Technology: A View from Personalism
Part 1
by James Beauregard
The question of
technology is not one that has been frequently raised by personalism. This is
perhaps understandable given personalism’s focus on the person is the central
concept or metaphor for understanding the world. At the same time, technology
surrounds us and penetrates our lives in numerous ways, making it a subject
worthy of personalistic attention.
In the recently published book from the York conference of the
British Personalist Association I contributed a chapter that considered the
ways in which personalism historically has viewed the question of technology
along with some thoughts about how it might be addressed in the future.
Personalist writings on technology are fairly scarce. One of the few
personal lists to dedicate an entire work to technology was Romano Guardini,
born in Italy but working in Germany throughout his career. He published a
brief book called Letters from Lake Como:
Explorations in Technology and the Human Race. Guardini (1885-1968) was born in the city of
Verona but his family emigrated to Germany when he was a year old, where he
grew up, was educated and worked as an academic in several universities.
Lake Como is in the lakes region of northeastern Italy, and Guardini
returned there periodically to visit family.
The tranquility of the countryside combined with the growing presence of
technology caused him to reflect on technology’s place in human life. He
published his reflections as a series of single articles during the years 1923
– 1925 and then collected them together to be published as a book in 1926. The
context of his letters is important in a variety of ways. This was interwar
Europe, in the wake of the first world war, during a period of relative peace and
prosperity prior to the crash of the financial markets in 1929. Guardini was
living and working in Germany, having emigrated there with his parents as a
young child, and was experiencing the situation on the ground in a country that
had lost the war and was struggling to pay reparations to the winning side, and
that was simultaneously facing the rise of right-wing nationalist movements,
including National Socialism.
Compared to Italy, Germany was a heavily industrialized country,
making it inevitable that Guardini would notice the contrasts as he wandered
the hills and the Great Lakes region of northern Italy. His reaction to growing
industrialization across the north of Italy was a strong one. He wrote,
[H]ow can I put this to you? Look, what has already taken place up
in the north I saw beginning here. I saw machines invading the land that had
previously been the home of culture. I saw death over taking a life of infinite
beauty, and I felt that this was not just an external loss that we could accept
and remain who we were. Instead, a life, a life of supreme value that can arise
only in the world that we have long since lost, was beginning to perish here,
as well as in the north.[1]
At first sight,
the letters may convey a jaundiced, pessimistic or negative view of technology,
but in the end this is not the case. Guardini builds a case for how persons are
to interact with technology, and ends on a positive note. The first, he deals
with the issue of separation and alienation.
During one of his walks along Lake Como he observes a sailboat, which
gives them pause to reflect. He sees the sailboat as a remarkable cultural
achievement, harnessing the wind and moving quickly across the water, calling
it "a primal work of human creativity” (pp 11-12). At the same time, it symbolizes for him a
sense of separation from direct contact with nature. The person sailing the
ship is not in the water but above it, separated from the natural world by the
wood of the ship. The separation becomes even more acute, he notes, when one
thinks of larger and larger ships, steel ships, ocean liners etc. For Guardini,
human culture is composed of the work of mind and spirit staying in close
contact with nature.[2]
Despite the sense of separation or alienation, Guardini ends his book
on a positive note. He firmly believes that persons can rise to the occasion of
new technologies, and meet their challenges. He locates technological
development not in material machineries of technology, but in the human person,
and rather than focusing on what might be lost, he challenges us to rise to the
occasion of technological advancement, writing that technological advancement
always has been and always will be "primarily an inner human
process."[3] Our task as persons, is not
to fight against technology, not to be Luddites, but, rather, to confront their
own creativity and our personhood in order to guide new technologies in the
service of persons, rather than allowing persons to become victims of
technology. While not explicit in his book, there is a sense that ethics ought
to have primacy over technology as its ultimate guide.
This is not an obvious position, to be sure, and within the
scientific and technology communities can sometimes be seen as a threat to
independence and creativity. This vision to, though, is undergirded by a
philosophy of technology that places technological development at the forefront
and all other concerns secondary. It is worth asking, as personalists, how
technology ought to be approached in the 21st century. Should technological
development simply charge ahead, with ethics constantly running after it, or
should an ethical vision be present at moments of inspiration, creation and
development of new technologies?
[1] Guardini, R. Letters from Lake Como:
Explorations in Technology and the Human Race, Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley.
Grand Rapids MI and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
1994, 5 (Hereafter, Letters).
[2] Guardini, Letters,16
[3] Guardini, Letters, 80.
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