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Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology
Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology
146 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 1, 2003
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May 10, 2014
A short precis:
Borgmann’s central claim in this book is that technology has created not just an array of machines and processes, but a culture defined and reified by practices and a corresponding ‘social imaginary’, to use Charles Taylor’s phrase, which ‘seems to render Christianity superfluous and irrelevant’ (7). If Christianity is to recover in the contemporary age, it must be through steady resistance and counter-practice, the persistent crossing of ‘moral thresholds that ‘are so high and hard that few of us cross them. Those are the thresholds of unencumbered self-determination, of seductive promises, of self-indulgence, and of freedom from accountability’ (116). This requires the cultivation not so much of the virtue of courage, which is the appropriate virtue in the face of physical danger, but of fortitude. In order to do this, we must also understand the character of the technological culture, which is invisible and must be unearthed archeologically – ‘Fundamental theology today must be a theology of technology, the successor to medieval natural theology’ (81).
Ch. 1, ‘The Invisibility of Contemporary Culture’, alerts us to the fact that the present technological culture is invisible in the ways in which it ‘interpellates’ or positions us. Products and processes have through technological refinement acquired the status of the ‘device’. The device occurs when machinery substitutes for process and the resulting product is made into a commodity. Where the device becomes a distinctive cultural pattern, a basic way that we interface with the social world, the ‘device paradigm’ emerges (see 122). Its basic characteristics are instantaneity and the illusion of limitlessness. Borgmann indicates that advertising takes a particularly prominent place in a culture saturated by the device paradigm. In such a culture, ‘focal things and practices are the crucial counterforces…They contrast with technology without denying it, and they provide a standpoint for a principled and fruitful reform of technology. Generally, a focal thing is concrete and of commanding presence [he describes this in ch. 2 – JW]. A focal practice is the decided, regular, and normally communal devotion to a focal thing’ (22, see also 31). The invisibility of the device paradigm and technological culture is such that their problematic nature do not emerge clearly until the solution is presented and practiced. The focal thing and practice are strong enough counterweights to alternatively interpellate the person who has been otherwise situated by the device paradigm.
Ch. 2, ‘The Moral Significance of Material Culture’, distinguishes between two kinds of ‘things or reality’ – ‘commanding reality’ and ‘pliable or disposable reality’ (28). To get at this distinction, Borgmann gives the example of a musical instrument and a stereo system. A traditional musical instrument is a highly concrete material object, likely made from precious wood or metal, potentially transmitted through generations, and which must be mastered ‘through endless and painstaking practice’ (29). The stereo, by contrast, ‘produces music as well, or, in fact, much better, i.e., with the supernatural sonority and consistency that no live performance can sustain and with a range in the kinds of music that would require a standing army of virtuosi and virtuousae were it to be humanly available to a listener’s call and beckon’. Yet it is not a commanding reality – it demands little of us to master its use, nor do we feel appreciation for it the way we do a masterful musician. ‘We respect a musician, we own a stereo’. The movement from live performance to perfectly captured and reproduced sonority is part and parcel with the inauguration of modernity – the ‘promise of disburdenment and enrichment’ (30) – in short, the promethean and ultimately illusory promise of autonomy. The stereo participates in the device paradigm – it is an artifact that invites consumption. The instrument is a ‘thing’ in Borgmann’s specialized sense – something which ‘has an intelligible and accessible character and calls forth skilled and active human engagement’ (31).
Ch. 3, ‘Communities of Celebration’ argues that technology, as the chief social force in late modernity that retains the confidence of the public, limits the possibility of celebration by making a strong distinction between public and private in both an economic and a social sense. He argues, similarly to Richard John Neuhaus, that the public sphere is ‘naked’ and hence ‘both hypertrophied and atrophied, both excessively developed in its sheer physical presence and devoid of intrinsic or final dignity, bereft of celebration and festivity’. Public space is concerned with production, and consumption now occurs in the private realm. In the modern context, individual prosperity and liberty increased to the point where ‘communal ties came to be seen as burdens. Consumption is the imperious and unencumbered enjoyment of goods or commodities’ (40-1). In this realm we prescind not only from the anonymous public but ‘from the judgments of our friends, parents, and spouses too. Ultimately, the realm of privacy is in each case occupied by one consumer’ (41). The technological society in this sense is stable, but ‘it is shallow, too, having lost dimensions of life that we used to value’ (44). Even ostensibly in public, because of commercialization, we are alone – ‘even when people are out in the open and in the public realm, one prominent way in which they celebrate a public event is to buy something that they can possess individually and take home’ (45). Borgmann urges that ‘it is simply the case that most people in this country find their deepest orientation in religion. As members of the national community we ought to affirm this devotion explicitly. As long as we officially ignore it, our public life will remain empty’ (53). Churches need to contribute to this revitalization of public culture by learning ‘to be genuine communities of celebration’ (54).
Ch. 4, ‘Contingency and Grace’ argues that the extension of technology beyond the realm of liberation from hard labor has made it difficult for moderns to experience grace. ‘The technological liberation from toil and misery was then and is still being regarded as freeing a space and the time for human flourishing. What has most always been overlooked is the fact that technology has not only made room for pleasure but has also invaded and occupied the liberated space and has impressed its particular shape on our typical enjoyments….The canonical response to commodities, finally, is consumption. Thus the join effects of mechanization, commodification, and consumption transformed traditional cultures from the ground up….The effect of this campaign was to constrict actual grace in its personal and real variants. Coaxing children to learn an instrument and prevailing on musicians to convene for domestic celebrations requires grace on our part. But making music transforms us into recipients as well as bearers of grace as when a fine trio provokes delight and gratitude….All this has been greatly reduced and often eliminated through the devices of radio, stereo, and television’ (76-7). Again, the character of the device is the ‘semblance of transparaent omniscience and omnipresnece’ – in a word, instantaneity. ‘Things no longer occupy a place and take their time’ (77). Borgmann insists that the only way for the genuine character of the gospel to break through in our lives is to get back to the root of the promise of technology – to ameliorate trouble for us. Technology cannot deliver us in the way we want it to – and often creates greater problems than we had without it. We need to recover the ability to distinguish between ‘trouble we reject in principle but accept in practice and trouble we accept in practice and in principle. When cancer strikes or a car crashes, we should resist the uncomprehending anger that rises from the culture of transparency and control and instead pray for the grace that allows us to accept what has come our way’ (79).
Ch. 5, ‘Power and Grace’ points out that technological culture is groundless – it has no end in mind other than the promotion of itself. It can answer instrumental questions, but not ultimate ones – ‘if in those cases we persist in asking what those endeavors and devices are for, we will again be finally referred to the foreground and center of commodities available for consumption’ (84). Yet this ‘quotidianity of modern life’ is unquestioned, precisely because ‘from the start it was systematically designed to be unproblematic, to be free of insecurity, of challenges, demands, or conflicting creeds, of pain and misery, of confinement, or toil’ (85). Technological culture in fact shows itself most clearly where it fails, namely where suffering and death overtake us. ‘To suffer misery is no longer to be reminded of one’s fundamental incompleteness and incapacity, but to be scandalized at the senseless remnant of a time long gone’ (85). Our poverty is no longer material, but in the depth and meaning of things. Commodities remove our awareness of the things themselves and ‘obviate the exercise of my more profound mental and physical capacities; they actually repel them; my best capabilities must atrophy, and my life will be terribly diminished’ (87). Human frailty in the modern era is manifest in ‘a crippling of our most profound capabilities and consequently a deprivation of things in their own right and depth. To be saved, accordingly, may involve the recovery of one’s capacity for the fullness of nature, of art, and for the pretechnological things and practices of daily life that lie half-buried under the surfeit of consumption’ (87). Here Borgmann distinguishes between two different kinds of power with regard to our use of things: ‘regardless’ power and ‘careful’ power. Regardless power is associated with commodificication – the inattention to the variety and commanding presence of things themselves. Careful power, by contrast, is associated with focal things and practices – where I am attentive to detail and to process. ‘Nature is present in its own right and beckons me to respond in the fullness and oneness of my bodily and spiritual faculties’ (89). There is this powerful quote at the end of the chapter:
‘If the time has now come to accept more fully what all along has been ours, it is still true that for a long time to come technology will constitute the common rule of life. The Christian reaction to that rule should not be rejection but restraint. Technology ought to be revoked as the dominant way of taking up with the world and relegtated to securing the margins and underpinnings of our lives. Within that environment we must make a clearing for the celebration of the Word of God. But since technology as a way of life is so pervasive, so well entrenched, and so concealed in its quotidianity, Christians must meet the rule of technology with a deliberate and regular counterpractice….Therefore a radical theology of technology must finally become a practical theology, one that first makes room and then makes way for a Christian practice. Here we must consider again the ancient senses of theology, the senses that extend from reflection to prayer. We must also recover the ascetic tradition of practice and discipline and ask how the ascesis of being still and solitary in meditation is related to the practice of being communally engaged in the breaking of the bread. The passage through technology discloses a new or an ancient splendor in ascesis. There is no duress or denial in ascetic Christianity. ON the contrary, liberating us from the indolence and shallowness of technology, it opens to us the festive engagement with life’ (94).
In Ch. 6, ‘Liberty, Festivity, and Poverty’, Borgmann distinguishes between three different kinds of poverty – ‘advanced poverty’, ‘brute poverty’, and ‘biblical poverty’, which holds the former two together. In late modernity, advanced poverty is the characteristic of most westerners, ironically brought into being by technology itself which brought us out of the experience of brute poverty. ‘Technology is the systematic eradication of profound poverty, and it is just that success that gives rise to advanced poverty. It is the accomplishment of unquestionable comfort and security that has all but paralyzed our capacity to help and to be helped and so to have part in the fullness of life. Advanced poverty, one might say, is a radically aggravated and universalized form of the condition of the rich of which the Bible speaks’ (106). Advanced poverty actually exacerbates brute poverty by its sheer eradicability. It is no longer a ‘sign of human frailty’ but a scandal (104). What Borgmann points out in this chapter is that poverty is an inescapable dimension of human experience. You don’t transcend it merely by escaping brute poverty – you escape into a more rarified, refined, and crueler iteration of it.
Ch. 7, ‘Courage and Fortitude’, offers some reflections on what to do about advanced poverty. Borgmann commends the cultivation of the habit of resistance to technological culture. This is not resistance to a physical enemy, as with courage, but to a moral one, which requires fortitude. We are required to practice gratitude and above all celebration, which are best done in the context of focal things and focal practices. Crucial quote from pp. 114-115:
‘Our morally crucial circumstances are the exact mirror image of those that made for martyrs. Where theirs were overt, ours are concealed; where theirs were mortal to their bodies, ours are lethal to the soul; and where theirs tore them our of their normal life, ours channel our lives within the unquestioned banks of the technological culture: You come home from work, frazzled and spent. You walk into the kitchen and are not surprised that the children have left already and your spouse is not yet home. You find yourself walking to the refrigerator; you take what you like most and put it in the microwave. You stare at the paper on the kitchen table; it’s Wednesday, your favorite TV show is on, followed by a game of the home team. Your pulse quickens a little. The show is good, your spouse comes home, you exchange a few words, the game is boring, you move to the den to do an overdue memo on the computer. But first you check your e-mail, the latest news, you happen on the ESPN website. They offer you a video game, you play it for a while, your spouse is going to bed. You decide to call it day….Has this been an un-Christian evening? You have not coveted your neighbor’s spouse, you have not stolen anything, you have not ordered anyone around. What you have done seems unexceptional. There were moments of a pleasant sort of freedom when you were able to eat what you liked at the time you liked, while watching a program you liked. There were moments of mild excitement when you anticipated the game or started to play the video game. Sullenness may have overtaken you in the end, but at least you did not have to presume on anyone’s time or attention….This sort of retreat to a cocoon of autonomy has been spreading enormously in the last generation as Robert Putnam has shown so impressively and depressingly. Yet a life without grace and gratitude is unchristian, not in this failing or that, but from the groundup. It has become incapable of redemption. This is not an all-or-nothing affair, of course. But the raising specter of irredemability is stalking all of us’.
Ch. 8, ‘The Culture of the Word and the culture of the table’ offers final parting shots at the device paradigm and its resolute hostility to the economy of grace and gratitude. ‘A culture informed by the device paradigm is deeply inhospitable to grace and sacrament. The productive side of technology is an enterprise of conquering and controlling reality. The notions of human incompleteness and deficiency that signify a primal condition for the advent of grace are mere grist for technological mills. On the side of consumption, the paradigmatic object is the instantaneously and easily available commodity. The notion that some opus, properly operatum, some thing, properly done, could exert power overus rather than our controlling it is foreign to the culture of consumption’ (126). To make a technological culture more hospitable to word and sacrament is not primarily to sensitize people to these things, as by a process of re-education; rather it is to relearn the art of celebration. This not primarily about self-gratification, but of discipline. ‘we need to acquire and bring along…a sense of discipline and excellence when it comes to celebration’ (127).
Borgmann’s central claim in this book is that technology has created not just an array of machines and processes, but a culture defined and reified by practices and a corresponding ‘social imaginary’, to use Charles Taylor’s phrase, which ‘seems to render Christianity superfluous and irrelevant’ (7). If Christianity is to recover in the contemporary age, it must be through steady resistance and counter-practice, the persistent crossing of ‘moral thresholds that ‘are so high and hard that few of us cross them. Those are the thresholds of unencumbered self-determination, of seductive promises, of self-indulgence, and of freedom from accountability’ (116). This requires the cultivation not so much of the virtue of courage, which is the appropriate virtue in the face of physical danger, but of fortitude. In order to do this, we must also understand the character of the technological culture, which is invisible and must be unearthed archeologically – ‘Fundamental theology today must be a theology of technology, the successor to medieval natural theology’ (81).
Ch. 1, ‘The Invisibility of Contemporary Culture’, alerts us to the fact that the present technological culture is invisible in the ways in which it ‘interpellates’ or positions us. Products and processes have through technological refinement acquired the status of the ‘device’. The device occurs when machinery substitutes for process and the resulting product is made into a commodity. Where the device becomes a distinctive cultural pattern, a basic way that we interface with the social world, the ‘device paradigm’ emerges (see 122). Its basic characteristics are instantaneity and the illusion of limitlessness. Borgmann indicates that advertising takes a particularly prominent place in a culture saturated by the device paradigm. In such a culture, ‘focal things and practices are the crucial counterforces…They contrast with technology without denying it, and they provide a standpoint for a principled and fruitful reform of technology. Generally, a focal thing is concrete and of commanding presence [he describes this in ch. 2 – JW]. A focal practice is the decided, regular, and normally communal devotion to a focal thing’ (22, see also 31). The invisibility of the device paradigm and technological culture is such that their problematic nature do not emerge clearly until the solution is presented and practiced. The focal thing and practice are strong enough counterweights to alternatively interpellate the person who has been otherwise situated by the device paradigm.
Ch. 2, ‘The Moral Significance of Material Culture’, distinguishes between two kinds of ‘things or reality’ – ‘commanding reality’ and ‘pliable or disposable reality’ (28). To get at this distinction, Borgmann gives the example of a musical instrument and a stereo system. A traditional musical instrument is a highly concrete material object, likely made from precious wood or metal, potentially transmitted through generations, and which must be mastered ‘through endless and painstaking practice’ (29). The stereo, by contrast, ‘produces music as well, or, in fact, much better, i.e., with the supernatural sonority and consistency that no live performance can sustain and with a range in the kinds of music that would require a standing army of virtuosi and virtuousae were it to be humanly available to a listener’s call and beckon’. Yet it is not a commanding reality – it demands little of us to master its use, nor do we feel appreciation for it the way we do a masterful musician. ‘We respect a musician, we own a stereo’. The movement from live performance to perfectly captured and reproduced sonority is part and parcel with the inauguration of modernity – the ‘promise of disburdenment and enrichment’ (30) – in short, the promethean and ultimately illusory promise of autonomy. The stereo participates in the device paradigm – it is an artifact that invites consumption. The instrument is a ‘thing’ in Borgmann’s specialized sense – something which ‘has an intelligible and accessible character and calls forth skilled and active human engagement’ (31).
Ch. 3, ‘Communities of Celebration’ argues that technology, as the chief social force in late modernity that retains the confidence of the public, limits the possibility of celebration by making a strong distinction between public and private in both an economic and a social sense. He argues, similarly to Richard John Neuhaus, that the public sphere is ‘naked’ and hence ‘both hypertrophied and atrophied, both excessively developed in its sheer physical presence and devoid of intrinsic or final dignity, bereft of celebration and festivity’. Public space is concerned with production, and consumption now occurs in the private realm. In the modern context, individual prosperity and liberty increased to the point where ‘communal ties came to be seen as burdens. Consumption is the imperious and unencumbered enjoyment of goods or commodities’ (40-1). In this realm we prescind not only from the anonymous public but ‘from the judgments of our friends, parents, and spouses too. Ultimately, the realm of privacy is in each case occupied by one consumer’ (41). The technological society in this sense is stable, but ‘it is shallow, too, having lost dimensions of life that we used to value’ (44). Even ostensibly in public, because of commercialization, we are alone – ‘even when people are out in the open and in the public realm, one prominent way in which they celebrate a public event is to buy something that they can possess individually and take home’ (45). Borgmann urges that ‘it is simply the case that most people in this country find their deepest orientation in religion. As members of the national community we ought to affirm this devotion explicitly. As long as we officially ignore it, our public life will remain empty’ (53). Churches need to contribute to this revitalization of public culture by learning ‘to be genuine communities of celebration’ (54).
Ch. 4, ‘Contingency and Grace’ argues that the extension of technology beyond the realm of liberation from hard labor has made it difficult for moderns to experience grace. ‘The technological liberation from toil and misery was then and is still being regarded as freeing a space and the time for human flourishing. What has most always been overlooked is the fact that technology has not only made room for pleasure but has also invaded and occupied the liberated space and has impressed its particular shape on our typical enjoyments….The canonical response to commodities, finally, is consumption. Thus the join effects of mechanization, commodification, and consumption transformed traditional cultures from the ground up….The effect of this campaign was to constrict actual grace in its personal and real variants. Coaxing children to learn an instrument and prevailing on musicians to convene for domestic celebrations requires grace on our part. But making music transforms us into recipients as well as bearers of grace as when a fine trio provokes delight and gratitude….All this has been greatly reduced and often eliminated through the devices of radio, stereo, and television’ (76-7). Again, the character of the device is the ‘semblance of transparaent omniscience and omnipresnece’ – in a word, instantaneity. ‘Things no longer occupy a place and take their time’ (77). Borgmann insists that the only way for the genuine character of the gospel to break through in our lives is to get back to the root of the promise of technology – to ameliorate trouble for us. Technology cannot deliver us in the way we want it to – and often creates greater problems than we had without it. We need to recover the ability to distinguish between ‘trouble we reject in principle but accept in practice and trouble we accept in practice and in principle. When cancer strikes or a car crashes, we should resist the uncomprehending anger that rises from the culture of transparency and control and instead pray for the grace that allows us to accept what has come our way’ (79).
Ch. 5, ‘Power and Grace’ points out that technological culture is groundless – it has no end in mind other than the promotion of itself. It can answer instrumental questions, but not ultimate ones – ‘if in those cases we persist in asking what those endeavors and devices are for, we will again be finally referred to the foreground and center of commodities available for consumption’ (84). Yet this ‘quotidianity of modern life’ is unquestioned, precisely because ‘from the start it was systematically designed to be unproblematic, to be free of insecurity, of challenges, demands, or conflicting creeds, of pain and misery, of confinement, or toil’ (85). Technological culture in fact shows itself most clearly where it fails, namely where suffering and death overtake us. ‘To suffer misery is no longer to be reminded of one’s fundamental incompleteness and incapacity, but to be scandalized at the senseless remnant of a time long gone’ (85). Our poverty is no longer material, but in the depth and meaning of things. Commodities remove our awareness of the things themselves and ‘obviate the exercise of my more profound mental and physical capacities; they actually repel them; my best capabilities must atrophy, and my life will be terribly diminished’ (87). Human frailty in the modern era is manifest in ‘a crippling of our most profound capabilities and consequently a deprivation of things in their own right and depth. To be saved, accordingly, may involve the recovery of one’s capacity for the fullness of nature, of art, and for the pretechnological things and practices of daily life that lie half-buried under the surfeit of consumption’ (87). Here Borgmann distinguishes between two different kinds of power with regard to our use of things: ‘regardless’ power and ‘careful’ power. Regardless power is associated with commodificication – the inattention to the variety and commanding presence of things themselves. Careful power, by contrast, is associated with focal things and practices – where I am attentive to detail and to process. ‘Nature is present in its own right and beckons me to respond in the fullness and oneness of my bodily and spiritual faculties’ (89). There is this powerful quote at the end of the chapter:
‘If the time has now come to accept more fully what all along has been ours, it is still true that for a long time to come technology will constitute the common rule of life. The Christian reaction to that rule should not be rejection but restraint. Technology ought to be revoked as the dominant way of taking up with the world and relegtated to securing the margins and underpinnings of our lives. Within that environment we must make a clearing for the celebration of the Word of God. But since technology as a way of life is so pervasive, so well entrenched, and so concealed in its quotidianity, Christians must meet the rule of technology with a deliberate and regular counterpractice….Therefore a radical theology of technology must finally become a practical theology, one that first makes room and then makes way for a Christian practice. Here we must consider again the ancient senses of theology, the senses that extend from reflection to prayer. We must also recover the ascetic tradition of practice and discipline and ask how the ascesis of being still and solitary in meditation is related to the practice of being communally engaged in the breaking of the bread. The passage through technology discloses a new or an ancient splendor in ascesis. There is no duress or denial in ascetic Christianity. ON the contrary, liberating us from the indolence and shallowness of technology, it opens to us the festive engagement with life’ (94).
In Ch. 6, ‘Liberty, Festivity, and Poverty’, Borgmann distinguishes between three different kinds of poverty – ‘advanced poverty’, ‘brute poverty’, and ‘biblical poverty’, which holds the former two together. In late modernity, advanced poverty is the characteristic of most westerners, ironically brought into being by technology itself which brought us out of the experience of brute poverty. ‘Technology is the systematic eradication of profound poverty, and it is just that success that gives rise to advanced poverty. It is the accomplishment of unquestionable comfort and security that has all but paralyzed our capacity to help and to be helped and so to have part in the fullness of life. Advanced poverty, one might say, is a radically aggravated and universalized form of the condition of the rich of which the Bible speaks’ (106). Advanced poverty actually exacerbates brute poverty by its sheer eradicability. It is no longer a ‘sign of human frailty’ but a scandal (104). What Borgmann points out in this chapter is that poverty is an inescapable dimension of human experience. You don’t transcend it merely by escaping brute poverty – you escape into a more rarified, refined, and crueler iteration of it.
Ch. 7, ‘Courage and Fortitude’, offers some reflections on what to do about advanced poverty. Borgmann commends the cultivation of the habit of resistance to technological culture. This is not resistance to a physical enemy, as with courage, but to a moral one, which requires fortitude. We are required to practice gratitude and above all celebration, which are best done in the context of focal things and focal practices. Crucial quote from pp. 114-115:
‘Our morally crucial circumstances are the exact mirror image of those that made for martyrs. Where theirs were overt, ours are concealed; where theirs were mortal to their bodies, ours are lethal to the soul; and where theirs tore them our of their normal life, ours channel our lives within the unquestioned banks of the technological culture: You come home from work, frazzled and spent. You walk into the kitchen and are not surprised that the children have left already and your spouse is not yet home. You find yourself walking to the refrigerator; you take what you like most and put it in the microwave. You stare at the paper on the kitchen table; it’s Wednesday, your favorite TV show is on, followed by a game of the home team. Your pulse quickens a little. The show is good, your spouse comes home, you exchange a few words, the game is boring, you move to the den to do an overdue memo on the computer. But first you check your e-mail, the latest news, you happen on the ESPN website. They offer you a video game, you play it for a while, your spouse is going to bed. You decide to call it day….Has this been an un-Christian evening? You have not coveted your neighbor’s spouse, you have not stolen anything, you have not ordered anyone around. What you have done seems unexceptional. There were moments of a pleasant sort of freedom when you were able to eat what you liked at the time you liked, while watching a program you liked. There were moments of mild excitement when you anticipated the game or started to play the video game. Sullenness may have overtaken you in the end, but at least you did not have to presume on anyone’s time or attention….This sort of retreat to a cocoon of autonomy has been spreading enormously in the last generation as Robert Putnam has shown so impressively and depressingly. Yet a life without grace and gratitude is unchristian, not in this failing or that, but from the groundup. It has become incapable of redemption. This is not an all-or-nothing affair, of course. But the raising specter of irredemability is stalking all of us’.
Ch. 8, ‘The Culture of the Word and the culture of the table’ offers final parting shots at the device paradigm and its resolute hostility to the economy of grace and gratitude. ‘A culture informed by the device paradigm is deeply inhospitable to grace and sacrament. The productive side of technology is an enterprise of conquering and controlling reality. The notions of human incompleteness and deficiency that signify a primal condition for the advent of grace are mere grist for technological mills. On the side of consumption, the paradigmatic object is the instantaneously and easily available commodity. The notion that some opus, properly operatum, some thing, properly done, could exert power overus rather than our controlling it is foreign to the culture of consumption’ (126). To make a technological culture more hospitable to word and sacrament is not primarily to sensitize people to these things, as by a process of re-education; rather it is to relearn the art of celebration. This not primarily about self-gratification, but of discipline. ‘we need to acquire and bring along…a sense of discipline and excellence when it comes to celebration’ (127).
February 20, 2015
Albert Borgmann does an excellent job of demonstrating how the rise of technology and its offspring, consumer culture and commodification has evaporated a sense of the sacred from life and broken down social bonds. That is the central message and the best out of the book. For instance, the dinner table, a "shadow" of the Lord's Table, has been abandoned in our society today. Families do not eat together (my family and I watch the news when we eat!) and even the preparation of the meal, which can be a source of great joy as family or friends peel the vegetables, fry the chicken, stir the sauce, etc...has been replaced by quick and convenient "fixes" like frozen pizza popped in the oven.
Borgmann's discussion of technology is overly broad - he does mention such things as transportation technologies and he interacts with critiques of the technological culture such as Harvey Cox and Robert Bellah, but I think Borgmann should have been more particular. The Internet and its impact on society is neglected. I don't think the Christian response comes out as well as the subtitle suggests and Borgmann, a philosopher, makes far more use out of philosophy than he does theology.
Overall, the first third and the last chapter are what I appreciated best. Borgmann's identification of the problems posed by technology are good but his responses to those problems were not as compelling.
Borgmann's discussion of technology is overly broad - he does mention such things as transportation technologies and he interacts with critiques of the technological culture such as Harvey Cox and Robert Bellah, but I think Borgmann should have been more particular. The Internet and its impact on society is neglected. I don't think the Christian response comes out as well as the subtitle suggests and Borgmann, a philosopher, makes far more use out of philosophy than he does theology.
Overall, the first third and the last chapter are what I appreciated best. Borgmann's identification of the problems posed by technology are good but his responses to those problems were not as compelling.
August 4, 2011
I have to admit that this is a very powerful and persuasive collection of Borgmann's essays. "Courage and fortitude" and "The culture of the word and the culture of the table" are the two essays I love the most. Both showed us how we could resist the ruling device paradigm and make room for grace in our lives.
It is not enough to say technology is a two-edged sword. Deep understanding and critical examination of our current human conditions are crucial for us to break the spell of technology. This book is a must read if you don't want to conform:) The language could be better, though; a little bit too dry for me to read. I dozed off a couple of times while reading this book:)
It is not enough to say technology is a two-edged sword. Deep understanding and critical examination of our current human conditions are crucial for us to break the spell of technology. This book is a must read if you don't want to conform:) The language could be better, though; a little bit too dry for me to read. I dozed off a couple of times while reading this book:)
July 4, 2024
This book made some profound points about the relationship of technology to our culture. It also makes points about how our culture around food and reading connects to liturgical practice. The author uses the term "grace" expansively in the text and also appears to substitute "culture of celebration" for "worship." Both of these expansions cause me to struggle a bit in understanding his points.
Overall reading this helped to clarify my thinking on some of these points, but I think that some of my answers on the relationships among Christianity, technology, and culture are ultimately going to be quite different from what the author proposes. In addition to the points given above I'm especially cautious about ecumenism being expanded beyond the boundaries of the church and the idea of lowering the wall of separation between church and state.
Overall reading this helped to clarify my thinking on some of these points, but I think that some of my answers on the relationships among Christianity, technology, and culture are ultimately going to be quite different from what the author proposes. In addition to the points given above I'm especially cautious about ecumenism being expanded beyond the boundaries of the church and the idea of lowering the wall of separation between church and state.
February 24, 2021
Second time to read and still complicated. But the surface I was able to scratch was very thought-provoking. Major take-away was a call to celebration in word and table, pursuing relational significance rather than mechanized convenience consumption that impoverishes our souls. Also helped me identify the stress caused by failure of my devices, a stress I don’t feel when overpowered or overwhelmed in the greatness of God’s creation.
May 23, 2024
It’s hard to find its voice hidden behind the ponderous philosophy. It doesn’t have a clear connected narrative, but it still was reasonably poignant about modern digital culture having no space for Christianity. Its solutions of less so there is space for spiritual growth is fleshed out better in more recent works. I’m glad I finished it cause it felt like a workout.
February 2, 2020
A Little Scattershot but Meaningful
It took more effort than it should have to follow his line of reason in the first half. But his idea is great: the device paradigm is stunting our deep human engagement and would be remedied by reverence for the sacred, respect for the rituals of literacy & communal eating, and discipline in celebration.
It’s a tough slog but contains some gold.
It took more effort than it should have to follow his line of reason in the first half. But his idea is great: the device paradigm is stunting our deep human engagement and would be remedied by reverence for the sacred, respect for the rituals of literacy & communal eating, and discipline in celebration.
It’s a tough slog but contains some gold.
May 18, 2022
It was okay. I like a lot of his ideas, but I feel like he made it more complicated than it needed to be, and made it hard to follow his arguments in the process. Great analogies, I'll definitely refer back to them going forward!
June 6, 2023
Power Failure is a thought provoking book on how to live an authentic Christian life in the age of technology, formatted in several essays. It is not perfect, but it certainly gets the discussion rolling.
November 10, 2020
Really good.
April 25, 2020
Interesting philosophical book on technology. It is more of a philosophical book than a theological book. Still, the ideas expounded are interesting and helpful for understanding more about technology and our modern culture. The two main, repeated ideas throughout the book are the pervasiveness of the device paradigm and the need for focal practices and focal things to counter it. It wasn't the most life changing book, and I suspect I missed some nuances of what he was saying, but it was helpful to read it nonetheless.
September 17, 2011
These essays by Borgmann hint at much more, but never seem to get there. I wanted to get access to his ideas about technology and faith, but this book is not the place to start for that. Instead it feels you are entering into an argument already underway and one that his prose does little to make more accessible.
December 10, 2016
Some profound thoughts to be mined in here. Having re-read many of the essays, I love how the endings of each essay grip you and tie into the following ones. Combine this book with a reading of Transforming Our Days and Living into Focus and you're primed for a new paradigm of focal living and practice.
Want to read
August 18, 2009reading around it as it is 130 pages of essays. Much easier reading than his other book and filling in some more context.
July 12, 2011
I think that the concepts in his book are really great. The writing, though, seems hard to follow (jargon), and I found myself putting more energy into it than I was getting out.
April 23, 2021
Viena centrinių knygų norintiems suprasti, kaip technologijos veikia šiuolaikinę kultūrą ir kokį atsaką į tai gali duoti krikščionybė!
February 26, 2017
Challenging reading, and as good an explanation of the importance of community in spiritual life as any this introvert has ever come across.
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