Christianity in the Technological Society

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris, for an intellectually stimulating discussion today and an interesting discussion and an applicable discussion with a first-time guest we have with us, Kriptos.

Kriptos, how are you doing?

I'm doing very well, John. Thanks for having me on.

Now, that's not your real name.

No, it is not. No, and actually my wife was making fun of it for me yesterday, so she was like laughing.

At.

I think I could probably do a whole podcast episode of just pulling up my follows and mentions and just letting my wife make fun of us all for our online names.

So yeah, some people, I should probably just get this out of the way, some people might be confused by this. I've never had an anon or an anonymous person who wishes to remain anonymous on the podcast before.

And so people can look at, they can find your substack seekinghiddenthing, is it seekinghiddenthing .com?

Seekingthehiddenthing .com.

Seekingthehiddenthing .com. Seekingthehiddenthing .com. And they can go to at underscore Kriptos on X, formerly Twitter, but they will not find out exactly who you are. And I know that that alone is a little bit controversial now, I guess, on X, like pseudonymous accounts.

So I'll just give you the floor on why you wish to remain anonymous. I think it's fairly obvious and defensible, but what's the reason for you?

There's actually two reasons. One is it's interesting because when I write pieces on my substack, I also record them. And so I didn't always, and one of my subscribers suggested that I do that because I tend to write long pieces and he said, Hey, I don't have time to read this, but if you don't mind recording it, then I can listen to it in the car on the way to work.

And I thought, well, that's a really good idea because that's kind of what Charles Haywood does with his book reports or his book reviews, right? He records them. And that's how I interacted with his material as well.

I thought it was a great idea. So I've been going back and recording some of my old articles and I just did one on Carl Schmidt, the crisis of parliamentary democracy. So for me on a personal level, I do it in part because this is what my wife asked me.

To do.

And it's also smart. I live in the frozen North and political speech is one thing. And I also have a business so that's what actually pays the bills. And I have a diverse clientele of people of different political persuasions.

And there is an open question of whether my political views, I don't generally talk politics with my clients. So there's a question if somebody decided to out me and my political views became wide known, would that detrimentally impact my ability to provide for my family?

So that's on the one sort of practical level. So honoring my wife's wishes and just being practical about it. There may come a time where I can do this for a living and it's not a worry about having my name out there.

But it's interesting. Carl Schmidt made the observation that speech is always drawn to power. So he says that the majority will always pressure the minority into bending their opinion to harmonize with the majority.

And he says, you may disagree that you actually have free speech. He says, but you don't. He says, and the sign that you don't is that your vote is a secret vote. He says, if you really had free speech, he says, your vote would be open.

But he says, you know that that's a lie because you know that if your vote was open, somebody would be pressuring you to vote in the correct way. And according to power and the majority, you would be pressured to vote for the majority.

So to maintain the authenticity of your vote and to secure your own opinion about the vote, you do it in secret. And so in that regard, the only opinion that can be thought of as being truly free from the demands of power, and even then there is some question, is truly an anonymous opinion.

And the founders basically felt the same way too. I mean, you look at most of the early dialogue with the founders was all done anonymously in op-eds. And now some people knew who the various names were, but it didn't necessarily have to be that way.

But they wrote pseudonymously in part for that very reason, because the kind of things that they were saying were dangerous. And then they would fall victim to the pressures of power to conform to the majority.

And so that's Carl Schmitt's observation about the, he was making observations about the contradictions within democracy in terms of democracy being built on the foundation of an open public debate. And he just basically says, well, it's just an illusion.

He says, it's not really the case because power always tries to conform the minority to the majority opinion. So there you go. That's the brief defense of why anonymity is a good thing.

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we're not here to talk about this subject, but I will say for people who might be new to the podcast, I've told this many times before on the podcast, but I actually used a pseudonymous name years ago to write a book.

And it was I was actually warned by people that I respected. I was going to put my name on it. And they said, you better not do that. Like, if you want a job in academia, then this could threaten that.

And so I use the name Joseph J. You can go check out the book. I'm trying to remember the name of it now, Sacred Conviction. The South's, I think, fight for biblical authority is the subtitle. Anyway, I mean, you can already tell from the title that that's probably a book that would get you canceled in certain settings.

And anyway, I'm the worst at using pseudonyms. I just like, you know, then I went to like my personal Facebook. I'm like, everyone should get this book that I didn't just write. No, no. And so there are some people years later who thought they had doxxed me and all this stuff.

And I'm like, I kind of already like put enough out there. I kind of doxxed myself. And that's the difficulty with this, is that in a time when telling the truth is that you could be punished for it and, you know, it's a threat to your livelihood of your family, then you kind of have this catch 22 where if you're someone who, let's say, years ago, probably someone like yourself and I know many others would have been part of the ruling class or the influential class in this country, you would have a job perhaps at a university or a seminary.

And the people, the smart guys like on our side, I should say more conservative side, like they actually can't get jobs like and if they do, they have to be muzzled. And if they decide not to be muzzled, it threatens their family.

And if they decide to go pseudonymous, how do they advertise what they're saying? So people know. So it's like this whole, this whole thing. But so anyway, I empathize with it. I understand. And I've been interacting or at least reading some of your stuff for I don't know, I think I've known about you for at least like a year or two.

And I've been doing this since I think 2021.

So but yeah, that probably is accurate. Yeah, yeah, because I think Jay Burden and there's some other guys, I know you're sort of in a network and I've I've listened to like where you've been interviewed on other shows.

I think that's mainly where I started hearing you. So anyway, we're going to have our own show here and talk about stuff that you've talked about before. And it's I heard the Chronicles podcast where you talked about this.

I don't know if you've said anything about it in other places, but we're gonna talk about the technological society and really like big picture here. What I want to do for people who are listening is I want to take a bird's eye view of one aspect of modernity.

That is the increase in technology. We're using technology right now. You're using it. I'm using it. People who are listening to this are using technology and we just take it for granted. It doesn't even occur to us sometimes like how different the world was before, like even if you watch a movie from the 1980s, let's say, and you just notice that like, hey, you couldn't do instant communication.

You had to call the restaurant someone was at if you wanted to try to track them down, if you needed to get a hold of them. I mean, there's there's so many things that have changed even in a period of 40 years that are just that are huge.

And forget about going back 100 years or 200 years. So, you know, what has this done to us? What should we be careful about? And Jacques Allul was one of the critics. We'll talk about him a bit of the Technological Society.

James Burnham with the managerial revolution as well. And so I'm going to just kind of let you take it away in any direction you want. But first question here, why or I guess I will put it this way. What is technology when we talk about that?

Technology as a Way of Thinking and the Ambivalence of Technique

OK, that and that's that's that's good that you ask that, because I think that was probably the way that I was going to go for your audience to the hardest thing for, I think, people to that. There's two main things that if people want to take away from this, the first is that technology or the the the technological society and technique is the word that that Allul uses, because there's a continuum that you move from tool using.

And Allul would argue that we're we're a tool using species as human beings. So we use tools. But there's a difference between the way that we used to use tools and our interaction with tools today. And what Allul argues is that technique and the technological society is less about the actual tools than it is about a way of thinking about the world.

And he says that this way of thinking in the technological society, and that's part of the transformation from being tool using people to living in a technological society, is that all solutions to every problem become technical.

There is really only one answer allowed. Now, you might have variations within that, but all the solutions for every problem become some manner of technical solution. And it is the dominant way of thinking about everything, every problem.

And if you might say it's the dominant ideology of our age, and that is technique. And so people don't really think about it. But that's really what binds, you know, when you talk about the the uniparty, you know, the unifying state, why is it that is business woke?

Why are the churches going woke and all these types of things? Well, it's because they all run on the same basic operating system. They are all think the same way fundamentally. And you might argue that all our conservative religious leaders don't, but they do.

Right. If you run a mega church, you're a technician. And that's just the bottom line. Right. And so and fundamentally. Technique is part of the the whole movement and mindset of progressivism and sort of technique is what gives progressivism its its impetus and its legs.

So that's the first part is to say that technology is a way of thinking about the world. And that's the first thing I think if your people can and we can maybe dive deeper into that. And then the second thing that we would have to I think that's important to come away with, if you don't come away with anything else, is to change how you think of technique and technology.

And we can get more into like what exactly is a technique. But to understand that. Technique and technology is neither good. Nor bad, nor neutral. Technique is ambivalent, it does not care. And so you have to understand the technique, every technique, every technology that gets introduced, every quote unquote solution to a problem that is a technical solution will come with good things and it will come with bad things like ills that negative impacts.

And the two always come together. So whatever gains or benefits you get from technology will come with a certain price to be paid. There are certain ill effects that will come with it. And they both come together and there's nothing you can do about it.

You cannot plan ahead of time because certain effects will be unknown. And generally, the benefits are front loaded and the ills that result come later after most of the benefits have been accrued. And so what Allul argues is that you have to understand that the introduction of a technique or technology will have effects regardless.

So it doesn't matter. You could say, well, like, for example, the favorite example is one of a gun, right? Well, what really matters, a gun is neutral. It's just like a lump of metal in your hand. What really matters is how you use it.

And Allul would say that's absolutely incorrect, right? He would argue that that gun has a certain purpose. And that purpose is to fire projectiles at a high velocity. Well, those high velocity projectiles, they will do good things.

You can use them to protect, but those high velocity projectiles will also be used to do ill. And those two come together and it does not matter. Now, would you prefer that we use them for better things?

Yes. But you are never going to escape the ills that come from the introduction of firearms into a society. It's just you can't do it. There is nothing you can do to prevent the ills from coming into.

The only thing that Allul argues in the end that you can do is you can't introduce new technologies to protect against the old technologies because those new technologies come with their own sets of goods and ills.

The only thing you can ultimately do is to apply moral, to subordinate the technology morally and just simply say no. But the problem with technology is that it's very powerful. So people introduce them and use them because they allow you to manipulate reality successfully, both immaterial reality, like human populations.

But they also are very, very good at making people money. And so as a result, you can say, well, we're going to subordinate these technologies. We're going to say no. But somebody will say, hey, well, why did everybody say no to that?

I can use this thing to gain power. Everybody else said no to guns. I'm going to like, yeah, let's use these guns and we can rule the world and make a bucket load of money. And that's one of the fundamental problems that you have with technology is that and this is really what allowed the technological world to happen is that it overcame the religious restraints, largely through Christendom, the religious restraints that held back technological development.

And that was part of the merchant classes pushing through and overthrowing the old order of nobility in the church towards the making of money, the pursuit of knowledge and the introduction of technique.

And then once you've done that and you've shaken off those moral restraints, it just basically allows it to go on without restraint. And so now basically every problem is a technical problem. It's a lot of words to say it, but that's kind of.

So those are your two big ideas that technology is a way of thinking and technology.

Doesn't care. Could you give an example, like for someone who has a middle class corporate job and like just paint the picture of their life from start to finish, right? They get up, they go to work when they're at work.

They you know, they're a manager in some factory or their engineer or whatever. And then they come home and then there's diversion to try to kind of distract them from the problems technology has brought up just just to make it very concrete for people who actually live this life.

Many middle class Americans do in the suburbs, especially so that they know that that's that that's not the way humans have always lived. And that's still in some ways not exactly the way people live in more rural environments.

No.

From Organic Craft to Managerial Technocracy

So probably the best way to do this is to draw a contrast between the older way of using tools and way of living and the new way of and the technical system. So let's go back to a pre-industrial world.

OK, you're a lord, you have an estate, you have all these different functions. Let's take, for example, this is the one I commonly use. You have a stable of animals. You've got your horses for your nights.

You've got probably some grazing animals and so forth. And you have a staff of people in charge of them. Right. At the top of that, you would have the stable master. Now, he's probably not a nobility or if he is, he'll be a minor noble.

But the stable master is is somebody who would have grown up in the stable. So he begins as a stable boy, maybe as a squire to a knight. He learns to to handle the animals, to love it. But a lot of this knowledge is being passed on to him apprentice style.

So it's all part of memory. It's just the way. And so one person's memory, the cultural memory of the stable sort of there's there's rules. But sort of this is how we do things. This is how we don't do things.

And over time, he interiorizes these rules and he interiorizes the way of doing it. He learns how to care for the animals. He learns how to do it. And you could talk about this in a shop as an apprentice.

He learns how to make, you know, chairs or he learns how to to forge iron and all these types of things. So they're learning it intuitively. They're learning it. They're being shown how to do it. It's all embedded knowledge.

It's all organic. Eventually, what happens is that, you know, maybe the old stable master dies. He you know, and this guy has kind of risen up and then he's placed in charge. Now, this person is actually in charge and he's now bears personal responsibility.

But he's learned everything that needs to be known about the stables from the ground up organically. He's soaked in the culture. And this is the way that they manage the stable. So he then if something goes wrong with the animals, right, say a number of horses die and it's inexplicable.

He bears personal responsibility. The Lord holds him accountable. Maybe he loses his his position. His family is ruined. Maybe he even loses his life, you know, because of that. He bears personal responsibility for this.

And so in the older way, what was decisive was not the tool, but the skill of the craftsman. So you used a handful of tools and you used them in a variety of settings. And what made the tools work was not the tool itself, but was the skill of the craftsman.

And you could talk about it in terms of rules for, like, say, laws of a society. So you might have a social grouping. Let's say there's a number of rules and patterns within the stable and you might write them down.

These are the laws of the stable. But those rules are merely a shorthand for what everybody knows intuitively anyways in a society. But it's just kind of and this is kind of the way that, say, the Ten Commandments function.

They function in a cultural setting where everybody knows. So you have a small number of rules that get applied over a wide variety of situations. And the decisive thing is not the rule, but the wisdom of the person who understands the culture, understands the situation and then knows how to properly apply the rule, much like you would use a tool.

So that's kind of your relationship between all of your your basic sort of social tools in an organic setting. Now, then, what happens is in the in the transition. So we picture like a hard transition.

So the Lord, you know, calls up McKinsey and McKinsey and company send in a bunch of consultants. Right. And what they do, and this is kind of the Taylorism, the time and motion studies. They they come into the stables.

Right. They examine everything from top to bottom, every process, everything, the way that it's all done. And they come up then with a whole management plan, a set of policies and procedures for the working of the same.

So what they've done is they take this organic thing that lives in the lives of the stable hands, the stable master and the whole culture of the stable, and they abstract it and rationalize it and turn it into a set of policies and plans.

Now, if you want to discuss, if you want to improve things in the stable, you don't even need the stable. You can go and have a meeting in a camera. You don't even have to necessarily even be a stable match.

You can take all your information back to the offices in the city and you can sit around with with your consulting team and you can try to improve the processes of the stable. And then once you've refined them, you can then transport these to other stables and implement.

So what happens is now is no longer that the culture and the people in there, the decisive thing, the decisive thing becomes the plan, the abstracted set of policies and the rationale there. So but once you've also abstracted, now you can also do things like you can apply machines to the running of the stable.

So we think, OK, well, let's add a computer system in here to make sure that the feeding is more efficient for the animals. And so you introduce this idea of efficiency. You're looking for predictable outcomes.

You're looking to elevate the floor. So now you can hire people who maybe are not quite as competent, but you can hire more so you can expand it on scale because you can take people that are less competent and you can elevate them through training, through processes.

And you can do it the the you know, the Walmart way or you know what I mean. And so then you can implement this policy. So what happens is, is that the important thing becomes the training, the site or the the the policies, the procedures, the the equipment, the machines and the person is just really a fungible cog that can be swapped in and out as long as they can be trained into it.

And then so you get like managers and offices and really a manager is most often just a collection of of policies and procedures. So if there's something going wrong in the office, he goes away for training.

They bring in consultants or a lot of times even the process of improvement. You know, this idea of constant improvement is part of it all. So, you know, if there's something wrong, we bring in the consultants, we improve it, recycle it back.

And what often ends up happening is that the process of improvement becomes even more important than the results. And so you hear this in meetings all the time. It's important that we have good process in the meeting.

You know, and you think like, well, OK, but maybe the the whole process is a completely you know what show. But as long as we got good results, hey, that's a good thing. But the the technical mindset doesn't think that way.

They're worried about as long as the process is good, the result will take care of itself. So that's kind of your shift in mindset. Everything becomes abstracted. Every becomes rationalized. It becomes portable.

It becomes turned into into, you know, sort of objective written policies that then transcend and basically you don't really need. And you can see this in places like teaching, for example, like teaching.

You no longer are dependent upon the skill of the teacher. You just basically bring anyone of a certain minimum of intelligence in and you teach them all the methodologies and then you will produce consistent with all education results on the other end.

And so the real important things becomes not so much the quality of the person of the teacher, but the discussion becomes about what methods should we use to teach the kids? Does that difference then make sense to you?

Yeah. And if I could get your opinion on as to whether this applies, I think for this audience, especially to more of a ecclesiastical situation. So like I've actually had a weird kind of seminary experience.

I went to three different seminaries and most of my credits came from Southeastern and that's where I graduated from. But I did a semester at the master seminary. I did a bunch of Liberty Online stuff and I did an in-person course there.

And if I had to sum up kind of like like based on what you just said, like kind of like what what they graduate from those seminaries, because they're they're all a little different. There's all there's things that obviously are the same about them, but that they have their spin on things.

Like what would they do when they got into a church? Like you've been to the pastor factory, really, which is kind of how we treat seminaries. And and if you went to like TMS and I people I would try to do this so people don't get too offended.

Look, I I've you know what?

Don't be offended because the seminary that I went to, OK, it's much the same. And the approach is fairly similar.

So it's like, yeah, I don't know which one you went to. Maybe you'll blow your cover if you say.

But, you know, I probably shouldn't.

If I went to, you know, TMS my whole time, I'm going to come out of TMS probably going into a church thinking like I'm going to be biblical, like that would be the highlighted word. This is going to be biblical.

And you know, it's part of being biblical elders and a plurality of them. And it's going to be reformed in soteriology and it's going to be premillennial in its eschatology. And so there's sort of this like there's this list.

You might be able to add other things to it here and there. And there's there's certainly hidden things you don't realize that you pick up at these places. But you have your what I think you just described as like the process, the procedure, the it's like the factory setting.

Right. And then you go into some podunk town. That's nothing like Grace Community Church. Grace Community Church is a huge megachurch that it's attached to the seminary. And you try to like implement these policies.

And it doesn't necessarily it's not always suited. It's not always it doesn't always work. And the timing of it doesn't always work if you try to do it too quickly. So if if I but but you think this is just biblical, right?

If I went to SCBTS, which which is where I graduated from, you know, you're going to go into a church thinking like we're going to implement the Great Commission stuff here, which means we're going to have a diverse congregation.

It's going to look like revelation. And if we so you start changing policies to match that. Or if you're from Liberty, you know, it's more of like maybe I it's more broad, but it's probably like based on individual experience and personal relationship with Christ.

And so you're going to go to a church and you're going to try to change the settings of that church to conform to the factory settings that you were taught. Right. And so I think people can relate to that because there's been, especially since 2020, I would say a lot of people have realized that younger pastors, as the boomer generation is retiring, are coming in, wanting not not to be like the stable master you just described, to spend a long time really just learning the ways of the traditions of that particular stable and taking personal responsibility.

They're coming in as technicians. Is that a fair parallel?

Yeah, it's actually probably worse than that. Then we can we can really drop a black pill on your on your audience. But maybe that maybe this is the place to do it.

You can do it. Yeah, go for it.

OK, so that and I will get into trouble for saying this. You know, things like systematic theology are can be wonderful. Right. And and this is the thing about the policies and so forth of the the technical regime.

They are powerful. And that you and this is the thing that you have to realize is that because you can't say they're good or they're evil, they bring benefits. Right. So that you have to remember that that all of these techniques bring benefits.

But if you want to do the long and short of it, this idea that we have of systematic theology, I think about what we just described with the stable. Right. So you take scripture. Which is a living collection of stories and poems and letters and so forth.

And you're going to abstract it and rationalize it. Well, what have we done? We've basically taken systematic theology is basically sending in the McKinsey consultants in to have a look at the Bible and development.

Now you can talk about the Bible without ever having to actually open the Bible because you can talk about the theology as an abstraction separate from the scriptures itself or even from the actual direct theophany that underlies the scriptures.

Right. So you can you can make the case. And I've gotten into trouble for people just like they really react badly.

When you say that.

So there's on the one hand where for all the benefits of systematic theology, that systematic theology is like a policy manual for the Bible. So it's it's a form of the same kind of technologizing of the scriptures.

It just it is. And this is one of the things that a little says. He says, I'm not trying to be necessarily critical. I just want you to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. OK. So then there's the other thing in terms of how we interpret.

And this is how I was taught how to do it. So you use, quote unquote, critical methods. You're given a methodology hermeneutically. You follow these basic steps in terms of, you know, do the original language, do the historical study, do the form, critical studies, do all of the various studies.

And then when all of that is done, you will come up with the big idea of the text that then you can then transport into the future. And then we can apply that to the new setting. Right. Well, that's basically a technical approach.

You become a technician of the word. And most of us in our seminaries are taught to be technicians of the word in one degree or another. There's very few that learn how to do mystical interpretation of the scripture, allegorical interpretation of the scripture.

They just don't. Can I stop you right there?

And I want you to continue.

I know there's like all sorts of red lights going off and warning people listening right now. Oh, yeah. And I just want to say that. So. I think the expository what you're describing sounds to me like the sort of expository preaching or it could at least fit the expository preaching kind of brand where you do become this grammar expert who just a technologist of the word.

Yeah. Like here's what the nouns and the verbs and their relationship. And and you don't I've even heard people go to the extreme of saying like you shouldn't even apply the word like you should to the setting.

I mean, you're talking about an application, which but but but I mean, it's so narrow that it's just like I become I don't know, like an English like somebody who can explain what the Greek says to you in English.

So so anyway, carry on.

Yeah. So then then on the other level is the the whole thing of running churches. Right. So, you know, you take the Great Commission. Well, we need the church to grow. We want to bring in the unchurched.

And so then a lot of the the focus in our technological society becomes on what's the proper methodology for church growth. So, you know, you've got your various different types of models. You've got the seeker model.

You've got the small church or the the small group model. So you have all these different models and you're growing the church, but you're doing so using technical methods. Now, what is what is interesting in a sense of this way is that most people who go through the seminary process, by the time you get to seminary, you're working on your master's degree.

So who are your peers? Well, your peers are other people with master's degrees or beyond. Right. So it's your lawyers. It's your doctors. It's, you know, it's professors. Your your peers are the expert class.

And so your pastors come in and they're they're basically their ethos is this kind of professionalism that's built on smart policy, technical management. They're taught to be, in many places, technicians of the word.

They're they're they're taught a technical approach to understanding the script or understanding scripture and theology in in in a systematic approach and an abstract and rational approach to understanding the scriptures.

So they bring this basically in. And a lot of it you'll see, like, especially in this dynamic now you're getting in like the Southern Baptist congregate congregations and and so forth and others where you have many prominent members who are advocating what what we really need to do is just put this woke away and then allow the church to go back to normal.

And what they're basically saying is that we've got to put the crazies away so we can go back to a kind of technical management of the church to this sort of technocracy, this church's technocracy. And what people don't realize is that by and large, our churches have in many ways already capitulated to the fundamental operating system of the regime.

They just do so with a language of Bible, scripture and theology. But fundamentally, at a basic level, many of our leaders are essentially experts and technicians. They're part of the the technical classes in that regard.

And so this is one of the the the challenges that we face. You know, so, you know, the really the question is, like, what do you do about it in response is yeah, this is this is kind of where you're you're you're you're you're in your six hundred dollar question comes in.

This is sort of what do we do with the response? But this is kind of where we're at in a society. And a lot of it we've done it for. We thought we're really good. So, you know, in terms of the country, what we do to secure our liberty.

So we invited the managerial system in in terms of to secure our liberty or we're doing it to grow churches or we're doing it to advance medical science or we're doing it to enhance our business. And so we invite these technical means in.