Why the Sea Is Salt

Peter Edman

Now that our curriculum on technology is off to the printer and finalized for the moment as we get ready for the spring Forums, I’ve been finding all sorts of articles and resources that would have made great boxes or readings. I take some comfort in the fact that our framework seems to be able to fit each of them in—in this case, the tendency of technology to do its job, even if you don’t want it anymore; the need to be careful with overpromising technology; and the critical need for a wider purpose for technology than mere blind “progress.” I’m also excited to have the website now, so I can document these items that are useful thinking and talking points for a conversation about technology and the good life.

Item one is the Scandinavian fairy tale, “Why the Sea is Salt,” retold in Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book among many other places (executive summary here). Seems people in the past occasionally took advantage of those long cold dark winter nights to think things through. The wonderful mill—which keeps doing what it is asked to do until stopped, but the user doesn’t know how to stop it—is a great metaphor for technology.

Item two: Kevin Kelly seems to be doing some groundbreaking work in overcoming techno-hype and exploring what is really happening with science and technology. Case in point is his essay on leapfrogging technology. Also well worth your time (about a half hour of it) is the story of his Christian conversion and its aftermath (available here in RealAudio from This American Life), which might be titled “reborn into ordinariness.” I’ll probably add a few of his maxims to the boxes in the next revision of our curriculum.

Item three is historian Christopher Dawson’s lecture on technology, the 1960 Smith History Lecture at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, “America and the Secularization of Modern Culture,” which is not available on the Internet, though I’ve included a few paragraphs below.

Dawson says in essence that technology needs to have an end beyond itself if it is not to overwhelm its creators.

For it is in the very nature of the technological order that there is no room for independent centers of action: everything has to be geared to one all-embracing system. Education and science and technology, industry and business and government, all are coordinated with one another in a closed organization from which there is no escape.

and

The fact is that a technological civilization which is devoted to purely secular and material ends inevitably tends to reduce man to an automaton by subjecting him to the dominion of vast impersonal forces. Thus it contradicts not only the doctrines of personal liberty which inspired the creative period of American culture but also the more universal spiritual principles which are common to Western civilization as a whole. . . .

If democratic society is to survive the pressure of the technological order and the challenge of Communism and the other totalitarian ideologies, it is essential that Western civilization should recover a sense of spiritual purpose or spiritual order. The technological order can only be made tolerable to human nature by being subordinated to some principle which is higher than individual profit or mass power. But is this conceivable? Does any such principle exist?

. . . This is the ultimate issue for modern civilization—a question of life or death. For I believe that it is only by the recovery of this lost spiritual element in our culture that we can make it strong enough to withstand the disintegrating and dehumanizing influences of technology. And this alone can provide a principle of coordination which will preserve the balance between the liberty of the human personality and the impersonal regulation of the technological order.

The lecture was most recently reprinted in the journal LOGOS 3:3, (Summer 2000), with an introduction by Gerald Russello.

Fodder, Science and Technology, Mon 06 Mar 2006