Updated 12/5/23
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The world of technology is not opposed to the world of spirit. But to the world of grace.
Between the dictatorship of technology and the technology of dictatorship, man no longer finds a crack through which he can slip away.
Man already possesses such power that no catastrophe is improbable.
When speaking of technology, the fool becomes excited, quivers, puffs up his chest, and drools.
The slave of the machine is less the worker and more the consumer.
Technological progress is driven by the urgent need to develop greater homicidal efficacy.
Photography turns events into anecdotes.
In the 1800s we witnessed the impact of science on religion; in the 1900s, the impact of technology on the imagination of idiots.
Mechanization coarsens and degrades because it leads man to believe he lives in an intelligible universe.
Technology does not fulfill man’s most enduring hopes, but cunningly mimics them.
Wouldn’t it be worth meditating on the moral and intellectual consequences likely caused by the availability of radio? Living in a continuous music recital as in a humid atmosphere, a thick fog of sound conducive to a certain stupor, a heavy, coarsened, dullness of spirit, the soul growing docile and desires unnatural.
To avoid contemplating the world described by science, man gets drunk on technology.
Stupidity is believing you can take a photograph of the place about which a poet sang.
The new atmosphere, the technological environment in which man is increasingly positioned, is revealed, little by little, to be an empty desert landscape where he loses all reason to live.
Yesterday, humanity was a man in a boat, lost without compass or oars, in a limitless sea. He did not know where to go, and even if he did, he could not get there. But the currents dragged him, the wind pushed him, and one day he would arrive at some reef, shipwrecked, or on some island, a patch of grass in the waves.
But now, if we imagine that same shoreless sea, and on it a ship, still without compass, but somehow unmoved by currents or winds, and with an engine that moves in any direction, it is not difficult to understand the desperation of its passengers, called, beckoned, seduced from all points of the horizon, but unable to choose and afraid of resigning themselves to monotonous circling. Or, perhaps they believe they are moving forward, ironically in perpetual immobility, which the absolute freedom of the ship and its absolute mobility make possible.
If man ever manages to fabricate a man, the mystery of man will not have been deciphered, but obscured.
Brief upheavals are enough to demolish what we’ve built up of our spirit; meanwhile, our natural baseness protects technological successes.
Dictatorship is the technification of politics.
Due to technological advances, the prophets of future catastrophes have resigned their posts to those who witness and announce them.
The technician rarely becomes aware of his misery. The scientist is usually aware of his own, but he remedies it with dimestore philosophies.
To suppose that the growing vulnerability of a world increasingly integrated by technology will not require total despotism is foolishness.
Photography murdered the imagination.
Modern man fears technology’s capacity to destroy, when what threatens him is its capacity to construct.
Man today does not live in space and time.
But in geometry and chronometers.
All technological progress is but a stage in the process of increasing tyranny.
He who invents a new machine invents for humanity a new form of enslavement.
Every decent person ends up regretting most technological advances of the last two centuries.
In the end, the intelligence that becomes lazy ends up abdicating to the technician.
As long as there is no technology of technology, the further development of technology only increases its danger.
Photography shows us how the imbecile sees the world.
Even the opponent of technology denounces its public but trivial outrages, more than its invisible but disastrous destruction. (As if the feverish migration of modern man, for instance, is disturbing because of traffic accidents.)
There is no assurance that what man invents will not kill him.
Let us not blame technology for the misfortunes caused by our failure to invent a technology of technology.
Rather than humanizing technology, the modern prefers to technify man.
It is less dangerous to hand over power to insane people than to technicians: from insane people, we can expect moments of lucidity.
Technology is not a democratic product, but the cult of technology, the veneration of its works, the faith in its eschatological triumph, these are the consequences of the democratic religion. Technology is the tool of democratic man’s deep ambition, his possession of the universe. Democratic man hopes technology will redeem him from sin, misfortune, boredom, and death. It matters little to him whether the innovations enrich his life or debase him.
Man can construct machines capable of virtually anything.
Except self-awareness.
Political failures cause less destruction than technological successes.
The technification of politics ends in massacres.
Technology wouldn’t be such a threat if manipulating it weren’t so simple for the imbecile and profitable for the thief.
He who does not tremble before a new invention does not know the history of the previous.
The arc of success common to the technological enterprise:
rapid initial rise, horizontal line, gradual decline, then unforeseen depths of failure.
Mechanization liberates first, then soon reaches a point where it enslaves.
Man’s three enemies are: the devil, the state, and technology.
The most notorious aspect of all modern enterprise is the discrepancy between the immense complexity of the technology and the insignificance of the final product.
In a civilized society, technicians would eat in the servant’s quarters.
The transcendent things of this world are those which transcend technology.
God invented tools, the devil machines.
The true driving force of technological development appears to be the proliferation of the tasteless. The flower without fragrance is its emblem.
Man no longer knows how to invent anything other than what will kill more efficiently or further degrade the world.
Through the predominance of technology, human ingenuity returns the world to its utilitarian form, imprisoning man in the habitat of the animal.
The liberation promised by every invention ends in the submission of the one who adopts it to the one who manufactures it.
The realization of the democratic principle demands a frenetic use of technology and the relentless industrial exploitation of the planet.
The “realism” of photography is false: it omits from the object its past, its future, and its transcendence.
Technicians are like worms that, without knowing how, produce silk. A healthy society will feed the technicians, but it will not respect them.
Note: Dávila was a Colombian political philosopher and in the Latin church. His aphorisms are presented here for the purposes of enjoyment, study, and historical record, but do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this writer. For more information on Dávila, see this introductory post. For information on how to live your life, go to church and read the Church Fathers/Saints.
Featured image: Antique endpapers from the Bergen Public Library. source
