Berdyaev Returns

Religious criticisms of technology attempt to examine it from the perspective of ethics, with ethics resting, at least in the Abrahamic traditions, on some relationship to divinity. The religious dimension of human life has both practical and theoretical sides: morals and theology. Although these two subjects cannot be completely separated, it is useful to consider religious critiques that approach technology from the perspective of practical religious life or of religious thought, that is, theology. Nikolai Berdyaev sought to elucidate the basic characteristics of the technical age and how it brings to a close the earth-centered period of human history and democratizes society. Accepting the new civilization as historically given, he inquires into its religious consequences: What is the religious meaning of the technical-mechanical form of civilization? According to Berdyaev and Jacques Ellul something radically important is being lost in the technoscientific lifeworld in which technology has become a dehumanizing, life-distorting addiction. The only truly human or spiritual way forward is by renewing and reapplying the radical Christian tactic of attacking all false gods. Just as Christianity demythologized the natural-organic world of myths and superstition, Christianity can reassert human freedom and spiritually by demythologizing the technical-mechanical world. The attack on the false gods of nature disenchanted nature, opening a pathway to the modern science of nature, and thereby to modern technology and the techno-lifeworld. Now the same tactic must be re-deployed to torpedo our enchantments with and by technology.