The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society: How Christianity Can Save Modernity from Itself

by Murray Jardine

The advance of modern technology is certainly ambiguous. It has promised less work and more leisure, but we actually work longer hours than premodern peasants and villagers. Present-day Western societies are facing a moral crisis, argues Murray Jardine, and our inability to make ethical sense of technology is at the root of this crisis. Jardine shows how Christianity fostered an ethic of progress that led to our technological expertise. However, Christians never fully grasped the implications of technological progress and failed to create an ethic that embraced unconditional grace. Jardine advocates a Christianity that fully understands technology, its responsibilities, and its possibilities.

Genres: Technology

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Matthew Colvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jardine writes in a very lucid, scholastic style, alternating striking claims (e.g. "The modern nation-state fails to achieve universality in that it is still generally based on ethnicity, which is essentially a remnant of the bloodline basis of pagan societies") with examples that prove the claims. It is easy reading, in that you don't have to work hard to figure out what he is saying, but it is not fast reading, because every page has an idea that you will want to stop and process for yourself.

The first half of the book is devoted to tracing the origins of the modern problem: namely, that individualistic, aesthetic-expressive consumer culture has arisen from man's creativity because the application of technology has not been disciplined by any viable ethical norms. This has happened because the old Aristotelian/Thomistic idea of the unchanging order of nature (and with "nature," also "natural law") has been exposed as inadequate, and nothing has taken its place. The result is social and ethical nihilism, and a socio-economic arrangement that is unsustainable -- not because it will run out of fossil fuels or perish in a manmade global warming catastrophe, but because it is destructive of human beings' ability to love, hope, and trust.

Jardine's solution is a curious one: he takes "responsible speech before God" as the core of the imago Dei, and argues from it to a new sene of human "place" that he thinks can provide the necessary structure, limits, and guidance for modern men who have realized, in a way that pre-modern men did not, that they have the power to change the world.

I'm still thinking about many of the book's ideas. I very much enjoyed his critiques of liberalism, capitalism, communism, and expressive consumerism. I found his discussion of the Greeks accurate and insightful. Theologically, however, Calvinists will disagree with Jardine's doctrine of providence, which seems like some sort of Open Theism to me. I find myself disappointed with Jardine's handling of Jesus as well: he basically uses Jesus as an example of his own idea of speech, and has little to say about the resurrection in connection with our modern problems. But again, I just finished the book, and I need to ponder longer on Jardine's idea of speech.

Overall, a good book, and worth reading for anyone who has to teach modernity in the humanities classroom, even if most of my Goodreads friends will differ from Jardine's "speech-based" soteriology.

[Bob · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm ambivalent about this book. I appreciate Jardine's trenchant writing and thought-provoking analysis that traces how we've arrived at the nihilistic freedom of the 21st century. Like many books however, he seems long on analysis and short on solutions. His basic plea is for the formation speech-based places where auditory rather than visual communication takes place, face to face rather than virtual. He pleads for local communities, shorter work-weeks and intergenerational care that lends dignity to aging and death. If anything, John Howard Yoder lays a far better theological basis for the church as alternative polis in The Politics of Jesus as does Wendell Berry in most of his essays and fiction.

[Christian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good, some bad. Hoping to write more about it soon.

[Blue Moon-Shepherd · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring. So dense, it almost conceals the fact that the author is so full of himself he’s bloated.

No redeeming qualities.

[Fernando Pasquini Santos]

O livro é muito bem escrito, e aprendi muito com ele, mas tem altos e baixos. Ele é dividido em três partes. A primeira é uma excelente aula de filosofia política, mostrando as incoerências e contradições internas do projeto moderno e ligando-as a uma incapacidade de ligar a criatividade humana a um pano de fundo moral (uma vez que, neste plano, permaneceu a visão aristotélica de um universo estático). A segunda é uma visão bem neo-ortodoxa da cosmovisão bíblica, e uma interpretação bem esquisita da história da igreja, embora com alguma verdade: as cessões que o cristianismo fez às cosmovisões pagãs impediu que ele desenvolvesse uma ética bíblica baseada nas doutrinas da criação e da cultura. O molinismo do autor é bem saliente e, como seria de se esperar, Calvino é um dos culpados pela secularização da ética cristã - a interpretação, simplista e mal informada, do autor é que Calvino perpetrou uma visão estática do Universo com sua ideia da história pré-determinada por Deus (ou seja, uma confusão entre calvinismo e deísmo). Por fim, a terceira parte, apesar de meio vaga e com alguns argumentos bem frágeis, apresenta uma proposta bem promissora. O autor aponta que três respostas à crise moderna são o pós-modernismo (Heidegger, Derrida e Foucault), o neoclassicismo (Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom e Daniel Bell) e o comunitarianismo (Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre e Stanley Hauerwas) e, após mostrar os problemas tanto com o pós-modernismo como o neoclassicismo, elabora o tema da criatividade humana na visão do comunitarianismo. Para isso, o autor propõe a ideia de "lugares de fala", mostrando que, ao entendermos a ideia da Palavra de Deus e da nomeação do mundo por parte do homem da cosmovisão cristã, podemos recuperar o elemento oral e auditivo em uma sociedade saturada do elemento visual. Assim, podemos compreender nosso lugar como criaturas que respondem à Palavra de Deus e estabelecem vínculos comunicativos uns com os outros e com a criação, criando comunidades e tradições capazes de colocar limites morais positivos para a ação humana no mundo.