The first step taken by these still Christian
intellectual leaders was to displace the saint
or knight, and to ignore the natural philosopher, to valorize the technician as the real hero of Western
Civilization.
A society cannot maintain its
social cohesion unless a decisive majority of its members hold in common a
number of guiding ideas and ideals. One of the necessary social ideals is a
symbolic hero to embody, in a personal form, the recognized goal of the
society’s endeavors. In Medieval and Early Modern Western Christendom the
West’s symbolic ideal figure was the inspired saint (with the chivalrous knight
as a secondary alternative). In the Late Modern Age the West has transferred
its spiritual allegiance from the inspired saint to the invincible technician,
and this change in Western Man’s personal ideal has produced changes in his
spirit, outlook, and aims (Arnold Toynbee, An Historian’s Approach to Religion [1956], 220).
The technician, not ‘the
natural philosopher’, whose theories the technician translates into practice,
was the new hero whom the West adopted in the later decades of the seventeenth
century (220).
If the saint, in imitation of Jesus, renounced power
altogether, and if the Christian knight at least subordinated it to norms of
chivalry, Western intellectuals placed no such limitations on the technician.
They encouraged and expected him to extend humankind’s power over creation
without limit.
Their next step, oddly enough, was to create an opening
for the exaltation of Vulcan, god of technology, over God the Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit.
Without waiting for God to
abdicate they were proclaiming His deposition; and in thus creating a spiritual
interregnum they were opening the way for the enthronement of a goddess in
God’s stead. This goddess whose fortune was made by the discredit and odium
that had overtaken the ancestral god of Western Christendom was…Technology; and
this new divinity was effectively enthroned in Western hearts although the
fathers of the seventeenth-century Western spiritual revolution had had no wish
to replace the deposed god of Christianity by any alternative object of
worship. Technology was deified, not be Western Man’s deliberate choice, but
because Religion, like Nature, abhors a vacuum (228).
[Vulcan] could not, however, be
substituted for a deposed creator as a compelling object of worship unless and
until the new divinity could be invested with some appearance of the
omnipotence with which God the Creator had formerly been credited…(231).
By the mid-1800s, Western technological growth had
exceeded everyone's wildest expectations and continued to accelerate. Western Christians
responded to this wholly unprecedented technological phenomenon with genuine
religious ecstasy. Vulcan in all his glory easily cast Jesus into the twilight
of medieval superstition.
A Technology that had first won
temperate approval in the West as a harmless hobby in which a criminal Human
Nature might safely be encouraged to indulge was now fervidly admired as a
magic key which was going to unlock the door into an Earthly Paradise by
solving all the problems that, in pre-Newtonian ‘Days of Ignorance’, had either
baffled Man or been ignored by him (233).
In the nineteenth century the
West unreservedly recognized and gloried in the vast additions that the
technician was making to human power by his continuing and accelerating
discoveries. At this stage of Western history it was taken for granted that all
additions to human power must be good, because it was assumed that…the wheels
of Western Civilization had been set on lines running forward in an endless
progress… (233).
Copyright © 2018 by
Steven Farsaci.
All rights reserved. Fair use encouraged.
All rights reserved. Fair use encouraged.
