Letter #221: Churchill on Tech
Humanity, but bigger.
I’ve heard it said that in the agonies of World War II, Winston Churchill saved Britain’s body while C.S. Lewis saved its soul. Since Lewis was a soldier in the first war and a foster guardian for London’s child refugees in the second, and since Churchill was one of Lewis’s only contemporary rivals for rhetoric and manful sentiment, I’d say they each labored mightily in both domains. But it’s true they complemented each other, and I don’t think the West could have survived its hour of need without either of them.
Not long before Lewis delivered the addresses that would become The Abolition of Man, Churchill wrote a similarly prophetic essay called “Fifty Years Hence.” In his mounting horror at the scope and possibilities of industrial warfare, he made the point you made last week: technological progress is no guarantor of moral progress and might, if we’re not careful, eclipse it.
It is therefore above all things important that the moral philosophy and spiritual conceptions of men and nations should hold their own amid these formidable scientific evolutions.... Without an equal growth of Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love, Science herself may destroy all that makes human life majestic and tolerable.
After the Blitz had obliterated much of London’s public architecture, Churchill also came up with the pithy saying that “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” Gradually, through a variety of restatements and reattributions, this worked its way into a layman’s summary of the brilliant but cryptic media theorist Marshall McLuhan: “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.” So Churchill also helped produce a key insight for both the 20th and 21st centuries: technology can be good for us or bad for us, but it’s never neutral.
Put all this together, and you get the problem Carl Trueman described. In the terms you use on your show, technology is guaranteed to change human life...possibly for the better. But technology can’t tell us what’s better or worse. It can only act as a force multiplier on the goodness and badness that’s already in us. And there is, I’m afraid, a whole lotta badness.
So maybe what this means is that we’re faced with the exact same moral challenges, at vastly higher stakes. That would seem consistent with a God who created the essential form of us in the garden and then commanded us to “bear fruit and multiply.” That last word—revu in Hebrew—literally means “get bigger.” Expand. Have babies, yes, but also increase and spread the best of humanity throughout this created universe.
If so, then a good principle might be: the shape of our humanity should remain the same, but at larger scale. We know the seven shapes of virtue. We talk about them all the time on this site: wisdom, justice, courage, temperance, faith, hope, love. If tech deforms those shapes, it’s evil. But if we can use it to redraw them on an ever-greater scale, well...maybe we’re in business?
Love,
Spencer
 | A guest post by
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I have a love-hate relationship with technology. Indeed our notion of technology has changed. In the industrial societies this was considered more of a mechanical thing. Machinery made people's live less laborious. Now we see it as electronic.
The electronic things bug me and here's why, they are immersive for people's minds. Mechanical things made people productive. Arguably Eli Whitney's inventions may have led to the end of the slavery economics had a war not started. I understand that is a monochromatic view of a complex issue and period and thus, it is speculative.
But cars and trucks and diggers and airplanes made the planet what it is. In some ways it brought us closer. The electronic world seems to me to have an insidious undertone. It is mentally immersion and for man, where the mind goes actions and feelings follow. Those actions, thoughts, & feelings if left unmonitored by self are subject to some manipulation by the one who programmed the widget being used. Therein lies my fear: that we give up the self for immersion into a world that is increasingly separate and yet more impactful than it's real cousin. Man is a terrible God. We have failed utterly each time we try and yet we persevere in this.
It seems to me that humanity never learns its lesson. The original temptation of "you shall be like God", is only ever repackaged. Inevitably, it seems, we always pluck the fruit from the tree and reap its consequences.
The only antidote is, like Christ, voluntary submission and acceptance of the cross God sends you. IMO, this is where Christianity has been failing at large. We have forgotten that all life entails suffering and it's what you do with it that matters. We do not trust God or want to accept our crosses.
When we accept certain technologies...especially those that enable cutting corners in our moral lives or simply to get what we want, we are no better than the ancient Jews who would participate in the forbidden pagan child sacrifice rituals in order to get some perceived advantage. That always ended badly for Israel.