Technology, the Incarnation, and the Theology of the Body

Excerpt from: Not Neutral:Technology and the “Theology of the Body”
by Adrian Walker

The full article may be found at: http://www.secondspring.co.uk/articles/walker2.htm

Pope John Paul II’s “theology of the body” is becoming better and better known among ordinary Catholics, many of whom have found in it a way of connecting the central mysteries of the Christian faith ... The Pope’s theology of the body is very timely. ... It responds in depth to what is arguably one of the main cultural causes of the collapse of marriage: the mechanization of bodiliness through technology.

… It is worth noting that the latest gadgets sometimes provoke an ill-defined sense of unease in us. The latest gadgets tend to change our lives in massive ways, and often rather more quickly than we are prepared for. Think of the sudden ubiquity of the personal computer and then, on its heels, of the internet. [But]… amidst all the celebration over the latest life-changing technological breakthrough, there is also a good deal of head shaking, too. Somehow, we feel dimly, something is being lost. The machine has won another victory over nature. Are we altogether sure that it is good for the machine to be so invincible?

If we [give consideration to this matter], I think we will see that it illuminates the cultural significance of the Pope’s theology of the body in surprising ways.

The Age of the Machine:

If we are going to make any sense of technology, …we need to stop thinking of it as a mere collection of tools. We need to start thinking of it as what it really is: a mind-set, an implicit philosophy.

The Canadian philosopher George Grant … has even called technology the “ontology of our age”. By that he means that technology is the filter, or framework, through which we Westerners …approach and experience the very being of things. Technology, Grant is saying, is the name for our basic world-view, our overall “take” on reality as a whole… And so we need to make a special effort to distance ourselves from our usual way of imagining technology – as a set of neutral tools or instruments, harmlessly lying ready for whatever uses we may decide to put them to. But if technology is not neutral, what is it? .. Technology is the dominant element in the overall drift of modern Western civilization…

Our feelings of unease at developments like the Internet or biotech are often waved away with the bland assurance that the problem with technology isn’t technology itself, but how we choose to use it. .. Take the computer. It is true that people use computers for all sorts of different purposes… But, however different the purposes of the users might be, the computer itself has a purpose. We could state this purpose as “processing information”.

Processing information may sound innocuous, but it isn’t. For it means taking human meaning and turning it into “information” – that is, into packets of electrical signals that the computer is programmed to “read”. Processing information means breaking down, or attempting to break down, the whole of an idea into parts that a computer can handle without having to understand the idea as a whole. It means treating, or attempting to treat, an idea as a bit of machinery that you can assemble and disassemble at will. It means treating a whole precisely not as a whole, with an integrity that goes beyond the “sum of its parts,” but as what Aristotle called a soros, a “heap”: an accidental aggregation of elements thrown together any which way.

The point I am making is that no one would have thought up the computer if he or she hadn’t first thought up the idea of “processing information”, and that no one would have thought up the idea of processing information if he or she had not had a technological mindset to begin with. For a technological mind-set is essentially the attitude that says that you can – even should – prescind from the wholeness of the whole, break the whole down into its parts, and re-arrange the parts for purposes that don’t have to have any intrinsic connection with the whole, but come entirely from the transforming will of the human agent. It is just this understanding of the whole-part relation that the idea of “processing information” applies to thinking and communicating. The computer is the technological mind-set come home to roost.
…What does all of this have to do with the body? The answer is that we (as a culture) filter our own bodiliness through the technological mindset. …

We thus come to the deepest reason for the vague unease that the latest technological gadgets arouse in many of us: technology is the project of erasing the distinction between artifice and human nature. To put it provocatively, technology has always been biotechnology, and biotechnology threatens the irreplaceable uniqueness and inviolable sanctity of the body… A technological culture is committed, in principle, to the view that our consciousness can be downloaded into any mode of embodiment just as the consciousness of the characters in the film ‘The Matrix’ is downloaded into computer-generated bodies. But as soon as I think of my own body in this way, I am assaulting my own dignity as a human person, which is tied up with my given embodiment.

This assault is perhaps most deadly when it comes to the sexual sphere, because sexuality is a (if not the) basic, pervasive inner shaping of our given bodiliness as an embodiment of our personhood. … As C.S. Lewis points out in The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength, the attempt to master our own bodily natures becomes a form of slavery that subjects us to the ruthless tyranny of an anonymous, superhuman techno-logic mocking our efforts to control it... One of the reasons for the plausibility and appeal of the myth of technology has surely been the precariousness of the human condition. Our bodies expose us to suffering, death, and all the shocks mortal flesh is heir to, and this exposure is uncomfortable and often deeply perplexing. And so the temptation to take things into our own hands, to attempt the impossible task of engineering our way out of the human condition, is always near at hand.

Pope John Paul II’s theology of the body trains the light of the Gospel on this temptation. On the one hand, the Pope re-orients us towards the hoped-for Resurrection of the Body, in which we will rise with Christ immortal… On the other hand, the hope for the Resurrection reveals that the vulnerability and exposure of our bodily condition endure, transformed, into the transparency of Trinitarian communion. We are free, the Resurrection suggests, not when we belong to ourselves, having mastered our bodily natures, but when we belong to the Father in our bodies’ unashamed exposure to his love. Thus, just as Jesus rose with his wounds, in the same body that suffered on Calvary, the Resurrection we “look for” underlines the dignity of the mortal body even in its weakness.

This is the “good news” that John Paul II’s theology of the body has to tell a technological world whose desire to escape the misery of the human condition has led to a forgetfulness of the true grandeur that shines forth in it.

Adrian Walker is an editor of Communio. This piece appeared in the magazine Second Spring issue 7.
http://www.secondspring.co.uk/