I have a love-hate relationship with technology, and in particular, with the internet. I grew up with computers and networks. When I was ten years old, my Father had an Amiga – no number, no version, just a plain Amiga. And it had a modem, which we used to dial up to connect to a network called Delphi. As I recall, I played cards against other Delphi users through a text based interface. After Delphi came Compuserve. After that, Prodigy. And it was through Prodigy, back in 1993, that I first encountered the internet. Back then, it had more than the World Wide Web. It had Gopher, and Telnet, and all other kinds of protocols and ways of using the internet. And of course, there was email, even if I was the only one I knew with an email account. I still remember Yahoo – just a few links in a long list. If I knew then what I know now, I’d have done what I did a few months ago, which was to cancel my web services and to sell my computer.
The long and tragic history of man begins with the stain of fratricide, of brother killing brother, of division and bloodshed. We hate God, we hate one another, and we hate ourselves, and in that hate we are ruptured from all three. Chaos reigns not only in the heavens and on earth, but in our very souls. Where communion should exist, war rages. In the midst of such darkness, a special child was born. He was different. He loved. This child was the salvation and the light, destined to unite the world in his total sacrifice of body, blood, and soul, humanity and divinity. In his life and death and resurrection, Jesus Christ united what no one thought possible – brother with brother, sister with sister, and God with all.
The most important theme in Pope Benedict’s new encyclical Caritas in Veritate – technology – has been almost entirely ignored. Most commentators have focused instead upon the encyclical’s teachings on profit and power. And yet the closest collaborators of the Pope have repeatedly stressed technology as a vital issue in the modern age. At the official press conference that unveiled Caritas in Veritate, Cardinal Renato Martino, of the President of the Pontifical Council of Peace and Justice, along with the Secretary of the council, Archbishop Giampaolo Crepaldi, both pointed to technology as a new sign of the times. Cardinal Martino said that Cold War ideologies “have been replaced by the new ideology of technology,” and that the “arbitrary nature of technology is one of the greatest problems of today’s world.” Archbishop Crepaldi explained that Caritas in Veritate is “the first time an Encyclical deals with this theme [of technology] so fully.” Inside the encyclical itself, one finds that the last chapter is devoted entirely the “The Development of Peoples and Technology”. Summarizing the previous five chapters, Pope Benedict writes that the “supremacy of technology tends to prevent people from recognizing anything that cannot be explained in terms of matter alone,” (77), and yet “development must include not just material growth but also spiritual growth” (76). Modern technology is never ethically ‘neutral’ – “technology is never merely technology” (69).
I started working as a janitor two weeks ago. I clean bathrooms, hallways, and classrooms – from top to bottom. On a daily average, I take on 25 toilets, 10 urinals, 15 sinks, 10 floors, 2 carpets, 4 classrooms, 10 trashcans, 10 mirrors, and 2 glass doors. Most of this work is simple manual labor – brooms, mops, dusters, spray, paper towels, and so forth. And I love it. There is a very nice feeling that comes with making something clean, and having done it with my own two hands.
There are many sources for the horror of legalized abortion. The main culprits are often identified as politicians. Other culprits are cultural figures like Margaret Sanger along with their historical institutions (”Planned Parenthood”). Sometimes poverty is taken to task, or overpopulation, or many of the other social-ills. There remains, however, a deeper source and problem – the mass confusion regarding the meaning of human sexuality and the right regulation of human birth. According to the teaching of the Catholic Church as promulgated by Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, the regulation of birth must adhere to the natural meaning of the conjugal act as inseparably procreative and unitive, a meaning that excludes any means of sterilization or artificial insemination. While technology gives mankind the ability and power to control birth, it cannot reformulate the meaning of human sexuality. The modern world’s conception of autonomous freedom, and its understanding of the human body as “raw datum” (VS 48) or raw material for human activity, has led mankind to “extend the domination [of technology] to his own total being: to the body, to psychical life, to social life and even to the laws which regulate the transmission of life” (HV 2). This attempt to “control” birth rather than regulate it according to the mission of marriage and the law of nature, this attempt to “plan” birth without regard to the characteristics of conjugal love or of responsible parenthood, this very attempt to redefine the meaning of the conjugal act, is doomed to failure and unhappiness, “since man cannot find true happiness . . . other than in respect of the laws written by God in his very nature, laws which he must observe with intelligence and love” (HV 31).