Technology Is Not Neutral

The Church has long pointed out the dangers of technology, with even the earliest pages of Scripture noting the connection between technology and the line of Cain.

PUBLISHED ON

January 28, 2025

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God has seen all His creation to be good. As Christians, we rejoice in this goodness. We delight in the loveliness of the sun and moon, in the odor of the sweet olive, in the taste of flesh and fowl and grain, in the spirits that raise our spirits, in the marital bond that brings life to birth. All in moderation, we say, moderation not excepted. And if we are somewhat sententious in our treatment of temperance, we are nonetheless right to note that God has given us the goodness of His creation as a channel of that grace by which we ourselves are made good.

Not infrequently, we are told that technology, too, with special reference to such things as the laptop and the smart phone, is morally neutral. It all depends on how we use it. With my iPhone, I can type this essay, or I can find pornography. I can file my taxes, or I can gamble away my savings. I can call my friend for a long-overdue conversation, or I can scroll the hours away on the troubled, manicured seas of social media. The choice is mine. How will I use this thing which money and cunning have set in my pocket?

The Church has long pointed out the dangers of technology, with even the earliest pages of Scripture noting the connection between technology and the line of Cain. John Paul II asked in Redemptor Hominis whether the modern world, with its great technological advances, was not also a world groaning in travail. As Walker Percy put it in The Second Coming, man has never invented a weapon he has not used, and we seem ever on the verge of putting to use the very weapons which, through our technological advancement, have given us the key to our own destruction. And the needed prioritizing of ethics over technology that John Paul saw to be critical to any real development of human living has not materialized.

Orthodox. Faithful. Free.

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I fear, indeed, that technology as it has come to inhabit and inform our way of being in the world is no longer a neutral matter but rather one which is formally ordered to the detriment of authentic human flourishing.  I fear, indeed, that technology as it has come to inhabit and inform our way of being in the world is no longer a neutral matter but rather one which is formally ordered to the detriment of authentic human flourishing. Tweet This

Behind my concern, and beneath much of John Paul II’s musings on the subject, is Martin Heidegger’s thinking in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” In it, he submits that the essence of the technological outlook, as it was coming to be in his day and has increasingly become in ours, lies in a tendency to make of being a standing reserve. So far, so neutral. A pen makes a standing reserve of ink to be drawn upon at will. A dam makes a standing reserve of a river, and the result—as anyone who has experienced the Diamond Lakes of central Arkansas, for instance, can attest—can be both useful and immensely beautiful, creating water supplies for people and lovely habitats for fish and game.

The problem, as Heidegger saw it, is that technology tends to make man himself a standing reserve. The obvious example lies in something like the way in which a technologically advanced standing army requires an immense supply of humans to serve it. More critically, though, I am thinking of the iPhone. The iPhone has so insinuated itself into the fabric of life—handling our banking, our education, our insurance, our entertainment and travel so easily and effectively—that we feel we have to have one. What’s more, the phone contrives endless ways to make me feel I must pick it up, look at it, interact with it. In any idle moment, my mind and hand move toward the phone. And so, Apple has created a standing reserve of customers who will faithfully buy the next model of iPhone upon its release. 

In other words, technologies which are not neutral are idols—not idols by accident, as anything in the world may be, but idols by design, compelling our attention for their continued existence. Low-end estimates place the average person’s smart phone usage at about three and a half hours daily, which amounts to roughly 24 hours each week. The iPhone, that is, has demanded its Lord’s Day and gotten it, while authentic Sunday worship continues to falter.

Technology of this kind is not neutral. It seeks and often attains our worship.

As Heidegger points out in his essay, though, drawing on the poet Holderlin, is the poison so often lies the cure. Pernicious technology demands our gaze and the use of our hands, and the proper direction of our eyes and our hands can lead us out of bondage to this new pharaoh and into the desert of worship.

Look to the Eucharist. Let the eye follow the extraordinary lines of a beautiful church. Look to the trees. Watch the birds and learn their names. See the sun at its rising and watch the wonder that lights a child’s face a thousand times a day.

Use your hands. Play an instrument. Plant and nurture a garden. Learn to repair an engine or clean a fish or skin a rabbit. Our hands are where our thinking meets the stuff of the world, and in learning to use them, we become once again human. No wonder Jesus spent so much of His life in silent, hidden work.

Technology is not neutral. But to admit that means having to make a change. “You must change your life,” speaks Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” And Christ speaks those words to us as well, burning in the Eucharist, inviting us to look, to see, to fashion things of these hands so beautifully, fearfully made.

Author

  • Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of Restoring the Lord’s Day: How Reclaiming Sunday Can Revive Our Human Nature (Sophia Institute Press). He lives with his wife and four children in New Orleans, where he teaches high school English and edits Joie de Vivre, a journal of art, culture, and letters for South Louisiana.

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