions—what is human life, etc
The most recent developments of the sexual revolution manifest this by viewing the human body as a “meaningless physical substrate,” and by politicizing/technologizing medicine to make things like sex reassignment surgeries etc possible
When technology becomes ontology, the person is rendered an object of technology rather than a subject
“There are huge questions embedded in what we are now doing to ourselves that our pervasive forms of reason do not permit us to ask or think seriously about. We're blind to them”
Our ability to imagine things like same-sex marriage and transgenderism depends on our technological ability to achieve them
Technology as ontology conflates truth with utility
Because ethics is trying to correct the sciences from the outside, it tends to either baptize the technologically inevitable or limit itself to banal questions
Liberalism elevates possibility/power over actuality, partly by defining truth as technological feasibility, partly by protecting individual choice from the encroachment of others (God, society, nature, etc) “the idea that I'm surrounded by this zone of possibility, and that the state is instituted to protect the violation of that zone from outside influences”
“Along with the proliferation of rights [...] goes the enlargement of the state's power to police and enforce those rights,” thus making the state totalitarian
“You can't have a common good if you don't inhabit a common reality”
Without a common reality, you have to have a common power that rules by awe; the internet does this far more effectively than the state
The state can only react to technological developments because it can’t anticipate all of them
Technocracy as a form of power is a system without a single controller
“A truly Catholic political order [...] would require the development of a cosmology upon whose denial our world is predicated. It's unreal, practically speaking, even though it may be ontologically true”
Catholic Integralism tends only to espouse a difference in policy that is compatible with the current liberal order