I’ve read quite a bit of Patrick Deneen’s work, and I admire it for its bracing clarity. He rightly takes aim at the roots of the modern technological project and its call to “conquer nature” (Bacon) or for humans to become “masters and proprietors of nature” (Descartes, though similar sentiments can be found in Hobbes and Locke as well). This conquest was promoted as a way to overcome violence, unhappiness, and sometimes mortality itself. I agree with Deneen that in the infancy of our new millennium, the pathologies in this way of thinking are beginning to make themselves felt in environmental degradation, economic volatility and demographic imbalances that give silent testimony to the notion that whatever real advances it has secured on its way, the goal of “conquering nature” without qualification or constraint is a violent, and in a certain sense, both a cowardly and imprudent enterprise.
Yet I am deeply unconvinced by the defense of “tradition” by Deneen and others (e.g., Rod Dreher in his less compromising moments). Liberals are right to be suspicious of tradition that does not have to justify itself except as an inheritance, because some of what is inherited is indeed monstrously oppressive (yes, most certainly including racism, not educating or respecting women, et.al., but also some teachings about work and its purpose, etc.). What needs to be thought through is how to develop a basis of moral judgment for evaluating our common inheritance that moves neither towards a quasi-fideistic defense of tradition and precedent (which really just becomes an oppressive traditionalism), nor toward an exaltation of the desiring, interested self as the source and arbiter of all or orders of meaning and value, an exaltation that ultimately achieves a nasty, selfish, materialist parody of human freedom and equality that does not honor the “human” that precedes and conditions the call to freedom and equality alike.
These criteria of moral affirmation and judgment could take several possible forms. One, defended by a long line of English moralists from the Scottish Enlightenment to twentieth-century Christians like C.S. Lewis, calls for the recognition of a universal moral sense that issues in a universal code of moral duties evident from world history and personal observation. Our interventions in nature would support rather than subvert that frame. I share this goal, but when it is phrased crudely so that it invites universal empirical confirmation in history, it is presumptuous and misguided. I do not think this method will survive the historicist acid bath that surely awaits it if it dares offer itself for contemporary application. Nearly all cultures and historical epochs (and individual persons) uphold recurrent and persistent moral truths, but inevitably suppress and occasionally disdain others in the interests of power and domination, and many a gleeful postmodern will seize upon these variations to dismantle the claim to a necessary or ubiquitous universalism.
The more promising path, to my mind, is to proceed by way of aesthetics and anthropology. The desire for argument and indications of historical persistence and good consequences from a certain path of thinking will be respected; the desire for universal proof will not be honored, however, since it is one more symptom of the desire for mastery (i.e., “prove to me that what you claim is truly necessary and universal, and furthermore, that I risk nothing and gain everything by accepting your way of thinking before I take even a single step in its direction”).
The task will be to show that, as Rousseau and Hamann presciently understood in the mid-eighteenth century, the project of conquering nature is an enterprise of cumulative and consuming ugliness and existential despair. It presents itself as the sum of human desire, but after three centuries of so of frantic searching it is clear that as an ultimate ambition and preeminent rationale for human activity, it has only the power to seduce, not to fulfill. Even on its own terms, it is increasingly difficult to claim that nature can be conquered without destroying ourselves with it. In this way, the critique of unlimited technology does not proceed from a universal historical counterpoise, but from the failure of this project to deliver on its own terms.
Yet on its way through the modern age, the turn towards technology and its dissemination to the “small he’s” (and she’s) of the world has done much good to affirm the well-being and flourishing of human beings. The enemy is thus not technology and the investigation and application of its possibilities for lives well-lived, but the ugly dream of unlimited conquest that underwrites its many abuses and its increasingly oppressive, global sweep. An anthropology that placed technology in service of our desire for happiness, for beauty, and for full human flourishing could sustain itself and ourselves. This anthropology would affirm the egalitarian ethos and the affirmation of individual dignity in modernity (in which technology plays an important supporting role), but would affirm that these very goods, which remain fair criteria for judging the worth of both tradition and anti-tradition, demand that human beings become the masters of technology, rather than aspiring to be the master of nature itself. The legitimate sphere of human mastery is our own activity, including technological activity, not nature as a whole, as if we were divorced from it and did not depend on it. There are forms of technological investigation and intervention that diminish our humanity, and these must always be proportioned to the humanity they serve.
This way of thinking obviously lends itself to theological reflection as well as anthropology, and while it can be plausibly sustained on secular grounds, to my mind its aesthetic and moral fullness requires theology. More on that thought anon.
