There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. Readers my age will instantly know those words from the classic film The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy speaks them as she clicks her ruby slippers together, leaves Oz behind, and zips magically back to Kansas. It’s a moment of triumph for Dorothy. The Wicked Witch is dead. The Lion has his courage. The Straw Man has a brain. The Tin Man has a heart. Her friends are happy. The Munchkins love her, and so does everyone else within a hundred miles of Emerald City. If she wanted the job, she could be a queen. And let’s face it: Oz is a marvelously interesting place, vivid with wonders, especially compared to Kansas.
In the original Oz fairy tale, L. Frank Baum (the author), describes Kansas as a vast, flat skillet, a land baked and burnt, where “great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any buildings in [their] path.” An immense prairie stretches away on every side. Dull and gray, the world is without a tree or house to break the “broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions.” The sky is gray. The grass is bleached. The houses are blistered. Even Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are gray and drained of joy.1 For Dorothy, this is “home.” Then a tornado hits and carries her off to an adventure. Which raises an obvious question: Why would she ever want to go back?
I know why. I was born and grew up in Kansas. And Baum—who created a fictional Kansas based on his experiences in South Dakota—imagined a world very different from the farms, hills, grasslands, towns, and rivers I knew. There’s nothing dull or dead in the Kansas of my memory; only people and things that are precious to me, a sky grand in color and scope, and the beauty of nature filling even the empty spaces.
Home is more than a building. We are creatures of place, from the smell of the soil to the green of the spring. Human beings need change, difference and variety, all of which are fed by the seasons and our travels. But we also need familiarity, permanence, and roots. This is the essence of home. Home anchors us. It locates us in the world. It surrounds us with the safety of love. And so the old slogan that you can take the boy out of the country, but not the country out of the boy, is quite literally true. The world is mediated by our bodies. Place imprints itself on our senses and on our soul.
This is so wherever we are. In my years as a bishop in South Dakota, there was grandeur in the Badlands and Black Hills; then in Colorado, the Rocky Mountains and the Eastern Plains; and now in the rivers and woodlands of Pennsylvania. Humans have a hunger for beauty, and we find it first in nature. In the words of the naturalist John Muir, “everybody needs beauty as well as bread,” and “God never made an ugly landscape. All that the sun shines on is beautiful, so long as it is wild.”
Scripture confirms it. Genesis tells us, “And God saw everything he had made, and it was very good” (1:31). There’s nothing flat or dull about the created world for a heart fully awake. Every life has heights and depths, fertility and volume; its crossbeams are vertical as well as horizontal. God spoke to Moses in fire on a mountain. Jesus was transfigured in light on a mountain. Human experience climbs from the lowest circle in Dante’s hell up the paths of Mount Purgatory to the ecstasy of the heavens. These things of eternity are not just pretty words or elegant metaphors. Every soul has a vivid foretaste of them in the sufferings and joys, resentments and mercies, that we encounter here and now, because the world is a sacrament pointing beyond itself—to greater realities and their Author.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote, “The environment is God’s gift to everyone … In nature, the believer recognizes the wonderful result of God’s creative activity” because “nature expresses a design of love and truth. It is prior to us, and it has been given to us as the setting for our life. Nature speaks to us of the Creator” and his love for humanity.2
Thus the farmer, far better than any engineer or technician, understands the soul of the world and humanity’s place in it. For Benedict, “The farmer is … the model of a mentality which unites faith and reason in a balanced way. For on the one hand he knows the laws of nature and does his work well, and on the other, he trusts to Providence, because certain fundamental things are not in his hands but in the hands of God.”3 Or, in the words of Pope Francis, “We were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass and metal, and deprived of physical contact” with the beauty of creation or the God who fashioned it.4
Christian teaching on nature is ancient and extensive, but sometimes the best lessons about creation come from unexpected sources. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien both survived the technological savagery of the First World War, and both returned to write powerful fiction rich with implicit faith. In Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, one of the Chronicles of Narnia tales, the lion Aslan—a symbol of Jesus Christ—literally sings Narnia into existence out of nothing. Narnia isn’t programmed or engineered but loved into life, for Aslan’s song is a breathing-out of his spirit like a lover’s sigh, full of meaning greater than its words.
In like manner, in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion—the creation story of Middle-earth—Ilúvatar (God) calls the world into existence through music sung in exquisite harmony by the Ainur, his great angelic spirits:
Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets and … countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Ilúvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Ilúvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.5
Even when the highest of the Ainur, Melkor (Satan), sows confusion with his own rebellious song, God reweaves the dissonance into his own creative symphony so that evil is “but a part of the whole and tributary to its glory.”
For both Lewis and Tolkien, nothing about nature is supine or dead. It resonates with the love of its Author. Just as Aslan is a good lion, but not a tame one, so, too, the world he sings into being is good and beautiful, but not tame, and not lifeless. It demands reverence. It demands stewards, not exploiters.
The scholars Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans outline the principles of Tolkien’s (and by extension, Lewis’s) thought this way:
1. The universe is a gift and the work of a divine Creator.
2. Creation is inherently good; beauty and dignity are part of its given nature.
3. Creation has meaning prior to any purely human plans; it has a purpose; it exists to bring pleasure to its Creator and to those who dwell in it.
4. The created order and its inhabitants are vulnerable to evil embodied in a cosmic enemy.
5. The mission of people dwelling in the world is to acknowledge the goodness of the earth, fulfill its purpose, and help in its restoration from evil.6
Love brought our world into being. And love, in its material form as undeserved beauty and unearned gift, disarms the intellect and touches the soul. But for a certain kind of modern thinking, this is not acceptable. Rather, it’s the worst sort of insult to our vanity: Beauty makes us conscious of realities and truths we did not create and do not command. Therefore it reminds us that we are weak, so it cannot be trusted. It makes us dependent, and we prefer control. And control requires power. Power—even the modest power humans can imagine they deserve by right—is erotic; it’s a drug for the ego, a faithless and demanding lover. And as in all toxic romances, the relationship always ends badly.
The bitter irony of a society built on the accumulation of power is that most people are left relatively powerless, living lives handed over to systems or processes—bureaucracy, the economy, the demands of a networked world—that they do not govern, but instead which govern them. Thus, most people end up being moved not by greed or power but by necessity—what they think they must do—and therefore by fear.
It’s worth remembering that in Baum’s fairy tale, “Oz the Great and Terrible” turned out to be a squat little carnival huckster behind a curtain, using people for his own ends, his own safety, his own power. Not much of a wizard.
* * *
THE BLIND SEE. The lame walk. And while the dead don’t yet rise, science is working on that problem. This is fact, not fiction—or it soon will be. Devices like eSight and the Argus II “bionic eye,” among others, already replicate sight for many of the visually impaired, and sight technology is still in its infancy. In early 2016, the U.S. government approved a technology called Indego for public use—“a wearable robotic skeleton that supports, bends and moves the legs of people with spinal-cord injuries, multiple sclerosis and other types of lower body paralysis.”7 The Indego joins a similar exoskeleton already produced by Israel’s ReWalk Robotics. And back in 2013, the tech giant Google started a biotech company—Calico—with the goal of “curing death” by defeating the aging process.8
The Google/Calico effort was inspired in part by Ray Kurzweil, the futurist author. Kurzweil talks openly “about his ambition to achieve eternal life, even speculating that it might be possible to bring his dead father back from the grave in the process,” and for the rest of us to escape the shabby wetware we call bodies.
Americans are technology addicts, and boosterism shapes much of the media coverage of today’s tech developments. In the two-month period from November 2015 through January 2016, the Wall Street Journal carried stories with headlines like “Life with your digital model. Within a decade our online alter egos will go on interviews and find deals. Millions of copies of your model could roam the Internet, doing all the things you’d do if only you had the time.”
And: “You will speak every language. Coming soon: earpieces that offer real-time translations.” And: “A robotics scientist aims to build models that speak to human emotions.” And: “How technology will transform retirement. Get ready for a new array of devices and services that will make it easier to work, stay healthy, live at home and remain connected to friends and family.”
It sounds great. In a sense, it is. These are dazzling ideas. And they’re not a surprise. More than forty years ago, the writer Arthur C. Clarke hinted at the future in his famous “Clarke’s laws”: First, when a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Second, the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Third, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Science and technology have made life rich in massive ways. When they serve real human development—as they often do in medicine and food production—the Church welcomes their results. As Benedict XVI wrote, “Technology, in this sense [of serving human dignity], is a response to God’s command to till and keep the land (see Gen 2:15).”9 And in Laudato Si, Pope Francis noted that “Human creativity cannot be suppressed. If an artist cannot be stopped from using his or her creativity, neither should those who possess particular gifts for the advancement of science and technology be prevented from using their God-given talents for the service of others.”10
This makes sense because the Western idea of progress has theological roots. Christianity is a restless faith. It points us beyond this life, but also seeks to remake the world in holiness. Christians honor the past as part of salvation history. The past sets the stage for our own small parts in God’s story. But the Gospel can’t be satisfied with the world as it was, or is. Rather, the disciple serves God in “renewing the face of the earth.” Thus, the modern secular urge to improve the world and break away from the past is often a kind of Christian faith scrubbed of its supernatural content. The almost “religious” zeal in some progressive political movements has the same roots.
The problem with progress is how we define it.
For the Church, “Man is not a lost atom in a random universe,” and “authentic human development concerns the whole of the person in every single dimension.” For a Christian, material progress alone is not enough. It may in fact kill the good in a culture. In Caritas in Veritate, Benedict stressed that “[genuine] development requires a transcendent vision of the person, it needs God: Without him, development is either denied, or entrusted exclusively to man, who falls into the trap of thinking he can bring about his own salvation.” And this ends by making creation (in the words of Pope Francis) a vast trash heap. As Benedict wrote:
The technical worldview … is now so dominant that truth has come to be seen as coinciding with the possible. But when the sole criterion of truth is efficiency and utility, development is automatically denied. True development does not consist in “doing” … Even when we work through satellites or through remote electronic impulses, our actions always remain human, an expression of our responsible freedom. Technology is highly attractive because it draws us out of our physical limitations and broadens our horizon. But human freedom is authentic only when it responds to the fascination of technology with decisions that are the fruit of moral responsibility (emphasis in original).11
In the 1600s, the scholar Francis Bacon promoted early modern science as a way to ease human life and end suffering. The words he used could be oddly brutal. He spoke of “torturing” nature—putting her on the rack—to force her to give up her secrets. But Bacon was also a great lawyer and salesman. In a time of conflict—the Reformation was very recent—he used his skills to argue that scientific thinkers had “minds washed clean of opinions.” They were men of courage. Men of intellect. They dealt only with facts. In Bacon’s words, scientists stood above the petty bickering of the day. They worked from reason, not emotion or religious passion.
Bacon’s lobbying helped science thrive in a badly divided era. But in reality, science is anything but neutral. Working on the frontiers of knowledge, “science is all about arguments and opinions.” And scientists are not purely objective creatures moved by disinterested investigation, but creatures also moved by ego, ambition, funding competition, and personal and group bias. Scientists also tend to speak with a “priestly voice” of expert knowledge that—innocently or otherwise—can discourage unwelcome questions and criticism from the general public.12 This has been clear for years in America’s bioethical disputes.
None of this denies the good done by today’s science and technology. But it also doesn’t free us from questioning their approach to nature. Our words “awe” and “wonder” come from the Old English and Norse terms for dread, great reverence, and the miraculous. Applied to nature, they suggest the presence of the holy. We feel awe when we meet something in creation much greater than human, something transcendent that commands our respect.
Not so in modern thought. A scientist may feel “awe” as a person when he looks at the night sky. But science as a discipline allows no such category. Science is about collecting and analyzing measurable data. Technology is about organizing nature into a “standing reserve” of raw material for human use. Things not measurable or useful are not relevant. In a sense, they’re not even real. That includes beauty. Beauty (so the reasoning goes) is an idea stamped on physical data by a person’s emotions and the conditions of culture. Beauty can’t “dwell” in the thing described as beautiful, because it doesn’t exist outside the mind of the observer.
Modern technology thus tends to cause deep changes in our relationship with nature. Creation is no longer a sacrament. In fact, the word “creation” is seen as misleading since it implies a Creator. Rather, nature is just there—dead material waiting for the human will to give it meaning. And technology’s inner logic is a self-directing juggernaut. To put it another way: In a Christian culture, life moves toward the goal of eventual rest in God. In a Marxist culture, the goal is different, but similar: Life moves toward eventual rest here on earth when the state withers away and men finally live as brothers.
But in a technocratic culture—what the media scholar Neil Postman called a “technopoly”—technology is its own justification. It’s the driving force of life. The essence of technology’s spirit is becoming, not arriving; restlessness as a destiny. No end point. No rest. No peace. Only more speed, more change, more new appetites and experiences, more intensities of discarding the past, outgrowing the present, and grasping for the fabulous future … always just out of reach.
* * *
WHY DOES ANY OF this matter in daily life? It matters because if we understand the inner logic of our culture, we can try to change it. And a central fact of modern American life is idolatry.
Which sounds outlandish. But check the evidence.
We’re a nation held together by respect for the law. The seminal law in our civilization comes from the experience of Moses on Mount Sinai—which is why Moses (inconveniently for unbelievers) shows up on so many of our public buildings. Until recent decades the Ten Commandments were so widely memorized and revered that almost any citizen could recite them by rote. And note their arrangement. The first three speak to our relationship with God. The last seven speak to our relationship with other persons. The God of Israel does not mince words:
1. I am the Lord your God; you shall not place foreign gods before me.
2. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
3. Remember to keep holy the Sabbath.
Now here’s a simple test. How many public figures, or even personal friends, do you know who genuinely place God first in their thinking? How much of God do you find in American public life? How many times in a day are the words “Jesus Christ” abused at work, on the street, in our public entertainment? How many malls close, how many people take a break from work, and how many families disconnect from media, sports, and shopping in order to spend time together, without distractions, on an average Sunday? And how much time do any of us make for silence—the kind of silence that allows God to speak, and us to listen?
For most of us, the answers aren’t pretty. American life is a river of noise and pressure, a teeming mass of consumer appetites. It’s profoundly ordered away from the first three commandments, even when we pay them lip service. And ignoring the first three inevitably undercuts the other seven. The dignity of others is an empty piety, subject to editing as we find useful, unless it’s guaranteed by Someone greater than us, to whom we owe our fidelity. Without that Someone, the rights of other people are no more solid than our moods.
To borrow the words of Jean-Marie Lustiger, the great French churchman, “[How] can we claim to be Christian when we continue to live like pagans?”13 But we’re often worse than pagans. True pagans had a reverence for nature and the gods. Today we worship ourselves and our tools. That sin defaces the world. It also kills our ability to see things as they really are. Simple blades of grass in heaven cause the visiting souls from hell so much pain in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce because they’re too real to bear for creatures made unreal by their own delusions. Consumer culture—the world we live in every day—is deeply anti-Christian not just in its gluttony and its exclusion of the needs of others, but also in its damage to the mature, clear-thinking self.
As Americans, we’re uniquely prone to an idolatry of progress. The reason is our history. Nobody saw this more clearly than the writer George Grant. The United States is an invented nation. It was carved out of the wild with a “conquering relation to place [that] has left its mark within us … Even our cities have been encampments on the road to economic mastery.”14
Our religious roots have stamped America with an appetite for results and a distrust of contemplation. Early Calvinism gave us “a practical optimism which had discarded awe [and so produced] those crisp, rationalized managers who are the first necessity of the kingdom of man. Those uncontemplative and unflinching wills without which technological society cannot exist, were shaped from the crucible” of pioneering Puritanism.15
Our roots have withered. But their effect remains: “What makes the [American] drive to technology so strong is that it is carried on by men who still identify what they are doing with the liberation of mankind.”16 And that project is going strong. God may be gone, but our belief in progress endures.
But progress, it turns out, takes its revenge in unintended consequences.
At home, the tech revolution means more comforts for everyone. It means easier communication, education, transportation, and work. Technology equalizes opportunity in important ways. Much of this is good. But it also fuels a cult of efficiency, a fetish for tools, and a lopsided focus on the future. It fosters boredom with the past. It feeds self-interest. It transfers huge wealth to a new, highly secular leadership class. It punishes many workers in traditional industries. It renders, or seems to render, the “supernatural” obsolete. And with its power to manipulate and propagandize, it reshapes our political life. As citizens are swarmed by ads, noise, and political messaging, people’s sense of powerlessness grows. So does their anger at the privileged. So does their skepticism about the democratic process.
And abroad? Overseas, technology has helped millions of people in formerly “underdeveloped” countries. As Thomas Friedman wrote in The World Is Flat (2005), the tech revolution has globalized the world economy by “flattening” the playing field for emerging nations. But the same technologies have often hurt the environment. They’ve also damaged traditional cultures. And terrorists have used them with brutal effect.
The proverb remains true: “For the man with a hammer, every problem is a nail.” Our tools come with a bias to use them on nature and on people without fully understanding either. And in the process, we change ourselves. In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the wizard Saruman turns from wisdom to rapacity in his taste for power. He rips out the ancient trees and flattens the land to make room for the industries of war. The lesson is simple: All technology, along with its blessings, also carries a temptation—an appetite for control, a willingness to flatten the world (if needed) to make space for the human will.
And that flattening instinct, which sees the whole world as raw material, comes with an enmity for those things technology can’t fix—including imperfect human beings. So we—all of us—inevitably become the targets of our own tools.
In denying any higher purpose to nature, science (or, better, “scientism”—the materialist philosophy that feeds off science) undercuts any special status for humanity, any natural rights inherent to being human, any firm grounding for justice. All these things are flexible. All are subject to change by whoever has power.
Cleaned up from the Nazi era and now with better marketing, eugenics is back. Genetic screening for fetal flaws is common. So is trafficking in the body parts of aborted children. As early as 2005, the ethicist Leon Kass, M.D., described our “peculiar moral crisis” this way:
We are in turbulent seas without a landmark, precisely because we adhere … to a view of human life that both gives us enormous power and that, at the same time, denies every possibility of non-arbitrary standards for guiding its use. Though well-equipped, we know not who we are or where we are going. We triumph over nature’s unpredictabilities only to subject ourselves, tragically, to the still greater unpredictability of our capricious wills and fickle opinions. Engineering the engineer as well as the engine, we race our train we know not where … That we do not recognize our predicament is itself a tribute to the depth of our infatuation with scientific progress and our naïve faith in the sufficiency of our humanitarian impulses.17
Kass, a former chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, offered those words at Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum. At the time, he dismissed as “a few zealots” the “immortalists [and] bionics boosters … trying to build a superman or a post-human being.”
But less than two decades later, transhumanism—the quest through genetics and technology for a new kind of humanity that transcends the jail cell of the purely human brain and flesh—is a new research frontier spearheaded by leading biotech companies.
* * *
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS to be self-evident: All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. These rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
These are wonderful words. Most Americans know them, or at least once learned them. As a national creed, these beliefs from the Declaration of Independence have enduring character and beauty. They’re imprinted on our national memory. And rightly so.
Too bad they’re not true. Or, more accurately, they’re true, but only in a particular biblical sense. One of the facts of life is that people are not equal in intelligence, beauty, wealth, social skills, athletic ability, physical health, family influence, potential earnings, or access to the best schools. The list of life’s inequities is long, and always part of the human experience. Life isn’t fair. And this is so even in revolutionary societies based on egalitarian ideals. The old ruling class may end up without their heads. But new hierarchies always take their place.
This isn’t news. Most people know that differences and inequalities are inevitable in the real world. So they sort themselves, or get sorted by events or other people, into categories of merit and influence. Whether these distinctions are formal and obvious, or invisible and officially denied, is irrelevant. Life doesn’t treat people equally. The poor and infirm are living witnesses. And in a utilitarian world, the natural-rights sentiments (including equality) that moved the nation’s Founders in 1776—as great as those beliefs still are—“appear false and meaningless or superstitious” to many of the leading minds that now shape our political imagination.18
When key scientists and scholars argue, as some now do, for human cloning, or the legitimacy of killing disabled newborns, or breeding children for spare parts on a mass scale, these proposals may be morally vile. But in a world with no higher purpose, they’re not illogical or inconsistent.19
People are equal in one sense only, but it’s a decisive sense deeper than any simple equations of worth. Think of it this way: Does a mother really love each irreplaceable child she bears “equally”—or in some much more profound and intimate way? Can a good father really weigh the “comparative value” of the young lives that come from his own flesh and blood? Our dignity is rooted in the God who made us. His love, shared in every parent’s experience, is infinite and unique for each of us as individual persons—because each son and daughter is an unrepeatable miracle. Only God’s love guarantees our worth. And therein lies our real equality. In him, our inequalities become not cruelties of fate, but openings that lead us to love, support, and “complete” each other in his name.
For the Christian, human beings are not sovereign individuals. Not interchangeable reasoning and consuming units. Not variables in a math equation. Our differences invite us to depend on and to help one another. And this fact should shape every aspect of our lives.
A skeptic might call this sort of thinking an alibi for living with chronic evils. Not so. Nothing absolves Christians from the duties of justice. In the political realm, equal treatment under the law is vital to a decent society. In matters of economy, the poor may always be with us, as Scripture says. But that doesn’t excuse us from working as hard as we can to make our country a worthy home for all our citizens. The Gospel should move us to change the world for the better, not bless it as it is.
That Christian restlessness, or leaven, is the engine of the civilization we call the West. Christianity invented the idea of the “individual.” And the world shifted because of it:
Christianity changed the ground of human identity … By emphasizing the moral equality of humans, quite apart from any social roles they might occupy … [t]he New Testament stands out against the primary thrust of the ancient world with its dominant assumption of “natural” inequality … The Christian conception of God provided the foundation for what became an unprecedented form of human society. Christian moral beliefs emerge as the ultimate source of the social revolution that has made the West what it is.20
This is why even the harshest critics of biblical faith often see liberal democracies as a form of secularized Christianity. Humanitarian compassion, embodied in the welfare state, is the virtue of charity drained of its God content. At its best, democracy works from a biblically derived belief in every person’s value.
But if the people are the only source of power and moral authority, and the people are venal and corrupt, then so is the state. If the state’s economic life feeds venality and corruption, the problems get worse. Moreover, in its purest instincts, democracy distrusts any material form of inequality. And as those inequalities seem to disappear, democracy grows more hostile to any remaining inequalities. Its leveling effect on all institutions and relationships gets stronger as differences and distinctions weaken.
As we’ve already seen, religion checks these tendencies only when people actually believe and practice what their faith teaches. And if new orthodoxies of unbelief attack inherited faith, if scientism and a cult of technology lower our eyes to the gadgets in our hands, the effect ripples across a culture’s soul. In the words of David Gelernter, the Yale computer scientist,
Scientists have acquired the power to impress and intimidate every time they open their mouths, and it is their responsibility to keep this power in mind no matter what they say or do. Too many have forgotten their obligation to approach with due respect the scholarly, artistic, religious, humanistic work that has always been mankind’s spiritual support. Scientists are (on average) no more likely to understand this work than the man on the street is to understand quantum physics. But science used to know enough to approach cautiously and admire from the outside, and to build its own work on a deep belief in human dignity. No longer.21
Thus it’s no surprise that colleagues of the (atheist) philosopher Thomas Nagel publicly savaged him some years ago for claiming that “the materialist new-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false.”22 His sin? Heresy. He doubted a new orthodoxy and got a taste of the new intolerance.
It’s also no surprise, as a Wall Street Journal essay said after the death of Steve Jobs in 2011, that the “most singular quality [of the Apple founder] was his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope … He believed so sincerely in the ‘magical, revolutionary’ promise of Apple” and its technology “precisely because he believed in no higher power.”23
“This is the gospel of the secular age,” said the Journal piece, and for “people of a secular age, Steve Jobs’ gospel may seem like all the good news we need. But people of another age would have considered it a set of beautifully polished empty promises, notwithstanding all its magical results. Indeed, they would have been suspicious of it precisely because of its magical results.”
A POSTSCRIPT
More than 130 years ago, an Anglican priest named Edwin Abbot wrote a curious little novel called Flatland.24 The story imagines a world of intelligent two-dimensional figures. These creatures are straight lines, triangles, squares, and polygons, led by a priestly class of circles. The circles oversee all science, business, engineering, art, and trade.
Flatland is a complex society guided by the creed of Configuration. For Flatlanders, all of reality consists in width and length. State doctrine condemns “those ancient heresies which led men to waste energy and sympathy in the vain belief that conduct depends upon will, effort, training, encouragement, praise or anything else but Configuration.” And what is Configuration? It’s the belief that all misconduct, all crime, comes from some deviation in Regularity of line or angle. Those who are Irregular end up in hospitals. Or prisons. Or executed.
One night the narrator, an urbane and orthodox Square (an attorney), is visited by a Sphere. The Sphere lifts him out of his Flatland universe. It shows him the glory of three dimensions and proves that Flatland is only part of a much larger reality. Then it sends the eager narrator back to his own world as an apostle of the Gospel of the Three Dimensions. Where he’s promptly locked up for mental illness and heresy.
Popular wisdom holds that Flatland was a satire of the conventionalism of the Victorian era. But we might find better parallels closer to our own land, in the scientism of our own time.