Technology challenging authorities and changing how we perceive the world
Some thoughts prompted by a talk from Carl Trueman, here at ACCS, yesterday
Hello again all. You might be expecting a post reflecting on the overturning of Roe v. Wade today… this post is not that, I actually didn’t have much time to think about that with all the conferencing yesterday. But I will tell you that, yesterday morning, the Court decision was announced from the stage at the ACCS meeting, and there was cheering and clapping, and then a hymn was sung. And then, as I read about it here, as to the reaction of the insanely-and-diabolically-pro-abortion Left afterwards, well… they have again revealed that all their talk about “protecting norms” when the Right ostensibly violates one is really just a tactical move, they themselves do not actually believe any action is off limits if that action would advance Leftist power. The Babylon Bee nails it, as usual.
But, putting that somewhat aside, let me share one interesting theme from the conference yesterday.
Technology challenging authorities
Today’s post is entirely drawn from a plenary address given by Carl Trueman where he mused about the way new technologies change the way we think about the world, change what we think is plausible and implausible, change the way we view existing authority structures. One obvious modern day example of this phenomenon is transgenderism. The claim that “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” would seem much less plausible to people if we didn’t have the ability to pump the man full of hormones and put him under the knife (and put him in new clothes of course) and make him look like a woman. But we are, now, technologically capable of doing such things, and it gives transgender claims a plausibility they would not have had a century ago.
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(And while I’m talking about transgenderism, and on this day in particular, can I just say that for the modern Left, the argument for transgenderism and the argument for abortion are the same argument now. They are both rooted in transhumanism, they are both rooted in the idea that we have the right to modify reality in whatever ways we can to bring it into accordance with our own desires. We do not conform ourselves to reality, reality conforms itself to us. The modern Left does not believe in individual rights, does not believe in “my body my choice”1, but it still sometimes uses the language of the old Left. It does believe, wholeheartedly, in transhumanism.)
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But anyway, let me give you just a couple more examples from Carl Trueman that I found interesting.
AD 1248
In 1248, in Europe let’s say, it was an agrarian society. And it was, we would now say, a low-technology society, and that low technology shaped their vision. It was a society that was wedded to the soil and which respected the authority of the seasons… for you had no choice but to respect the authority of the seasons. It was a time at which, we think, the average person never traveled more than 40 miles from their own home… travel was slow, and difficult, and dangerous, and anyway what would you be trying to get to so far away? Therefore the existence and authority of space was respected2. And in small agrarian villages, everyone knew everyone else and was accountable to everyone else, and therefore the authority of the community was respected.
1248 is also the exact year that construction began on the Cologne Cathedral. Construction began in 1248 and continued until 1473, at which point is was halted, and then finally resumed in the 1840s, and the cathedral was finally finished, constructed to its original plan, in 1880. The cathedral therefore took over 600 years to build. Now none of the workers who began on day one knew the work would take 600 years… but they did all know that it was going to be a generational project. They knew that they would never walk through the doors and worship at this cathedral. But the technology of the day didn’t allow them to built something like this cathedral any faster. They built it anyway. The lack of faster technology therefore forced them to cultivate a transcendent vision, forced them to think generationally.
AD 1522
1522 is five years after Luther and the 95 Theses, and a few decades after printing presses had become widespread in Europe. Some historians try to reduce the Reformation to being purely a result of the recently invented printing press… Trueman would not do that but it is true, he said, that without the printing press we would not have gotten the Reformation in anything like the form we did.
Printing does interesting things to a culture. For one, it causes rising literacy rates. Some studies have found that rising literacy rates cause a political self-consciousness to develop in the citizenry. Structures of power that worked well over an illiterate population now come under strain.
But exactly in 1522, Trueman pointed to the event that really sparked the Reformation in Zurich when a printer, Christoph Froschauer, called all his employees together, and cooked them a plate of sausages… during the Lenten fast. This is actually a profound moment, Trueman said, for the theme of technology challenging authority. In an agrarian society, essentially all business is seasonally dependent - the authority of time and the seasons must be respected. But the printing business is not seasonally dependent. This employer needs his employees to work year round. His little protest here is breaking with the medieval Church calendar, breaking with a notion of time built around the agrarian calendar.
Or, at the risk of offending some, Trueman also mentioned that it is perhaps not a coincidence that Sabbatarianism first took off in England… which had the largest mercantile economy. The employers therefore needed their employees to be putting in a regular work week, the more irregular (and with so many holidays now) Church calendar was a disruption to the work. One regular day of rest per week was better for their technologically-enabled businesses.
Present Day
And today… well it is obvious that we live in a time in which technology is encouraging the collapse of, at least trust in, traditional structures of authority. (And I was amused that, Trueman said, all Roman Catholics now are really Protestants, because they chose to be Catholic. That is not a thought that would have occurred to someone in Europe in AD 1200, you did not make religious choices in AD 1200. But that whole implicit authority structure has now been fractured, we are all Protestants now.)
But a couple more examples. One, the combination of freedom of religion and the automobile challenges the authority of the Church. Take those things away and you probably just attend your closest parish church, and the idea that you might attend somewhere else doesn’t even occur to you. If you have a problem with that church… well it doesn’t matter what you think, it isn’t up to you, that’s your church, there is an authority there. But now you can just drive to another. The Church has become perceived, therefore, as something more like a provider of consumer goods.
Or, modern music has undermined the authority of the community. Until quite recent history, music could only be created and enjoyed as a community production. But now, probably 99% of the music Trueman enjoys is just him and Spotify, and 1% involves going out to listen to music somewhere. The authority of the community as it pertains to music has therefore been eliminated. Music is an object of personal consumption now.
Or finally, the technologies of contraception and abortion and antibiotics have created the idea that sex is a harmless, cost-free recreation. Sex has become another item of individual consumption. Sexual pleasure has been detached from the need of any ongoing relationship (pornography is also relevant here). The effect of these technological changes has been to make Biblical sexual ethics seem less plausible.
And “bans off our bodies”, by the way, which seems to be the preferred replacement now for “my body my choice”, was totally invented in a Planned Parenthood committee meeting somewhere to prevent people from thinking about the fact that “my body my choice” was contradicted by their support for vaccine mandates.
Trueman, being an immigrant to the United States, also mentioned that immigration is a qualitatively different experience for him than it would have been for someone 500 years ago. 500 years ago he would have kissed his mother and father goodbye and boarded the ship knowing he would never see either of them again. Today, he calls his mother twice a month and can fly back to England regularly. That changes, drastically, the way you think about immigration, really it changes what immigration is.