The obvious question is rarely asked: what is the end of this enlargement of human control and this endless technological reaching? I sense a communal dread about it. Are we building the Tower of Babel—a recurring trope this week? Are we headed for the annihilation of humankind?

This past week, adults from across the country gathered at Wyoming Catholic College with participating faculty to discuss the nature and future of technology. We began on Sunday night by thinking about the Greek god of technology, Hephaestus, and we ended last night at the home of our hosts, Jim and Dottie Tonkowich, thinking about the future of technology and how we might benefit from it without losing our human center and endangering our relation to God.

I can’t speak for the other faculty or participants in this regard, but for me the major insight from the week was the necessity of thinking as deeply as possible about technology as the “dispensation” of our age. Technology fascinates us. Last night I discovered that one of our participants had driven a new Tesla from Florida to Lander. He told me about various recharging systems, the difficulty of figuring out how to turn on the windshield wipers, the laptop-sized dashboard display, and so on. In a way, the more “dazzled” we are (as one of our participants put it) by particular innovations, the more difficult it is to keep thinking deeply into what technology itself is, but our readings this week kept bringing us back to what Martin Heidegger calls “the question concerning technology.”

For a Tuesday session led by Dr. Paul Geisting, for example, we read Francis Bacon’s utopian narrative, The New Atlantis, which describes an island kingdom in the Pacific called Bensalem. When a representative of Salomon’s House, the scientific academy of Bensalem, describes the end or purpose of the work there, he neatly summarizes what we could call the project of contemporary technology: “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.” Why are they enlarging “the bounds of the human empire”? Because they can. The project has no explicit intent to add to the glory of God, for example, any acknowledgment of the Resurrection, or any reference to guidelines established by revelation. Though Bensalem itself is nominally Christian, Salomon’s House operates independently of both religion and politics.

Although science today has been thoroughly invaded by politics, the contemporary world is nevertheless clearly engaged in “the effecting of all things possible” 400 years after Bacon’s book was published. “Nature” is now a social construct. “Reality” is not enough. In fact, rumor has it that we are all going to be wearing wraparound virtual reality headsets now that they are available from Apple instead of Meta.

The obvious question is rarely asked: what is the end of this enlargement of human control and this endless technological reaching? I sense a communal dread about it. Are we building the Tower of Babel—a recurring trope this week? Are we headed for the annihilation of humankind? This prospect, considered likely in the nuclear-war scenarios of my childhood, was floated again in the media last week. It was a one-sentence statement released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization, and signed by over 350 experts in the field: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

Heidegger’s essay (admittedly not the easiest thing to read) addresses a different kind of extinction. The “extreme danger” we face is “the illusion… that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct.” In other words, the danger for man in the technological dispensation is that he cannot even think of God or nature (witness the transgender phenomenon) except as something that he has constructed and projected. Heidegger does not worry so much about potentially lethal machines, because, in fact, “the actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence—that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.”

Heidegger nevertheless finds the rise of a “saving power” in the possible recovery of this “more original revealing,” and he even has a recommendation that reminds me of the “little way” of St. Therese of Lisieux: “Here and now and in little things, we may foster the saving power in its increase.” In thinking of how to foster it, I’m reminded of that most pre-technological and unusual of contemporary things, silence (pdf). I intend to try it.

Republished with gracious permission from the Wyoming Catholic College Weekly Bulletin.

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