Abstract
How does Christian ethics best approach technology? A straightforward way is to evaluate particular artifacts and techniques, and the small- or large-scale projects in which they are embedded, with regard to their risks and benefits, their just distribution, and (in the better accounts) their positive or negative relations to genuine human goods. Technology assessment typically operates at this level, but perceptive observers of technology are often dissatisfied with this approach. Impressed with its profound effects on the ways we relate to one another, to the external world, and even to ourselves, these observers view technology not merely as artifacts, techniques, and projects, but as a way of life. But if Christianity, too, is a way of life then Christian ethics cannot rest content with applying doctrines or moral principles to particular technologies but must examine the one way of life in light of the other. There is no shortage of accounts of technology as a way of life, and in Christian Ethics in a Technological Age Brian Brock expounds the influential accounts of Martin Heidegger, George Grant, and Michel Foucault. Far more difficult, however, is the remainder of the task. To adequately describe the way of life of Christian faith is no mean feat; to do so in a way that illuminates technology and positions it in light of the Christian way of life is an immense challenge. Brock is the first to take up this challenge in a serious and comprehensive way. Whatever its shortcomings, this book sets a new standard for Christian ethical evaluation of technology.
Central to Brock’s theology is the conviction that God speaks to us, paradigmatically in worship, claiming us from outside ourselves. The divine claim meets us in the person of the neighbor, to whom God in Christ is freely bound. It follows that ethics is not adherence to rules or principles or even the cultivation of virtue or formation by ecclesial practices. It is rather ‘local listening in particular circumstances’ (p. 236) for the divine Word that makes one attentive to the neighbor and to the social and material order in which the neighbor is embedded. While he is indebted to Augustine and Barth, one of Brock’s accomplishments is to articulate an important contemporary Lutheran trajectory in Christian ethics. This trajectory encompasses Luther’s insistence on freedom from self-justificatory norms and for spontaneous service of the neighbor according to perception of her concrete need; Bonhoeffer’s related critique of ‘the ethical’ as alienation from the circumstances of life in society where God’s concrete commandment is heard; Hans Ulrich’s description of the life of the creature as listening for God’s call; and Bernd Wannenwetsch’s focus on worship as the site of God’s speaking and our listening, along with his stress on the divine enlivening of the senses to perceive and respond more adequately to the neighbor. Brock’s original contribution to this trajectory is to show how God’s claim comes through the material order of creation as well as through the person of the neighbor in her social ordering.
This theological perspective is the topic of the second part of the book, but it clarifies what is at stake in the account of technology as a way of life in the first part. In Heidegger, Brock finds a critique of technology as the ordering of reality as ‘standing reserve’ which precludes any claim that addresses and transforms the subject from outside. In Grant, he finds a critique of technology as assertion of the will that denies ontological order its normative status and reduces it to a homogeneous mechanism. In Foucault, he finds a critique of disciplinary techniques that render bodies efficient, pliable and predictable—the polar opposite of attention to the particularity of the neighbor and response to her concrete need. And in technology assessment, he finds a form of moral reasoning that is itself technological in its presumption of control, attempting through rules, procedures and risk-benefit calculations to render technology itself a reliable and efficient instrument of our self-chosen ends. Brock’s theological perspective also governs his selection and evaluation of particular technologies. A hypothetical ovum-sorting machine that allows ova to be screened prior to fertilization embodies the refusal to accept the neighbor in her concrete givenness. The blog expands communications but ultimately hinders true listening to the other through whom God speaks. Agricultural biotechnology increases yields but reduces nature to a resource for consumption rather than an ordered reality calling for our attentive care.
Thus do the Christian and technological ways of life stand in sharp contrast, as expressed in the binary pairs that govern Brock’s analyses, which pit spontaneity against calculation, appreciation of particularity and diversity against homogenization, openness to otherness against control, attentive perception against instrumental rationality. Contrasts like these can easily become caricatures, and Brock invites criticism by identifying them with the contrast between the church as a worshiping community and the corporate boardroom where, he asserts, deliberations over technology reduce to concern for profit and competitive advantage. The problem is not just that studies of technology companies claim to find more complex moral cultures. It is that the most challenging ethical questions raised by technology are more subtle in nature. Fortunately, Brock is well aware of this point. Some of his most insightful remarks emphasize the contrast between, on the one hand, Christian attentiveness to the concrete need of the neighbor which leaves responsibility for the effectiveness of our actions on her behalf to God, and on the other hand, the control of reality by technology in order to ensure beneficial results and secure the future. Here Brock demonstrates the fruitfulness of the Lutheran notion of Christian freedom, according to which the finality and exclusivity of salvation in Christ obviates the need to secure salvation by our own doing and making and thus frees us to attend to the human neighbor and other creatures, exposing technology as a false soteriology and opening us to aspects of social and material order that are obscured by our desire for control. However, a second problem with the contrasts Brock draws is that they seem to preclude any legitimate appropriation of technology by Christians. If technology is not merely artifacts and techniques but a way of life, and if this way of life contrasts so sharply with the Christian way of life embodied in worship, then it seems that Christians must reject technology altogether, or at least to whatever extent possible. Yet Brock repeatedly (and rightly) denies this conclusion, affirming the possibility of a positive role for technology in the lives of Christians and disavowing attempts at alternative, non-technological ways of life. However, any such positive role presupposes that technological artifacts and techniques can be isolated from technology as a way of life and a form of ethical reasoning. This isolation is apparently what Brock has in mind (pp. 225-26, 381-82). But how (and in which instances) can it actually be accomplished? And if it can indeed be accomplished, doesn’t this call into question the claim that technology must be approached as a way of life? The unavoidability of these questions may explain why Brock sometimes speaks of Christian resistance to technology rather than appropriation, bringing him close to the non-technological alternative he otherwise renounces.
On Brock’s account, of course, the purpose of Christian ethics is not to supply criteria or guidelines for the use of technology based on moral principles but to position us to hear God’s voice as it addresses us in creaturely reality, enabling us to perceive morally relevant aspects of social and material order and to expose forms of thought and practice that obscure those aspects or distort our perception of them. Whether this kind of ethic can succeed, even on its own terms, depends on what it can say about social and material order to guide our perception. With regard to the former, Brock puts Wannenwetsch’s theology to good use, describing the sociality embodied in worship and showing how it gives proper shape to our encounter with the neighbor. With regard to material order, Brock seeks to enrich Wannenwetsch’s description with an account of creation that lends material concreteness to sociality, and to extend this line of thought to the encounter with nonhuman creation. To this end he contrasts the conviction that God speaks to us through material creation with the assumption that materiality is morally neutral and thus available for manipulation in accordance with our desires (in the case of our bodies) or the demands of efficient productivity (in the case of agriculture). In this ‘evangelical account of creation’ (p. 321) God’s word spoken through material order establishes certain forms of sociality, enables us to accept our biological nature (and nonhuman nature) in its givenness as a divine gift, and reconciles us to the inevitable difficulties of creaturely life in its fallen state. This position is highly promising, but it seems ambiguous. On the one hand, Brock opposes his evangelical account to metaphysical or natural law conceptions in which material order imposes itself directly, apart from the divine voice speaking through it. His discussion of agricultural biotechnology stresses that proper treatment of a creature is not determined by inquiry into its essence but by consideration of the concrete contexts of our interactions with it (pp. 348-49). Fixed norms give way to situated care for creatures in their particularity. On the other hand, Brock insists that the materiality through which God’s word addresses us is a structured order.
Here, created order is much more determinate, as evident in the role of sexual dimorphism in his discussion of sexuality, and normative judgments appeal directly to essential features of reality.
In an obscure passage on breeding poultry for disease resistance, Brock seems to distinguish recognition of the chicken’s ‘particular form of creatureliness’ from inquiry into ‘what it is’ (p. 353), and to endorse the former but not the latter expression. Other passages gesture in the same direction. Is this a genuine distinction? If so, it might settle the ambiguity. But it would require an explicit and rigorous articulation that is lacking here. We are left to conclude that Brock’s Grant-inspired attempt (pp. 61-62, 330-31) to retrofit Heidegger’s approach to materiality with a robust notion of form or structure with normative force has not succeeded (though Heidegger’s notion of Sein was bound to frustrate it). The perennial Lutheran tension between an ethic of spontaneous response to need and attentiveness to creatures in their concreteness, on the one hand, and a notion of created order, on the other hand, thus remains unresolved. Critics will take advantage of these shortcomings to question why material order is so determinate in the case of biological sex and so indeterminate in the case of technological breeding of farm animals or how a growing population will be fed if, as he holds, contraceptives are to be shunned and local, small-scale agriculture embraced. However, Brock’s more fundamental points—on the relation between social and material order and the importance of both, on the evangelical character of normative order, and on the threat of technology to our grasp of the latter—are eloquently and forcefully made and survive whatever shortcomings accompany their elaboration. Thanks to this important book, we now have a comprehensive and robustly Christian ethic of technology that sets a new standard. We also have an Ulrich-Wannenwetsch-Brock lineage, whose cumulative insight into these matters has done much to teach Christians to live in a technological age.