One of the most interesting sections of the encyclical Laudato Si’ are paragraphs 102-111 on the role of technology. ‘We have entered,’ Pope Francis says, ‘a new era in which our technical prowess has brought us to a crossroads.’
While he recognises the improvements to life that technology has achieved which he describes as ‘wonderful products of a God-given human creativity...in the fields of medicine, engineering and communications’, he nevertheless mounts a profound critique of technology and what it is doing to us.
While Francis has no time for technological solutions and ‘fixes’ for complex ecological problems, he is no techo-Luddite. What he does is link technological knowledge to power and says that those with this knowledge and the economic resources to use it, gain ‘an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world.’
Francis argues that technology cuts us off from our biological connectedness with nature and creates the illusion that the world simply exists for us to use. ‘Technology,’ he says, ‘tends to absorb everything into its ironclad logic’ that presupposes that ‘there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit’, an idea he says that ‘proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology.’
Quoting theologian Romano Guardini, Francis says that ‘there is a tendency to believe that every increase in power means “an increase of progress itself”...[yet] “contemporary man has not been trained to use power well” because our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience.’ We are besotted with technology, but don’t have the maturity to use it wisely.
Francis’ critique draws on the writings of Romano Guardini (1885-1968) who, despite being born in Verona, was German. Although present-day conservative Catholics have tried to harness Guardini to their critique of post-Vatican II Catholicism, he was a key theologian leading-up to the Council and his much of his thought is reflected by progressive Catholics.
The Guardini book that Francis quotes is The End of the Modern World (1956). Guardini argues that we have entered a post-modern world that is dominated by a technology that cuts us off from the natural world creating an artificial, abstract, one-dimensional, de-personalised reality. ‘The technological mind,’ he says, ‘sees nature as an insensate order, as a cold body of facts, as a mere “given”, as an object of utility, as raw