Power Failure

Albert Borgmann

Description

We live in a culture shaped and fueled by technology. Usually we equate access to technology with opportunity and the chance to pursue "the good life." Power Failure raises some crucial, if disconcerting, questions about technology: If technology liberates us, what kind of liberation does it promise? Are we prospering, and by what definition? Albert Borgmann looks at the relationship between Christianity and technology by examining some of the "invisible" dangers of a technology-driven lifestyle. Specifically, he points out how utility and consumption have replaced connection to physical things and meaningful practices in everyday life. Power Failure calls us to redeem and restrain technology through simple Christian practices, including citizen-based decision making, shared meals, and daily Scripture reading.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy of religion
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441231567
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2003 by Albert Borgmann
Published by Brazos Press A division of Baker Book House Company P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516–6287 www.brazospress.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
eISBN 978-1-4412-3156-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Contents

Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Introduction
Part 1: The Circumstances of the Culture of Technology
1. The Invisibility of Contemporary Culture
2. The Moral Significance of Material Culture
3. Communities of Celebration
Part 2: The Place of Christianity in the Culture of Technology
4. Contingency and Grace
5. Power and Care
6. Liberty, Festivity, and Poverty
7. Courage and Fortitude
8. The Culture of the Word and the Culture of the Table
Notes
Index
Introduction

T hose of us who live in the advanced industrial countries enjoy unprecedented liberty and prosperity. A crucial part of our freedom is political the freedom of democracy. But what is truly novel and unique is the liberation we owe modern technology freedom from hunger, cold, disease, ignorance, and confinement. Just as remarkable is the positive counterpart to liberation, namely, enrichment the immense prosperity of goods and services that technology has delivered. We are doing very well.
But Christianity is not. All indications are that, as the standard of living rises, faith declines. The population of the richest among the first world countries shows the least belief in God and in life after death and has the lowest church attendance. It also seems that religious convictions decrease as the level of education increases. [1] This country is to some degree an exception, but church membership and church attendance in the United States have also been declining. [2] And here, too, the more affluent and better educated are less religious. [3]
Christianity is still the largest religion in the world and will likely remain so in the foreseeable future. [4] But its strength lies in the southern hemisphere, where Christianity is expanding, and that part of the world is less affluent and less educated in the academic sense than the northern half. This, too, suggests that there is a connection between the progress of technology and the decline of faith.
Technology, in this context, is meant to designate not just an ensemble of machines and procedures, but a type of culture, the kind that is characteristic of the advanced industrial societies and has been developing and gaining definition for two and a half centuries. The connection between technology and Christianity is troubling for two reasons. Most obviously the progress of technology seems to render Christianity superfluous and irrelevant. The good news of the Gospels is directed toward oppressed and poor people, one might think, and when oppression and poverty have been lifted by technology, the good news becomes old.
What is troubling as well is the fuzzy outline and uncertain force of technology and hence of the challenge Christianity is facing. What kind of liberation is it that technology has promised? What sort of riches has technology produced? Do we in fact feel free? Are we truly prospering? These questions go largely unasked in our national conversation. We seem to be stricken with a subclinical malady of doubt and sometimes despair. But in this second sort of trouble there lies hope as well. Perhaps underneath the surface of technological liberty and prosperity there is a sense of captivity and deprivation, and we may hope that once we understand technology more incisively and clearly, there will be good news once again.
That, at any rate, is the argument of the essays that follow. They have been published previously and severally and have been revised, coordinated, and arranged for this collection so that there is some cohesion and sequential order amongst them. They follow one another roughly in an order from the more general to the more particular and from the more preparatory to the more conclusive. The first three examine and expose crucial features of contemporary culture, some inimical to Christianity and some hospitable. Each of the following five investigates a particular linkage between technology and Christianity and in each case concludes with a positive Christian response to the challenge of technology.
These essays are broadly philosophical in character though there is very little of the technical terminology of contemporary philosophy “philosophical” here means reflective and reasoned. Reason and reflection cannot presume to govern faith, but they can precede it and clear a space for it. Making room for Christianity is in fact the most promising response to technology. We should neither try to demolish technology nor run away from it. We can restrain it and must redeem it.

1

The Invisibility of Contemporary Culture

T here are many cultures around the globe today. Among them the culture of the advanced industrial countries is surely the most distinctive. All other cultures, for better or worse, tend toward it. By contemporary culture I mean the technologically advanced style of life.
Contemporary culture is extremely conscious of itself. No prior culture has had so much information about itself, has taken its pulse so often, or has done so much talking about itself. And yet it seems to me that contemporary culture is essentially blind to itself. It is ignorant of its essential character. We can get a first indication of this concealment when we consider two privileged modes of discourse of contemporary culture, namely, scientific and political discourse.
It has become fashionable to emphasize the instability of scientific insight and to stress the kinship between the epistemologies of the sciences and the humanities. But this fashion ignores the progress and the cogency of science. Einstein has superseded Newton in a way in which Arthur Miller has failed to supersede Shakespeare. And Steven Weinberg’s unified theory of the weak nuclear and electromagnetic forces won the kind of acceptance that John Rawls’s theory of justice has never enjoyed. In the natural sciences there is always by near unanimous consent a best current theory. There never is any such thing in the humanities.
The privileged status of political discourse is less controversial. Its privilege consists not in its cogency or progressiveness but in its overpowering presence. Scientific discourse has the strongest claim on our assent, political discourse on our attention. Politics occupies the front page of the newspapers and first place in the newscasts. But neither kind of discourse speaks about the character of our culture. As an example of scientific discourse, consider the 2001 issues of Scientific American. Here we find science speaking with unchallenged authority about the nature of the very large (“Echoes from the Big Bang,” “Making Sense of Modern Cosmology”) and about the structure of the very small (“Photonic Crystals,” “100 Years of Quantum Mysteries”). [1] When it turns to the middle-sized realm in which we enact our culture, natural science must, if it wants to speak cogently, confine itself to fairly limited aspects (“Genetically Modified Foods: Are They Safe?” “Safeguarding Our Water”). The focus of natural science, we might say, sweeps past the texture and flavor of our daily lives.
In politics we take comprehensive responsibility for the vast machinery that supports our daily lives. We attend to its energy and resource requirements, to its domestic safety and global security, and to the economy and tranquility of its administration. Accordingly, the New York Times on the front page of its 24 March 2002 issue reported on the genesis of the Bush administration’s national energy report, on the turmoil in the Mideast, on the lack of security in small town banks, among other things. However, the nature and the value of the life that consumes energy and proceeds within whatever margins of security this central and crucial area of the common order remains occluded in political discourse.
It is a simple fact that philosophy as a professional discipline commands neither assent nor attention. When Anglo-American philosophers contemplate the state of their art, they readily concede the lack of consensus within their profession and the indifference of the culture at large to the profession itself. [2] At the same time there is no denying the extreme rigor and precision of contemporary philosophical work, which gives the impression that all the finely wrought philosophical pieces are destined eventually to fit together into a compelling, imposing, and intricate structure. But one will search in vain for the emerging outlines of such an edifice.
As regards the flavor and texture of our historical situation, its center of gravity, and its deepest hopes and fears, readers of contemporary philosophy would have to rely on fragments, allusions, and asides. If beyond that they would conjecture, on the basis of philosophy alone, about the character of a culture that had begotten this kind of philosophy, what would they gather? They might think that the general and preliminary character of philosophy was the reflection of an unsettled and preliminary culture, one that had not yet attained a forceful and enduring shape and therefore did neither permit a concrete description and sustained critique nor inspire a definite counterproposal. As we know, that conjecture would be entirely mistaken. The advanced industrial culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century is both the cause and the result of the most radical transformation of the pla