christian ethics in a technological age

christian ethics in a technological age

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EERDMANS -- Christian Ethics in a Technological Age (Brock) final textTuesday, May 11, 2010 10:18:13 AM

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Christian Ethics in a Technological Age

Brian Brock

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.

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© 2010 Brian Brock

All rights reserved

Published 2010 by

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

2140 Oak Industrial Drive N.E., Grand Rapids, Michigan 49505 /

P.O. Box 163, Cambridge CB3 9PU U.K.

www.eerdmans.com

Printed in the United States of America

16 15 14 13 12 11 10 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brock, Brian, 1970-

Christian ethics in a technological age / Brian Brock.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8028-6517-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Technology — Moral and ethical aspects. 2. Christian ethics.

3. Technology — Religious aspects — Christianity. I. Title.

BJ59.B76 2010

241 — dc22

2010005670

Unless otherwise noted, the Scripture quotations in this publication are from the New Revised

Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National

Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and used by permission.

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Contents

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction: Christian Faith and Technological Artifacts 1

New Technology, the Manager, and the Languageof Technology Assessment 10

The Moral Commitments of Technology Assessment 15

Christian Theology and Technology Assessment 18

Overview of the Book 21

1. Martin Heidegger on Technology as a Form of Life 31

The Sociality of Perception: Beyond Idealism and Empiricism 33

Birth and Ascent of the Technological Form of Life 39

Can We “Tame” Technology? 48

Technology within the Law of Material Being 51

Conclusion: Beyond the Cosmos as “Object” 60

2. George Grant and the Technological Ideal 66

Grant, Heidegger, and the Metaphysics of Technology 66

Axioms of a Technological Age 69

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The Consequences of Technological Axioms 85

Protest in a Technological Age: Sanity Is Not Statistical 94

Conclusion: Creation, Boundaries, and Hubris 99

3. Michel Foucault and the Habits of Technology 102

Grant and Foucault: Enucleation and Problematization 104

Revolutions in Punishment: From Drama to Docility 107

The Contemporary Relevance of Foucault’s Cultural Analysis 125

Technology as Meaningful Experience 129

Conclusion: Technology as and in Political Economy 145

Summarizing Part I with a Case: Tabulating Fertility 149

Technological Decision Making from the Inside 162

4. Advent and the Renewal of the Senses 167

What Is Moral Theology? Christ at the Center 169

How Far Is Too Far? Moral Deliberationin a Technological Age 187

5. Technology for Good and Evil 191

Augustine’s Two Cities 193

Gift as Moral Heuristic 201

Technology as Pride: A Society of Curiosity 205

Theological Ontology and Moral Deliberationin the Work of Karl Barth 211

The Recovery of Situated Difference:The Promise of Technology 225

Conclusion: Sanctification as the Remaking of Rationality 234

6. Political Reconciliation in the Community of Worship 236

Bernd Wannenwetsch on Political Worship:Beyond Reactionism and Analogy 239

Reconciliation as the Church’s Life-Form 246

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Clashing Forms of Life? Political Technique andEcclesial Authority: Romans 12:1-8 255

Trust in the Word as Basic Political Skill 263

Mutual Representation and Reconciled Community 270

Conclusion: Political Ethics and NonpoliticalTechnological Questions 288

7. Worship, Sabbath, and Work 289

Karl Barth on Sabbath: Genesis 2:1-3 290

Worship and Work between Creation and New Creation 295

Clashing Forms of Life? Work and Service 302

Conclusion: Work as a Site of Faith Seeking Understanding 318

8. Being Reconciled with Creation’s Material Form 320

Embracing Created Material Order as Gift 322

Bodiliness in the Creation Narrative: Genesis 1:24-31 335

Clashing Forms of Life? The Eating Complex 340

Clashing Forms of Life? The Sexual Complex 360

Theological Analysis of the Case Study: Receiving Fertility 364

Conclusion: Sociality and Materiality as a Site of Conflict 373

Conclusion: An Ethos of Dwelling in the House of the Lord 374

Demythologizing Technology Assessment 374

The Humane Revolt of the God-Man 379

Taking Hold of Life That Really Is Life 387

Bibliography 389

Index 405

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Acknowledgments

Thanking those who have shaped one’s thought is always a pleasure, evenif necessarily incomplete. At the head of the list is Michael Banner, whoconscientiously oversaw, guided, and inspired the formation of this projectas a doctoral thesis at King’s College, London. During that period MartinWendte was my closest reader and conversation partner, and BerndWannenwetsch provided unstinting encouragement and critical interac-tion through a great generosity with his ideas. Simon Perry, AndrewCameron, and Douglas Knight deserve thanks for educating me with theirthoughts and friendships. And to my second supervisor, the late and muchbeloved Colin Gunton, goes the credit for sustaining the rich research en-vironment a project like this needs to flourish.

Through the years this project has found many generous critical read-ers, to each of whom I am immensely grateful. Hans Ulrich, StanleyHauerwas, Bernd Wannenwetsch, Linda Woodhead, Stefan Heuser, AmyLaura Hall, Hans Schaeffer, Nikolaus Bacht, Simon Perry, Brent Waters,and Benjamin McNutt read and commented on complete drafts of thebook. The London Goodenough College Theology Study Group, theKing’s College Systematic Theology Research Seminar, and the Universityof Aberdeen Cultural History Seminar heard and gave helpful feedback onseveral portions of this work. Oliver O’Donovan, Kelly Kapic, Chris Rob-erts, Paul Cumin, Robert Lowry, Don Wood, Chris Brittain, Iain Taylor,Norman Wirzba, Matthew Nickoloff, and A. K. M. Adam each commentedon one or more chapters. The questions of my examiners, Robert Song andJohn Webster, were provocative and stimulating, as have been many subse-quent conversations with John, now a treasured colleague. Many thanks as

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well to the students in Aberdeen who took “Christian Ethics in a Techno-logical Age: Problems and Prospects” and who gave invaluable feedback ona complete and late draft of the book, especially Andy Odle and ScottPrather. I am also grateful to Andy Draycott, whose doctoral work onWannenwetsch provided valuable stimulation in the late stages of revision.Thanks also to Duke Divinity School for permitting me to consult JudithHeyhoe, whose insights and editing skills made this a much clearer book,as did the final proofreading by Shaun Price and Benjamin Wall.

I am also indebted to the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Princi-pals of the Universities of the United Kingdom for granting an OverseasResearch Student Award, and to the King’s College Theological Trust, bothof which supported my doctoral work. Financial, emotional, and prayersupport were liberally given by my grandmother Laura McFarland, andparents, David and Carolyn Brock. Most important, my wife StephanieBrock funded, prayed, cheered, proofread, and commented on many ver-sions of the manuscript. She not only dwelled with joy in this text with mefor the many years of labor it took to bring it forth, but taught me whatmarriage means, an ongoing lesson that increasingly shaped the structureof this book.

My inquiry into technology began from questions about the sourcesof the financial tensions that bedevil medical care in the developed West, aproblem commonly construed as one of being capable of delivering morehealth care than we can pay for. The more I thought about these tensions,the more evident it became that the problem is insoluble in these terms.Technological development and political will seemed to be pushing aheadin an apparently reasonable manner to yield a state of affairs satisfactory tono one.1 This paradox led to further investigation into the rationality of

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Acknowledgments

1. This problem has subsequently been recognized in public policy analysis and evennoted (if gingerly) in the political discourse surrounding health care reform in the UnitedStates. What these comments make clear is that the basic problem is barely understood andis considered far beyond the scope of policy analysis or empirical study. American research-ers comparing the British and American health policy in 2006 concluded, to take one exam-ple, that “The United States [has] avoided coming to terms with escalating healthcare costsand possibly diminishing returns on investments in health care. Perhaps more than anyoneelse, Americans value technological progress in medical care. The national bias in favor ofinnovation, along with the dispersion of responsibility for coverage decisions in Americanhealthcare, makes it particularly difficult to focus public attention on the consequences ofour ‘default’ approach to allocating healthcare resources.” My interest is in coming to termswith the implications of this “national bias in favor of innovation,” probing the extent towhich America is only one important exemplar of Western developed societies, and directly

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these beliefs. Down this road lay a wider set of questions about the verypresuppositions of the modern project. Setting the book aside for someyears but continuing to think about it, I was privileged to have many con-versations with Stephanie about her experiences as a neonatal nurse. Wethen were blessed with a son, Adam, who would no longer be with us if notfor that most intensive and invasive of medicine’s armory, open-heart sur-gery. One way to read this book is as an extended expression of wonderand gratitude at the ingenuity that can patch holes in the middle of a livingsix-month-old heart, stopping and restarting it in the process. But it iswonder accompanied by a lament, that these very same human skills are atthe same time arraying themselves against those, like Adam, consideredimperfect or nonstandard.

This book is dedicated to David Brock, who immersed me from youthin the mechanical world, and Carolyn Brock, who gave me the world ofbooks. A lifetime is not long enough to appreciate the gift of biologicalparents who live as if the body of Christ is humanity’s first home.

Durham, North Carolina

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acknowledgments

facing the dead ends this bias produces not only in health care policy and practice, but inmany other spheres. Quotation from Wilhelmine Miller, “Value-Based Coverage Policy inthe United States and the United Kingdom: Different Paths to a Common Goal,” NationalHealth Policy Forum, George Washington University, 29 November 2006, 27.

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Introduction

Christian Faith and Technological Artifacts

The Lord has called by name Bezalel . . . he has filled him with di-vine spirit, with skill, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind ofcraft, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, incutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, in every kind of craft.

exodus 35:30-33

Demetrius, a silversmith who made silver shrines of Artemis,brought no little business to the artisans. These he gathered together,with the workers of the same trade, and said, “Men, you know thatwe get our wealth from this business. You also see and hear that notonly in Ephesus but in almost the whole of Asia this Paul has per-suaded and drawn away a considerable number of people by sayingthat gods made with hands are not gods.”

acts 19:24-26

The Spirit of the God of Israel is given to Bezalel to inspire skills in everytechnique of fabrication. Yet these same skills are condemned inDemetrius. Or perhaps it is only the ways in which the Ephesian silver-smiths deploy their God-given skills that Paul condemns. To bring thissimple question into contact with contemporary debates about technolog-ical development immediately opens complications of a very differentsort: Is the craftwork of the ancients really analogous to modern techno-logical manufacture? In quarters where the Bible is taken as the fundament

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of Christian faith, it is often assumed without further ado that such moralequivalence is easily established. In contrast, more liberal Christians tendto emphasize the ways that modern technology and its dilemmas are quali-tatively different from those of the ancients. The conclusion soon followsthat Christians must be prepared to leave Scripture aside and use their rea-son in dialogue with the best secular thought to discern appropriate direc-tions for technological development. It is safe to say that the biblical au-thors never dreamed of technologies like modern genetics, the Internet, ornuclear energy, and therefore that Scripture does not directly address theethical questions they might raise. But if the challenges presented by thesetechnologies are genuinely novel in theological terms, contemporaryChristians must be brave enough to admit that they are cut off from thetraditions of faith that oriented previous generations as they assessed andresponded to the cultural changes they too faced.

In this book I am primarily interested in grappling with a modern cul-tural icon as familiar to us as it was unthinkable for the ancients: the phe-nomenon of “new technology.” What do we really mean when we use thisterm? What unifies this group of quite disparate human activities? Why isit that here especially humanity seems to be presented with so many vexingmoral challenges? And how relevant is a historical Christian tradition inassessing what is born from this womb? What seems clear is that Chris-tians have no reason to dispute the commonplace that a world withlightbulbs and penicillin is better than a world without, all things consid-ered. The proposal that we ought to roll back or freeze technological ad-vance is not only an impossibility, but ridiculous. Nevertheless, unsettlingquestions about where technology is taking us continue to bubble just un-der the surface of contemporary culture, unfettered technological progressno longer appearing as the unambiguous boon it once did. With modernmedicine, transport, and hygiene have come violence on an unprecedentedscale and the specter of terrorism more devastating than ever beforedreamed, as well as the remaking of humanity from its basic buildingblocks. As a result, we have become freshly aware that the embrace of tech-nological development despite these fears is always a step of faith. To takethis step without asking what sort of faith it is makes it a double leap. Thisbook is an extended inquiry into if and when the church of Jesus Christmight wish to share the world’s faith in the promise of technology, or ifand when its own proper faithfulness might set it in opposition to the faithand order of its age.

The question of where to begin such an inquiry is fraught with concep-

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tual complications in addition to the role of Scripture already described.The habitual recourse of our public debates to consequentialist balancingof benefits and harms seems most feeble precisely in discussions aboutthose technologies that promise to take humanity down roads never beforeexplored. The patently irresolvable debates between environmentalists anddevelopers of genetically modified crops provide one example of why ap-peal to consequences will never resolve the most contested questions. Con-flicts like these are driven by beliefs behind the empirically testable. Againthis presents us with another conceptual problem, that of the scope of anal-ysis. Ought we to enter this contested area by studying a single technologyin some depth? Or perhaps by first setting out a general theory of technol-ogy? There is some wisdom in both approaches — as well as dangers. Fo-cusing on moral analysis of single technologies promises the empirical de-tail that ensures supple analysis, but tends to make generalization to othercases difficult.1 Foregrounding a grand theory of technology facilitates thebroad generalizations that promise to help resolve a wider range of techno-logical questions, but here the difficulty is making connections from thegeneral theory to very different types of concrete technical questions.2 Anyaccount of technology that aspires to generalizability must develop someoverarching account of technology, but its plausibility will rest on continualand detailed reference to particular technological questions.

Such an approach will also need to demonstrate an awareness of howmodern decision makers actually go about deciding which technologiesought to be developed, a process that is always more messy, compromisefilled, and intuitive than theory would dictate. Only when we have prop-erly understood and theologically analyzed how decisions for technologi-cal development are made will we be prepared to act not as armchair or ac-ademic pundits, but as participants in the gospel’s reclamation of thesocieties we currently inhabit. The Christian gospel is critical but not de-structive, revolutionary but not tyrannical; it subverts our ways of perceiv-ing and living from deep within, at their very heart. I will shortly deploy a

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1. This approach is often pursued by thinkers with empiricist presuppositions. Cf. Rob-ert Pool, Beyond Engineering: How Society Shapes Technology (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1997).

2. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment trans. JohnCumming (London: Allen Lane, 1973), provide an influential example of an analysis of tech-nology that is essentially a critique of the development of Western philosophy. Here interac-tions with specific technologies are general and illustrative rather than constitutive of the ar-gument.

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discourse analysis to the deliberative framework most often applied to di-vine the worth of a proposed technological development in developedeconomies. The bulk of my analysis will be devoted to detailing why thesedominant ways of orienting moral analysis — and the presuppositionsand the factors it considers morally relevant — are best understood as ex-pressions of a technological age against which the gospel lays fundamentaland sweeping challenges.

The deepest challenge of Christian faith in a technological age is itsquestioning of modern certainties about the relation of knowledge to beliefand activity. There have been many attempts in modern philosophy and the-ology to surmount the problems generated by the overly conceptual bias ofmodern (post-Cartesian and Kantian) metaphysics. I have learned muchfrom thinkers critical of modern metaphysics and epistemology. What I takefrom them can be summed up thus: “knowing” is the cognition of agents inmotion; affective, volitional, and relational beings. Our ways of living aredeeply implicated in how and therefore what we know. We know because wehave “tasted and seen,” not in the first instance because we have grasped a su-perior theoretical coherence. With this claim I part ways with dominantmodern accounts of epistemology and ethics. I assume, in contrast, thatwhatever “Christian ethics” is, it is not the derivation of moral claims fromcreedal affirmations. Rather, the creeds describe a formed faith that revealscreation as it truly is. God gives a faith that has form and through it new sen-sitivities; these are exercised and explored in the ways we live. The technicalterminology for the position I will develop is that it is ontologically realist,methodologically antireductionist, and epistemologically antifoundation-alist. I position myself against both the reductions of positivism and empiri-cism and the strongest claims of social constructivism and moral relativism.Why and how I take this approach is related to the subject of my study, andthe way that it demands a rethinking of the very form and task of theology asit has been understood in modernity.

My methodological stance can be understood as an interpretation ofAnselm’s credo ut intellegam, glossed thus: I live a confession and thereforeI understand. This intertwining of doing and knowing is not simply aChristianization of modern anti-Enlightenment philosophies; these in-sights were as commonsensical to ancient Christians as they are counter-intuitive to most moderns.3 I am bringing into the foreground a consider-

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3. The Didache displays particularly well one very early Christian appropriation of thecommon ancient relation of ethics and epistemology. It demands that converts be trained in

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ation obscured in most modern ethics with their focus on “choices.” Evenwhen this focus is bounded by awareness of the foreshortening effects of“quandary ethics,” moderns find it difficult to disconnect the concept ofethics from the moment of conscious choice. Because we habitually thinkabout ethics as the discourse of “making right choices,” we may only barelyglimpse the ways the gospel renders questionable beliefs or activities wenever saw as products of any choice. But the gospel does not “answer” ourmoral questions: it generates new ones. When it does, it does not necessar-ily direct us to the action that would constitute a proper response. Ethics asfaith’s struggle with such complexities is a much more open and explora-tive notion, which of course includes conscious choices, but differs inscope and tenor from the activism forced on us by an ethics reduced to theact of choosing. Seeing and moral evaluation are wholly intertwined, andare separated only with great difficulty. Explicit moral reasoning alwayscomes late in the day, but is nevertheless an indispensable part of the hu-man embrace of the divine conversion of human life.

The most important implication of these claims is that the readershould not understand the ethical prescriptions developed in this book asderivations from ideas or doctrines. They are hints about ways of life thegospel indicates as full of promise. Given my epistemological commit-ments, I assume that it is in the living that faith is tested and is known, andfinds its redeemed form. The biblical witness describes the life of faith asgiven shape in life shared with God. Its ethical form is not found throughmastering certain habits (a Greek conception), but in the lived testing andencounter in which what is good and true is proved. Christian ethics istherefore a prayerful questioning in faith of human habits to discern “theway of the righteous” (Ps. 1).4 That Christian ethics is a prayerful testing al-lows for a diversity of Christian forms of life while setting all Christian liv-ing within formative and guiding grammatical rules. Within these presup-positions, ethical claims function as judgments made in faith about thecontemporary force of theological claims. Therefore, in what follows I aimonly to suggest avenues Christian faith opens up for exploration in a tech-nological age enacting a very different quest.

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Christian behavior before admission to baptism. Here it is assumed that the gospel is not infact known at all by those still practicing sorcery, infanticide, abortion, arrogance, andboastfulness, among other things.

4. Hans Ulrich, Wie Geschöpfe Leben: Konturen evangelischer Ethik (Münster: Lit Verlag,2005), 288-91.

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Put simply, the monk praying and praising for the first six hours of theday and working the last nine is engrossed in different aspects of creaturelyexistence than the modern urbanite who works at a computer the first ninehours and watches television the last six. In a meaningful sense, they dwellin different worlds. To say this is not to reproduce the modern captivity toepistemology, though it is to assume the perspectivalism inherent in beinglimited, biological creatures.5 It is rather to make a claim about the varietyand richness of God’s works. Those works are manifold enough to absorbmany human lifetimes, each exploring one of its many folds. It takes verylittle spiritual insight to see that a Christianity fully and uncritically aspir-ing to achieve the suburban ideals of the developed West may only rarelyglimpse what is beyond its own narrow furrow during its two hours ofworship on Sunday morning. But Christians dare not say that nothing atall happens here. During these two hours a promise of new life is held outand experienced, an annunciation inflaming hope for the defeat of thedeadening narrowness of modern technological life and an overcoming ofits estrangements. The annunciation of the gospel does not destroy themodern technological world altogether, but is a divine invitation to a formof life at once critical, enlivening, and connective.

These considerations are as old as humankind. Many of the ancientGreeks thought that involvement in technical questions was a demeaningpursuit, while others came to hold it in high regard.6 Scripture too doesnot uniformly praise or condemn skilled craftsmanship as a skill with in-dependent worth. In the Old Testament we see artists and craftsmen por-trayed as being filled like Bezalel with the Spirit to carry out and teachothers their crafts (Exod. 35:30-35) or to plan as architects (1 Chron. 28:11-

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5. See Nietzsche’s important observations about the epistemic implications of beingcreatures with limited senses, in Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed.Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1997), 483; The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff;poems translated by Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 39,354; The Will to Power: A New Translation, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmannand R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 489, 496, 505.

6. This divide took the form of a debate about the nature of reality and the appropriatepath to its knowledge. On one side stood the Ionian philosophers of Miletus, such as Thales,who had a “physicalist” view emphasizing the permanence of matter and its accessibility toempirical study. Plato was the earliest systematizer of the rival view that emphasized thegrounding of reality in permanent forms, ideas, and concepts, best understood through de-ductive or mathematical investigation. Aristotle represents a compromise between these twopositions.

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12).7 Conversely, in Acts 19:23-27 we see Paul implicitly condemning atleast one species of manufacture. Notice here that the biblical witness tiesthe assessment of the worth of human craftsmanship to the worship it ex-presses. All building serves some lord and is assessed solely in relation tothe faith it expresses.

Those engaged today in deciding whether a corporation or state oughtto pursue a given technological development seem on the surface rathercloser to the craftsmen of Ephesus than to the builders of Israel’s temple.They do not build for religious but secular purposes, motivated by a desireto do the right thing by their corporation or nation, so bringing wealth,prosperity, and maybe even renown to those for whom they feel responsi-ble. But there is a theologically critical difference between moderns andthe Ephesians: we moderns, with our focus on ethical choices, have lost theability to see what was immediately apparent to the Ephesian silversmiths,that our making has an intrinsic relationship to our worship. Notice thatPaul says nothing against the silversmiths’ manufacture, and preaches onlyJesus Christ and him crucified. It was not Paul but Demetrius who imme-diately saw that the simple utterance of this name claimed and deeply chal-lenged the work of his guild. The modern loss of this immediate sense ofthe connections between work and worship is a characteristic of a Chris-tianity whose secularity is marked by its assumption that in all but the oc-casional problematic cases, questions of technology are remote from ques-tions of faith.

Another difference between the Ephesian silversmiths and modernforms of manufacture is the interjection of the division of labor.Whereas each Ephesian silversmith had to play the role of manager andfabricator, with only the occasional foray to the marketplace, industrycoordination conventions, contemporary managing, designing, and fab-rication, have become entirely separate roles. The manager has beengiven the responsibility for declaring that designers should begin design-ing and then producing new technologies. So while the Ephesian silver-smiths could only think about changes in their product lines as they la-bored in their dark workshops, today such deliberation has become atask for a group of people sitting, stereotypically, in bright, window-encircled boardrooms overlooking sprawling cities. Here ten men insuits sit around a long table deliberating about business strategy in prep-

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7. Cf. Miroslav Volf, Work in the Spirit: Toward a Theology of Work (Eugene, Oreg.: Wipfand Stock, 2001), 113-15.

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aration to set to work the hands and machinery of a vast enterprise bydirective word alone.

Let me make clear, in parenthesis, that my reference here to “ten men”is a recognition of rather than in defiance of contemporary conventionsabout gender-inclusive language. Though we might well find women incontemporary boardrooms, precisely as a result of gender equality move-ments, gender relations remain complex in the fields of business and tech-nology, traditionally male domains.8 My choice to use “ten men” in this vi-gnette is a reminder of this dynamic, which will not be a main theme of thisbook, though its implications will be touched on at several points in thecourse of the discussion, most obviously in the case study that ends part I. Iwill also not deal directly with the closely related theme of race, though itwould be fitting also to imagine our “ten men” as white. The very languageof “technological development” is in part responsible for this imagination,being a crucial component of a long and complex linkage of colonizationand racial supremacy.9 The racism of the great colonial projects yesterdayand today are underlain by a polarization of an unruly and unproductivewilderness with polite and civilized society groomed and ordered throughscience, technology, commerce, and ownership.10 As society’s benevolentcivilizers, our ten men consider themselves to have transcended the wild-ness and savagery that they have made it their goal to displace.

We find such groups right across the Western industrialized world, allwith essentially the same remit: to produce computers, credit cards, petro-leum, biotech products, national security; the whole panoply of manufac-tured goods, services, and government that sustains familiar material andsocial relations. They steer a course for the future by managing and shift-ing the arrangements of funds, infrastructure, and labor under their con-trol, and aim optimally to configure the internal organization of their con-

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introduction

8. Cf. Jill Bystydzienski and Sharon Bird, eds., Removing Barriers: Women in AcademicScience, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,2006); Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750 (London: Thames andHudson, 1995), chapters 5–9; and Patricia Lewis, “The Quest for Invisibility: Female Entre-preneurs and the Masculine Norm of Entrepreneurship,” Gender, Work and Organization 13,no. 5 (September 2006): 453-69.

9. Cf. J. Kameron Carter, “Trinity, Christology and the Problem of Global Civil Society:Notes on the Archeology of an Idea,” in Peter Caserella and Paul Louis Metzger, Trinity andCivil Society (forthcoming).

10. Cf. Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture(New York: Routledge, 2003), chapters 4–7.

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cerns and the products these concerns release into wider society. Withinthe limits of their resources, legal constraints, and market constraints, suchboards are free to act as they see fit to produce what they consider the mostbeneficial state of affairs for the entity they govern.

With such important decisions at stake, each board member naturallyintends to pursue his work with conscientious meticulousness, thinking tohimself that he will do nothing rashly, confident in his own “prudence andconsiderateness whenever the safety of others is committed to [his] care.”If at times the task demands exploratory or sweeping rearrangement of thesocial or material arrangements of society, these board members must notrisk the welfare of their corporations with practical paralysis, but must atall times be certain of their commitment to magnanimous benevolence.Each must be able to say to himself with a clear conscience, “[I] will notrashly encounter danger. I will be cool, persevering, and prudent.”11

Demetrius the silversmith and our ten managers bear a clear aware-ness of their duties as part of the decision-making organ of a manufactur-ing concern. Among the many differences between the two forms of man-ufacture are their modes of deliberation about how to direct theseconcerns. Modern corporate and state managers have developed a highlyformal method of moral deliberation in the hopes of maximizing the pos-sible welfare they may produce by their decisions. I will ask the questionthat the hegemony of such methods has eclipsed in the modern board-room: Does the presence of the Christ who so disturbed the silversmiths ofEphesus also break into and claim our ten men’s deliberation about newtechnology? Or is some human work perhaps validated as an expression ofsanctified and properly secular human making? These questions imply afurther circle of questions: Does this same Christ break into our own indi-vidual thinking or unthinking relation to the things we make, acquire, andrely upon on a daily basis? We find the hint that such an inbreaking doesnot destroy but refashions human making in the divine validation ofBezalel’s skills. These were skills discernible among the pagan peoples,transformed through God’s orienting them for his own purposes. Theol-

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11. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (London: David CampbellPublishers, 1992), 9, 11. Lest it appear to be a gratuitous slur to place the portentous words ofShelley’s scientist on the lips of corporate and government managers, we need only note thatShelley’s tale has recently been rehabilitated by inventors. The “Bill Gates of Biotech” was re-cently pleased to say of his work creating artificial life: “Shelley would have loved this!”Quoted in Kevin Davies, The Sequence: Inside the Race for the Human Genome (London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001), 110.

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ogy invites this transformation in its attempts to name the evils that cur-rently beset both church and world.

Bezalel’s skills were not the exclusive preserve of a narrow elite but ex-pressed to a higher degree those of many types of artisans, and commonpeople. Material culture shapes and is sustained by the activity of everyonein a society, from top to bottom. For this reason I will be focusing in whatfollows on the intertwining of three nodal points in human relations: thepoint of governance and lawmaking, the point of business and industrialdecision-making, and the point of our individual consuming and produc-ing. My contention is that the technological habits of moderns exhibit ashared, if shifting and fissured, grammar, visible in its essential contours atall three points. As we turn now to examine the rationality of technologyassessment, notice that it is addressed to both corporate and governmentalmanagers, and assumes a populace that predictably, if tacitly, will repro-duce its grammar in its individual decisions about the meaning of techno-logical progress.

New Technology, the Manager,and the Language of Technology Assessment

A properly supple theological engagement with modern technology mustat least indicate where theological thought might enter the ongoing flow oflife. This is especially important when talking about modern technology,which is firmly embedded in every aspect of our lives. Technology is manythings to many people, but is external to none of us because it is a constitu-tive aspect of modern humanity. “It weaves through our everyday think-ing, educating, family raising, churchgoing leisure and labor,” commentsanthropologist of technology Louis Bucciarelli. “Technology as artifact, assystem, as tool, productivity, efficiency — yes; technology as metaphor, asprocess, as values we live by and in as well.”12 Technology in all its forms issimply the environment in which our habits of living and thinking de-velop, in which the middle-aged cannot operate their phone while thechild designs a Web site. We inherit ways of living and thinking within thisenvironment, and all our actions can only react to it.

To gain any purchase on such a complex topic suggests beginning witha few basic terminological clarifications. We commonly think of “technol-

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12. Louis Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 196.

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ogy” as marking the most obvious difference between what are called thedeveloped and the developing worlds. We have in view a range of artifacts(such as cars) and institutions (like hospitals). “Research and development”as an important aspect of the organized industrial processes of technical ex-perimentation also springs to mind. This usage of “development” gesturestoward the systematic ordering of society to sustain economic and materialgrowth through continual development of techniques and mechanical ar-rangements. Within the scope of these two senses of technology, an “ethicsof technological development” or an “ethics of design” designates the rangeof discussions about which technologies should be developed. Differentparties engage in such discussions with various aims in mind. The entrepre-neur strives to promote the growth of business, the nongovernmental orga-nization to alleviate poverty in “undeveloped” countries, and so on. Thecommon denominator in such discourses is the presupposition that we cantalk intelligibly about why we ought to invest in upgrading, creating, or ex-panding a given technological apparatus within a given context.

It is crucial to note the often overlooked point that discussion about de-signing new technologies is a political process. The language I have just usedof “better” design or technologies is intended to redirect attention fromtechnological artifacts to the ways that artifacts embody collective judg-ments about what it is meaningful to do or make. This redirection remindsus that design is a meeting of a range of different parties, each with differentcriteria for success in mind. The engineer seeks mechanical elegance, themarketer aesthetic qualities, the accountant cost efficiency, the maintenanceteam robustness of design and ease of access for repair, and so on. In being apolitical process, design is also historical. Designing never begins with a cleanslate. The competitors’ product, the financial state of the company, the taxand legal environment, labor costs and skills are just a few of the variablesthat confine and shape the process of design at any given moment.

Design, then, is a living process, the gathering of human beings to dis-cuss the construction of an object. It is an activity laden with uncertaintyand ambiguity, and so with promise. The theological question is how this col-lective discussion might come to discover the true good and aim of its activ-ity. One of the guiding assumptions of this study is that inquiry into this truegood often begins precisely when commonly accepted beliefs about whatgood action looks like suddenly become unclear and design agreementtherefore becomes hard to reach. In such moments we can genuinely ask:What is this thing we make good for? How does it enrich human life?

When the shape of a new technological artifact is finalized, the manu-

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facturing process is geared up and the design team disbanded. This repre-sents the closing of an ethically pregnant window. The decision of what tomake has been decided; this will be deterministically reproduced until fur-ther notice. Yet the manager as a voice within the design process will alsoretain a special role in being able to abruptly shut it down. This makes un-derstanding the way managers construe the aims of technological develop-ment crucial in grasping the rationality of this “living center” of techno-logical life, the design discussion. In the culture of management embodiedin our ten men, technical, governmental, and financial cultures meet andnegotiate in a process that is wholly political. This is a collective discover-ing of a good material form for the future. But as we will soon see, the cul-tures of design and management are increasingly ones in which explicitpolitical negotiation about the appropriate ends and goals of manufactureis being replaced by decision-making techniques that assume these discus-sions have been resolved.13

A literature has arisen to aid managers’ practical decision makingabout technological development that offers a scientific approach to theimplementation of new technologies. In a field in which no clear spokes-person represents a consensus view,14 Ernest Braun’s Technology in Con-text: Technology Assessment for Managers15 provides a developed exampleof the central currents of a maturing but fluid discourse.

According to Braun, the conception of “technology assessment” wasborn at the request of the United States Congress, who wished to system-

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13. Cf. Bucciarelli, Designing Engineers, 185-87, 195-98.14. This somewhat dated comment remains apropos: “Despite the fact that [technology

assessment and environmental impact assessment are] widely practiced throughout theglobe, there is no generally accepted approach to which the terms ‘technology assessment’and ‘environmental impact analysis’ refer.” K. S. Shrader-Frechette, Science Policy, Ethics, andEconomic Methodology: Some Problems of Technology Assessment and Environmental-ImpactAnalysis (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1985), 12. A vast literature is devoted to debating thedetails of the method and disseminating the results of particular studies, including the jour-nals Technology in Society, Technology Assessment, Poesis and Praxis: International Journal ofTechnology Assessment and Ethics of Science, Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal, HealthTechnology Assessment, and the International Journal of Technology Assessment in Healthcare.The moral frameworks most often assumed in the discourse are variants of utilitarianconsequentialism, which assume that the good can be impartially or “rationally” defined(either procedurally or by content), and thus costs and benefits can be balanced to reach anexpedient political decision. See Shrader-Frechette, chapter 2.

15. Ernest Braun, Technology in Context: Technology Assessment for Managers (London:Routledge, 1998).

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atize the diverse actuarial-style methods that had come to rationalize themaking of investment decisions in private business. This was a response toincreasing pressure on Congress in the 1950s and 1960s to coordinate na-tional policy on technology. In 1972 it set up the Office of Technology As-sessment to provide objective reports about the potential impacts of newtechnologies. The aim was the prioritization of development options tomaximize investment and return. So conceived, technology assessmentserved strategic planning on the assumption that technology was one of ifnot the principal weapon for both strategic and tactical maneuveringamong competing entities.16 This assumption reveals the deeper tacticalconnections between the seemingly disparate projects of scientific explora-tion and technological “application.” Both now become visible as essentialcomponents of strategic plans formulated and funded by managers. It is nolonger controversial to note that modern research science is much more in-fluenced by the managerial culture of industry and government than bymaverick inventors and free academic entrepreneurs. A watershed in thisshift was the rise of the large techno-scientific projects of the Second WorldWar. The rise of technology assessment in 1972 is thus part of the matura-tion and rationalization of this shift in the culture of invention.17

Stated formally, technology assessment is “a systematic attempt to fore-see the consequences of introducing a particular technology in all spheres it islikely to interact with.”18 Braun’s interest is in making the deliberativemethods it offers available to any manager concerned with “what effect dif-ferent present actions and decisions might have upon the future” (109, italicsin original). The theory aims to take the guesswork out of understandingthe effects of incremental or radical innovations, aiding anticipation andplanning for wide-ranging systematic changes in specific technology sys-tems, and the forecasting of large-scale shifts in the general technologicalparadigm of society (14-15).

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16. Braun, Technology in Context, 26-30, 55-57. For further insight into the U.S. govern-ment’s efforts along these lines, see publications such as National Research Council Staff, In-dustrial Technology Assessments: An Evaluation of the Research Program of the Office of Indus-try (Washington, D.C.: National Academic Press, 1999), and Molla Donaldson and HaroldSox, eds., Setting Priorities for Health Technology Assessment: A Model Process (Washington,D.C.: National Academic Press, 1992).

17. Mary Jo Nye, Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800-1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

18. Braun, Technology in Context, 28, italics in original. Page references in the followingtext are to Braun’s book.

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Conceived as a social science, technology assessment aims to be as ob-jective as possible in presenting a balanced view of the possible futures anation or company faces. Those who assess technology, Braun claims, “donot offer advice of the kind ‘this ought to be done,’ but only of the kind ‘ifyou wish to achieve this and that, the following instruments are at yourdisposal and may prove effective’” (38). The method drinks deeply of themodern liberal preference for conceiving prudence and justice in purelyformal terms, as political consent achieved via rules for deliberation. Ittherefore studiously avoids making any thick material claims about truth,morality, or reality (157).

In practical terms, technology assessment bears a close relation to domi-nant forms of economic science, attempting to produce a set of mathe-matical cost-benefit curves with meaningful purchase on real future humanbehavior. The methods of extrapolation, expert opinion, mathematicalmodeling, cost-benefit analysis, and cross-impact or environmental-impactanalysis are combined to create the most accurate picture possible of thefuture impacts of new technologies. Risk-cost-benefit analysis is the preemi-nent technique in this battery of conceptual and empirical tools because ofits capacity to deal with the widest number of variables. It is also the tech-nique favored by private industry due to its emphasis on profit as a primedecision-making determinant.19 Such a method intends not only to rule outinvestments in new technologies that will not produce a dividend, but also toindicate opportunities when the introduction of a new technology may beespecially profitable.20 However, because technology assessment deals withinherently unpredictable human social behaviors, in the end Braun con-cludes: “Perhaps technology assessment is more an attitude than a method— the attitude of attempting to take a holistic view of technology within itsbroad social setting.”21 This attitude opens and governs the space in whichthe lively discussions about any given technology may take place betweenengineers, market researchers, accountants, and the like. It is the rationalityof management that determines whether a team will ever be assembled tothink seriously about developing a new technological artifact. Technology asmetaphor hovers over technology as artifact.

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19. Shrader-Frechette, Science Policy, 14-15.20. Braun, Technology in Context, chapter 5, “Methods Useful in Technology Assess-

ment.”21. Braun, Technology in Context, 108.

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christian ethics in a technological age

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