Is any technology good?

Wendell Berry, a Christian/farmer/writer we have referenced before on the blog, wrote an article several years ago about why he would never buy a computer, saying he doesn't want to write more or faster, he wants to write better. A number of people responded with fierce criticism and Berry replied with an article detailing his perspective. If you have time, read the whole thing as it is very challenging to the suburban Christian worldview. If not, check out these exerpts and let us know what you think about how we ought to view technology as Christians. Should we clone cows to reduce the cost of beef or milk? What if that helps feed the hungry? Are there deeper issues we must address first? Is it possible to pursue any technological innovation (faster computer, better medicine, artificial life) with Christ-centered motivation?

The various reductions I have been describing are fairly directly the
results of the ongoing revolution of applied science known as 'technological
progress.' This revolution has provided the means by which both the productive
and the consumptive capacities of people could be detached from household and
community and made to serve other people’s purely economic ends. It has provided
as well a glamor of newness, ease, and affluence that made it seductive even to
those who suffered most from it.

Some people would like to think that this long sequence of industrial
innovations has changed human life and even human nature in fundamental ways.
Perhaps it has—but, arguably, almost always for the worse. I know that “techno-
logical progress” can be defended, but I observe that the defenses are
invariably quantitative—catalogs of statistics on the ownership of automobiles
and television sets, for example, or on the increase of life expectancy—and I
see that these statistics are always kept carefully apart from the related
statistics of soil loss, pollution, social disintegration, and so forth.

To ask a still more obvious question, what is the purpose of this
technological progress? What higher aim do we think it is serving? Surely the
aim cannot be the integrity or happiness of our families, which we have made
subordinate to the education system, the television industry, and the consumer
economy. Surely it cannot be the integrity or health of our communities, which
we esteem even less than we esteem our families. Surely it cannot be love of our
country, for we are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we
are about the desecration of our land. Surely it cannot be the love of God,
which counts for at least as little in the daily order of business as the love
of family, community, and country.

And so the question of the desirability of adopting any technological innovation is a question with two possible answers—not one, as has been commonly assumed. If one’s motives are money, ease, and haste to arrive in a technologically determined future, then the answer is foregone, and there is, in fact, no question, and no thought. If one’s motive is the love of family, community, country, and God, then one will have to think, and one may have to decide that the proposed innovation is undesirable.