Technology, Culture, and Virtue Patrick J. Deneen - The New Atlantis

Patrick J. Deneengadgets for getting around, industrial agriculture for food production,cheap clothing from China so that we don’t have to make or repair garments,cheap labor from Mexico so that we don’t have to build or fix, andthe Internet for everything else. But this is precisely the point: withinroughly two generations we have lost a vast storehouse of cultural memorythat was the accumulation of countless generations who saw it astheir duty to posterity, grounded in gratitude to ancestors, to ensure safepassage of this knowledge to future generations. Culture itself has cometo be viewed as disposable based on the illusion of independence fromnature that our modern technologies have bequeathed us. Why spend timediligently learning at the side of your father how to repair a bucket ornavigate by the stars or grow vegetables when every young person knowsthat a machine will do this work—or that cheap replacement products arereadily available?Everyone knows that if you have a problem with a computer, yougo to the youngest person in the family for advice about how to repairit: ancestral knowledge has been replaced by the constantly up-to-date.So, too, we professors are told that we need to adapt our teaching tothe modern technologies used by our students, as if these won’t in factinfluence the teachings themselves. If all technologies ultimately replacethemselves with something else, we are living in a time when our technologiesare replacing the original and essential human technology ofculture. However, if culture is one of the preconditions for technology ofall sorts that make us human, then we are employing technology in waysthat increasingly dehumanize us. By destroying nature and culture, weultimately destroy ourselves.The War on VirtueIf we are indeed at war with nature—as Bacon and other modernsdeclared—we should seek a full accounting of the costs and losses associatedwith the struggle. As with any war, we avoid that accounting becausewe would like to cling to the illusion that we are winning. But in his 2005essay “Agriculture from the Roots Up,” Berry offers a starker assessment:This war, like most wars, has turned out to be a trickier businessthan we expected. We must now face two shocking surprises. The firstsurprise is that if we say and believe that we are at war with nature,then we are in the fullest sense at war: that is, we are both opposing andbeing opposed, and the costs to both sides are extremely high.70 ~ The New AtlantisCopyright 2008. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.