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.The Benedictine order made a distinction between toil and labour.
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.]
