Technical Difficulties: How Technology Hinders Virtuous Medicine and Insights from Catholic Social Teaching
Darren Henson, Ph.D., Regional Officer for Mission & Ethics, Presence Health
As technology demonstrated its powerful might in the mid-twentieth century, Martin Heidegger asserted that the essence of technology represented a completion of Western metaphysics. His central claim is that Being discloses itself via technology. Its has become our human destiny, for nothing remains untouched by technology—human senses, attitudes, reactions, and experiences of time and space. For Heidegger, technology exceeds instrumental utility. It is a mode of revealing where alētheia, truth, happens. Technology’s revealing is not poetic, but rather an unreasonable and sustained challenging of nature that demands it to supply energy to be extracted and stored. As such, the essence of technology unconceals and orders everything as continually available, manipulable, and immediately accessible, all of which renders technology as possessing a saving power. Thus, technology reduces everything to immanence and eliminates beauty and transcendence. In his conclusion, the philosopher conjectured that human achievement can neither stop nor banish the powerful sway of technology as revealing, consuming, and converting nature into standing-reserve. Yet, human reflection, he thought, could ponder a higher power with a saving ability. In fact, he professed that only a god could save us.
This paper does not wholly espouse Heidegger’s claim that technology completes metaphysics, and yet his analysis is inescapable. An inextricable bond exists, for example, between medicine and technology. The nearly uncritical trust medicine places in the latter led anthropologist Sharon Kaufman to observe a “technological imperative” operative in hospitals. This reduces patients to replaceable parts, following technology’s methodology of efficiency and effectiveness. Moreover, some envision deploying technology to create an immortal human future.
This paper develops the loose end Heidegger left hanging. Faith in God provides a horizon of truth different from technology or science. This essay explores the Catholic tradition’s assessment and engagement of technology. For over a century the Catholic social tradition has both praised and critiqued technology, a leitmotif largely unexamined by Catholic scholars. I argue that the social tradition’s assessment of technology reveals four themes along a continuum. At one end is the tradition’s praise of technology as the good fruit of human reason, and at the other end, technology unleashes violence and destruction.
Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on the environment amplified critiques of technology penned by his living predecessor. Francis vividly writes how technology has marred the world’s ecology. Similarly, medical technology often distorts the ecology of the human body and our concepts of human flourishing. This paper will elucidate concepts from Laudato Si, other refined arguments from Benedict XVI, as well as other social encyclicals to build the case that a living faith provides the balance to dominating sway of technology.
The paper concludes arguing that these aspects of the tradition can propel faith-based, and especially Catholic healthcare to transform medicine. By reflecting on technology’s imposed influence on clinical experiences, theologically informed healthcare either on the part of the patient or the practitioner, can more clearly unmask the myths of technology, assess non-beneficial care, and advance palliative practices early in chronic disease trajectories.
As technology demonstrated its powerful might in the mid-twentieth century, Martin Heidegger asserted that the essence of technology represented a completion of Western metaphysics. His central claim is that Being discloses itself via technology. Its has become our human destiny, for nothing remains untouched by technology—human senses, attitudes, reactions, and experiences of time and space. For Heidegger, technology exceeds instrumental utility. It is a mode of revealing where alētheia, truth, happens. Technology’s revealing is not poetic, but rather an unreasonable and sustained challenging of nature that demands it to supply energy to be extracted and stored. As such, the essence of technology unconceals and orders everything as continually available, manipulable, and immediately accessible, all of which renders technology as possessing a saving power. Thus, technology reduces everything to immanence and eliminates beauty and transcendence. In his conclusion, the philosopher conjectured that human achievement can neither stop nor banish the powerful sway of technology as revealing, consuming, and converting nature into standing-reserve. Yet, human reflection, he thought, could ponder a higher power with a saving ability. In fact, he professed that only a god could save us.
This paper does not wholly espouse Heidegger’s claim that technology completes metaphysics, and yet his analysis is inescapable. An inextricable bond exists, for example, between medicine and technology. The nearly uncritical trust medicine places in the latter led anthropologist Sharon Kaufman to observe a “technological imperative” operative in hospitals. This reduces patients to replaceable parts, following technology’s methodology of efficiency and effectiveness. Moreover, some envision deploying technology to create an immortal human future.
This paper develops the loose end Heidegger left hanging. Faith in God provides a horizon of truth different from technology or science. This essay explores the Catholic tradition’s assessment and engagement of technology. For over a century the Catholic social tradition has both praised and critiqued technology, a leitmotif largely unexamined by Catholic scholars. I argue that the social tradition’s assessment of technology reveals four themes along a continuum. At one end is the tradition’s praise of technology as the good fruit of human reason, and at the other end, technology unleashes violence and destruction.
Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on the environment amplified critiques of technology penned by his living predecessor. Francis vividly writes how technology has marred the world’s ecology. Similarly, medical technology often distorts the ecology of the human body and our concepts of human flourishing. This paper will elucidate concepts from Laudato Si, other refined arguments from Benedict XVI, as well as other social encyclicals to build the case that a living faith provides the balance to dominating sway of technology.
The paper concludes arguing that these aspects of the tradition can propel faith-based, and especially Catholic healthcare to transform medicine. By reflecting on technology’s imposed influence on clinical experiences, theologically informed healthcare either on the part of the patient or the practitioner, can more clearly unmask the myths of technology, assess non-beneficial care, and advance palliative practices early in chronic disease trajectories.