Fall: When Tools Become Systems

This is a difficult position to hold honestly. It is too easy to slide into a moralism in which a particular technology stands convicted because it was once misused, and too easy to slide into the opposite moralism in which the system’s evident misuses are explained away as the unfortunate behavior of a few bad actors. Neither captures the actual Christian critique. The actual critique is structural. It says that fallen human creatures, organized into large technical ensembles, produce results that no one intended and that no one inside the system can simply choose to undo.

The diagnostic tradition

Romano Guardini saw this earliest among the Catholic moderns. The 1920s letters he wrote from the shores of Lake Como are not a complaint about machines. They are a diagnosis of what happens to a culture when measure is lost. The decisive period, he thought, was the consolidation of the industrial revolution between roughly 1830 and 1870. Before, human work shaped a world that still had scale, season, and recognizability. After, the categories of growth and speed and quantity began to govern, and the inner relation between human beings and their surroundings was disrupted in a way that was no one’s specific decision and that no specific decision could reverse.

The disruption is not undone by goodwill. Guardini was clear about this. The Christian task is not to mourn the lost measure but to humanize what is coming — to enter the new world as serious people and try to shape it from inside. That is the move that separates him from the reactionaries.

C. S. Lewis names the same Fall in an anthropological register. The Abolition of Man is three short lectures about what happens to education when the moral order that human beings receive is reframed as a set of private preferences they impose. The danger, Lewis says, is not machines as such. The danger is the project of conditioning — of training future generations to be whatever the Conditioners’ arbitrary preferences happen to prefer, with technical means now adequate to the task. The final conquest of nature, in Lewis’s image, is the conquest of the human by what is no longer human, because the Conditioners themselves are now ruled by nothing more than impulse. This is one of the most prescient short Christian texts ever written on transhumanism, behavioral economics, and the long political consequences of letting moral realism die.

Jacques Ellul names the same Fall sociologically, and gives it the term that has become unavoidable: la technique. Technology is too narrow a word for what he is describing. The real phenomenon is the total complex of rational, efficiency-oriented methods that organizes modern life — of which machines are only the most visible part. Bureaucracy is technique. Propaganda is technique. Marketing is technique. The scientific management of labor is technique. Once you see this, the question “is technology good or bad?” becomes obviously the wrong question, and the real question becomes what happens to a civilization in which efficiency itself has become sacred. Ellul’s answer is severe: it becomes a civilization of means, in which the ends recede until no one remembers them, and the system as a whole sacralizes itself.

Ivan Illich gives the diagnosis its most operational vocabulary. The decisive concept is the threshold: the point past which a particular technology stops extending human capacity and starts reorganizing the surrounding world in ways that eliminate the alternatives. Up to a point, a tool is convivial. Past a point, it becomes a radical monopoly: the elimination of alternatives, not by overt prohibition but by the reshaping of the environment. Cars past a certain point eliminate walking. Schooling past a certain point eliminates vernacular literacy. Industrial medicine past a certain point eliminates ordinary care. Each step looks like progress; the totality looks like dependence.

Pope Francis makes the diagnosis magisterial. The recurring phrase is the technocratic paradigm: the assumption that technical method, control, and efficiency are a total epistemology, that every problem is at root an engineering problem, and that the meaningful action of history happens in laboratories and on platforms rather than in persons, families, parishes, polities, and the poor. Laudato si’, Fratelli tutti, the Rome Call, and Antiqua et nova together amount to the most articulated twentieth- and twenty-first-century institutional Christian engagement with this Fall — and they do it without becoming anti-technological in the simple sense.

The structure of the diagnosis

These five thinkers do not agree on everything. They disagree on whether the system can be reformed from within (Guardini and Francis are more hopeful than Ellul), on whether the right unit of analysis is the artifact or the institution (Illich and Ellul disagree subtly here), on whether the danger is primarily anthropological or sociological (Lewis foregrounds the first, Ellul the second), and on what the constructive response actually looks like in practice.

But they agree on the structural insight. The Fall is not localized in particular wicked technologies. It is the way that ensembles of technologies, embedded in larger institutional arrangements, generate emergent logics that no individual chose, that no individual can fully refuse, and that quietly form the consciences, attentions, and possibilities of the people who live inside them.

This is what makes the technological Fall properly theological. The Christian doctrine of original sin has always insisted that human evil is not just a sum of individual bad choices but a structural condition in which we are formed before we choose anything. Technological civilization is one of the places where the doctrine of original sin is most visible to people who do not otherwise believe it. Most working engineers, regulators, and platform employees who feel that something has gone wrong — that their best individual intentions are not enough, that the system produces things no one wanted, that the optimizations have stopped serving the goods they were supposed to serve — are experiencing something the Christian tradition has named for a very long time.

What the diagnosis is for

Naming the Fall is not the same as refusing the world it has fallen into. None of the figures in this strand are Luddites. Guardini and Francis insist on engagement. Lewis lived inside the Oxford institutional life he was simultaneously critiquing. Ellul edited a town’s water system while writing about technique. Illich kept telephones, books, and bicycles in his own life and treasured them.

The diagnosis is for two things.

First, it is for seeing. The Christian who has read these figures cannot honestly believe that “we just need to use technology well” is a complete answer. The “we” who would do the using has already been formed by the system whose technologies it imagines itself using. Honest engagement requires admitting this.

Second, it is for making room for the response. If the Fall is structural, the response cannot be only personal. It has to include the slow, patient work of building institutions, communities, practices, liturgies, schools, hospitals, neighborhoods, monasteries, friendships — forms of common life that are not finally organized by the technocratic paradigm and that can therefore form people capable of perceiving what the paradigm cannot perceive.

This is the move that connects the Humanize and Limit and Expose False Salvation strands of the tradition to the Build and Heal strand. The diagnosis of the Fall is what keeps the affirmative theology of creation from sliding into the technocratic paradigm. It is also what keeps the apocalyptic warning from sliding into mere refusal. The Christian middle, which is harder than either edge, is the place where Christians who have read both Dessauer and Ellul try to live.

See also: Creation: Why Christians Built Machines · Redemption and Eschatology: Healing, Resurrection, and False Salvation