Nature, Technology, and the Emergence of Cybernetic Humanity - Is Human Nature Obsolete? - page 62

incarnation of this argument, see W. Norris Clarke, “Technology and Man: A
Christian View,” in Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the Philosophical
Problems of Technology , ed. Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey (New York: Free
Press, 1983), 247-258.
4. The new attitude toward nature was in part the result of the de-animization
of the world accomplished through the Christian cult of the saints, which dis-
placed nature's “spirits” to a supraworldly heaven. See Lynn White Jr., “The His-
torical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” in Philosophy and Technology: Readings
in the Philosophical Problems of Technology , ed. Carl Mitcham and Robert
Mackey (New York: Free Press, 1983), 263.
5. Lynn White argues persuasively that the Industrial Revolution of the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries was in fact a managerial revolution whose major
accomplishment was to usher in the presence of large factories. See White,
Medieval Religion and Technology , 80.
6. The historical connection between technological invention and development
and warfare is noted by many commentators. See especially William H. McNeil,
The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A . D . 1,000
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Everyone, of course, knows that
the Pentagon invented and implemented the Internet, though not many are aware
that it also created and continues to oversee the Global Positioning System, or
GPS, the only space-based satellite system global in reach.
7. Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (New York: Free Press,
1957), 130.
8. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 85.
9. Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 125.
10. E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (Garden City,
NJ: Anchor Press, 1954), 104.
11. In his Meditations on First Philosophy , Descartes argues precisely for the
survival, though not the truth value of sense perception: “But the nature here
described truly teaches me to flee from things which cause the sensation of pain,
and seek after the things which communicate to me the sentiment of pleasure
and so forth; but I do not see that beyond this it teaches me that from those
diverse sense-perceptions we should ever form any conclusion regarding things
outside us, without having [carefully and maturely] mentally examined them
beforehand” (Rene Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes , trans.
Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Rose [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1972], 1:193).
12. William Harvey's depiction of the heart as a pump leaps to mind here.
13. Aristotle once said that techne loves happy chance, expressing a fundamen-
tal orientation toward technology that the early moderns clearly found unten-
able ( Nicomachean Ethics 6.2. 1140a19).
14. Alexandre Koyre, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 201.