Brave New World

The Difference Between Labour and Slavery

The Age of Technology--that is, our age--has removed so much drudgery from human existence that life is now a much more positive proposition than it was when it was considered cheap.  The age of calculating machines and information processing machines (which we call computers) has replaced much human mindless repetitive work.  

The Luddites amongst us argue that this is a bad thing.  Machines increasingly make man redundant.  Redundant men are unemployed men.  Endlessly efficient machines drive down the costs of human labour; under their realm, machines reduce man, at best, to a latter day serf, etc.

Yet this is not the historical view of technology and machines.  Western society increasingly became mechanized and machine-led so that mankind could come to be more and more  in God's image, more and more human.

Historian Lynn White put it this way:

The humanitarian technology that our modern world has inherited from the Middle Ages was not rooted in economic necessity; for this necessity is inherent in every society, yet has found inventive expression only in the Occident [that is, the West], nurtured in the activist or voluntarist tradition of Western theology.

It is ideas which make necessity conscious.  The labor-saving power-machines of the later Middle Ages were produced by the implicit theological assumption of the infinite worth of even the most degraded human personality, by an instinctive repugnance towards subjecting any man to a monotonous drudgery which seems less than human in that it requires the exercise neither of intelligence nor of choice.  [Lynn White, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California, 1978), p. 22.]

The Benedictine order made a distinction between toil and labour.
  To labour--that is, to work--was to be like God, for God is always at work.  But toil--where one is enslaved to the creation--was something quite different.  Toil was a curse upon humans for the sin of the race.  This eventually led to the startling idea that part of work was to remove endless, dehumanizing toil from human existence.  As one scholar put it, this meant that "human beings should not have to do what wind, water, or horses can do.  People must do what other species and natural forces cannot do--use creative reason to liberate human beings from the curse of toil."  [Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization (Nashville, Tn: Thomas Nelson, p.2011],  p.98.]

Dr Lynn White put it this way:

The study of medieval technology is therefore far more than an aspect of economic history: it reveals a chapter in the conquest of freedom.  More than that, it is a part of the history of religion . . . .  It has often been remarked that the [monasteries in] Latin Middle Ages first discovered the dignity and spiritual value of labor--that to labor is to pray.  But the Middle Ages went further: they gradually and very slowly began to explore the practical implication of an essentially Christian paradox: that just as the Heavenly Jerusalem contains no temple, so the goal of labor is to end labor.  [Lynn White, ibid., p.72.]

Ironically as the West has rebelled against its Creator, the Age of Technology has increasingly returned man to the curse of toil.  Reject God from the world-view, and some men aspire to the status and position of demi-gods.  The rest of mankind they would degrade and enslave, often using their grasp of technology to help them achieve it. 

The horrific stories of the Orwellian Thought Police operating within Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley is a recent example.  It represents nothing less than a very ancient curse--its claim to be a Brave New World notwithstanding.