The Prophets of Technology (Including Lewis and Tolkien)

"...These writers foresaw, with a startling clarity, the emergence of the technocratic order in which we live; attending to their warnings, we can get a better understanding of our current predicament — and, just possibly, a sense of how we might respond to it. Such will be the purpose of this essay...."  

Hearth & Field contains a fascinating essay by Dr. Ben Reinhard on  "The Prophets of Technology",He features Lewis, Tolkien, and more. It begins:  

I dreamt that all the planning of peremptory humanity

Had crushed Nature finally beneath the foot of Man;

Birth-control and merriment, Earth completely sterilized,

Bungalow and fun-fair, had fulfilled our Plan;

But the lion and the unicorn were sighing at the funeral,

Crying at the funeral

Sobbing at the funeral of the god Pan.

—C. S. Lewis, “Pan’s Purge”

Technology, it is clear, has left mankind behind. For the moment, the forces we have created are profitably restrained — to the ease and comfort of the multitude, and to the staggering enrichment and empowerment of the elite who control them. Yet even our rulers are only riding the tiger, and it is only a matter of time before their grip slackens, and the machines man made to be his servant become, finally, his master. But whoever happens to rule at the moment, it is clear that the tyranny of the machine is unlike anything else hitherto encountered by the human family. Where the old tyrannies claimed merely the bodies of their subjects, the Machine claims all: body and soul, mind and strength, and all the inner recesses of the human heart. The old world has faded; the new one, being born, promises to be an inhuman, harrowing age.

And, most terrifying of all, it is all happening so fast.

Reflections of this sort are likely not new to readers of Hearth & Field. They can be found on the pages of any of a dozen respectable publications; they echo the concerns of contemporary writers as diverse as Paul Kingsnorth, Bill Watterson, Rod Dreher, and Pope Francis. But though readers will recognize that such warnings are not exactly new, I wonder how many recognize precisely how old they are. For all that it reads like a pastiche of contemporary criticisms of the technocratic paradigm, the opening paragraph is in fact comprised entirely of lightly paraphrased quotations from Christian humanists from the early-to-mid twentieth century: Romano Guardini, Christopher Dawson, C. S. Lewis, Conrad Pepler, and J. R. R. Tolkien.

These writers foresaw, with a startling clarity, the emergence of the technocratic order in which we live; attending to their warnings, we can get a better understanding of our current predicament — and, just possibly, a sense of how we might respond to it. Such will be the purpose of this essay. ...

Read the Essay here.