In the distant past, we humans lived in a
creational context. We experienced an immediate relationship with creation and
it was creation itself which both provided for our basic needs and confronted
us with our greatest threats. With the development of cities and writing,
society became our primary context, mediated our relationships with creation,
provided us with our means of living, and made war the greatest threat to our
survival. Today, we live in a third context: a technological society. Today our
most significant livelihoods and threats of death are technological in nature.
It is technology, more than politics, economics, or religion, which structures
our societies, cultures, and personalities.
Unexpectedly, the innumerable technologies
developing separately since about 1750 eventually coalesced into a single
technological system. Worse, this system is now global in extent. As
individuals, cultures, and societies, we now face a Global Technological System
(GTS) that far exceeds our ability to control or even comprehend.
“Still, one thing seems absolutely certain,”
says Jacques Ellul, and that is the “opposition between the development of the
technological system on one hand and society and human beings on the other” (Perspectives on Our Age, 69).