Techne & Psyche
Dolores Brien has been weblogging again… great little essays, especially the one on George Gilder.
As a public intellectual George Gilder is on a par with Newt Gingrich but he’s interesting because he exemplifies two dominant strains characterisic of our technoscientific culture. First, he is only among the most recent, in that long tradition going back to the Middle Ages, to give a religious significance to scientific discovery and technological innovation. As David Noble notes in The Religion of Technology, they are driven, despite their apparent worldliness, “by distant dreams, spiritual yearnings for supernatural redemption.” Second, his writings and speeches expose that inclination beginning as far back as the Greeks to see in the principles governing the most significant or defining technologies of the time as the same principles by which every other aspect of human life is governed.