Folder 2: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1961

"The Challenge of Technical Excellence to the Catholic Intellect"

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Main Author: Ong, Walter J.
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Language:eng
Created: Saint Louis University Libraries Digitization Center 1961
Online Access:http://cdm17321.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/ong/id/1319
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Folder 2: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1961
author_facet Ong, Walter J.
author_sort Ong, Walter J.
title Folder 2: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1961
title_short Folder 2: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1961
title_full Folder 2: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1961
title_fullStr Folder 2: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1961
title_full_unstemmed Folder 2: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1961
title_sort folder 2: personal bibliography. texts of various talks, papers, etc., not planned for publication at present, 1961
description "The Challenge of Technical Excellence to the Catholic Intellect"
publisher Saint Louis University Libraries Digitization Center
publishDate 1961
url http://cdm17321.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/ong/id/1319
_version_ 1798396420739301376
spelling sluoai_ong-1319 Folder 2: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1961 Ong, Walter J. Ong, Walter J.; Catholic Church; Technology -- Religious aspects Lectures; Presentations (communicative events); Essays; Summaries "The Challenge of Technical Excellence to the Catholic Intellect" 1961 2011 text/PDF 64 1 1 5 2_Item 0001.pdf Series 1: Scholarship, 1926-2001 Items in this folder are from Sub-sub-Series 5: Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present. This sub-sub-series contains texts of various talks, papers, etc., not planned for publication at present. In addition to these, in Father Ong's "General Files" series there are copies of dozens of addresses and/or papers that have never been published, plus notes for still other unpublished addresses, lectures, etc. Many of these were eventually published in one form or another -- many, however, were not. 64 1 1 5 2 Permission to copy or publish must be obtained from the Saint Louis University, Pius XII Memorial Library, Special Collections Department Saint Louis University Libraries Digitization Center text/image eng Saint Louis University Libraries Special Collections THE CHALLENGE CF TECHNICA·LEXCELLENCE TOTHECATHOLIC INTELLECT by the Reverepd Walter J. Ong,S. J. , Professor of English, St. Louis University, An Address delivered January 30, 1961, at the Advanced Workshop for the Impr-ovement of Catholic Schools of Medical Technology, held at the Coronado Hotel, Saint Louis, Missouri, as transcribed from the recorded proceedings of the Workshop. The technological age in which we are living at present is a mystery. It has come into being as a result of a great many historical changes,. patterned changes, which are themselves part of the total pattern of the evolution of our universe. We know something about the pattern of some of these changes but there are so many changes and they are so involved with one another and so tied up with all that is tragic and all this is hopeful in man's complex history that it is impossible for us even to begin to explain them all. In speaking to you this morning, all that I can hope to do is to present for your consideration some thoughts, central thoughts, I hope, concerning tile pattern of development out of which- our technological age has emerged, with special reference to the significance of this pattern for Chris-tians and particularly for those of you in medical technological work. In religious circles particularly, but in other circles as well, it is common to interpret our age of technology in the terms of the secularization of society. You have all heard this line of thought. A popular account of the present situation, so interpreted, might run as follows. In the old days men everywhere worshipped a god, or least a group of gods. Everything in human life had a religious, or semi-religious, or quasi-religious, cast. Man's birth was surrounded with,r,e.tigious ceremony; the boy or girl was integrated into the larger life of the tribe' or city in religious ceremonies; the ordinary business of adult life--hunting, farming, dom-estic activity, and so on--was carried on in a r.eligious setting. From such a state of affairs, however, man has deviated. He has deviated by secularizing much of hia existence, He has paid more attention to things of this world and, horrible thought, .even to technology. Secularization reached its peak, we are told, first in western society and from here it is spreading to other aegmente of mankind. In this interpretation, religion used to be in much better condition than it is in today, we are told. Religiously, man is progressing slowly downhill, things are getting worse, and worse, and worse, and worse, and they've always been getting worse. The more 'he learns about the world around him, the more attention he pays to it--developing science and technology--the more he must neglect God. Earlier ages were ages of farthbut the present age is the age of the machine. Faith and the machine are antagonistic to one another- -we must choose between ,them. There are sey~ral difficulfie s ,with this interpretation. First of all, there are the excesses of early religion. For when society was so thoroughly permeated with religious observances many things which we see in perspective now were quite wrong- -terribly wrong- -were often justified on religious or on pseudo-religious grounds. War, murder, slavery and 'all sorts of sexual excesses have been justi-fied in the past on what are supposed to be religious grounds and still are so justi-fied in many countries. Secondly, attention to this world, man's work in this world and on this world, is itself a good. If people do not know how to control natural forces, it is because they have not fully realized what was in God's command to the first members of our race, as seen in the very first chapters of Genesis where God tells Adam and Eve not merely to increase and multiply, and fill the earth but also to subdue it and rule over it. ' " There are further difficulties in this interpretation. Religion has obviously prof-ited tremendously from technology and science. The Catholic Church iII particu-lar has profited from technology and science." The sense of community which is essential for a church founded on love would be virtually imposatblefn a worldas populous and diverse as ours if it were not for technological means of communica-tion. I think we could even conjecture about the workings of Divine Providence in asking ourselves why the public revelation begun with Abraham and completed in Jesus Christ was not given sooner. We could conjecture that it was not given sooner because man was not technologically developed enough to assimilate it. Scattered around the surface of the 'earth, earlier members of the human race had to exist for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years in small groups lost to one another. How effective could the Good News of the salvation of all mankind really be before any men could know where even most other men were, or even that there were other men of civilizations vastly different from thetrvown? What could universal charity have meant to a world of preliterate paleothic cultures? For centuries the Church was hampered in her missionary efforts by a lack of those technological developments which later on made rapid transportation and instantaneous communication possible. A meeting such as this one this morning, of course, is made possible by technological developments. The prominence of get-togethers, discussion groups, meetings of all sorts--religious, political, scientific--is a phenomenon of our own age. We live in an assembly culture. Ex-cept for neighborhood groups, meetings were relatively rare in an earlier period. Now, it sometimes seems that we have to attend national meetings every week. The f~r-flung contacts of which meetings such as this are examples and which are absolutely necessary for the global organization of man, are made possible by technology. The danger of abusing technological developments does not lessen the fact that had technological advance come earlier contacts between men could have profited and much more of the world could seemingly have received the gos-pel of Christ at a much earlier time. Furthermore, the early religiosity of man could overreach itself in ways which make it evident that a certain amount of secularization such as that associated with technology was absolutely essential and was a positive religious good. Reli-gion cannot tolerate total secularization of man's life, but when religion is called upon to do things which are not proper to religion the cause of religion is badly served. Religion is not supposed to supply for natur-al science or technology .. Indeed, it cannot supply for them. But it has been made to supply for such things, with results which at times have been disastrous to religion. Let us take an example when an earlier religious sensibility interpreted thunder as the voice of God such an expression was warranted not only for poetic and met-aphorical reasons but also on philosophical grounds. If God is the ultimate cause of all things He must cause thunder and rain too. This is simple, isn't it? But the ultimate, infinite action of God, divine causality, is not easy to grasp. Activ-ity and causality at a lower pitch corne horne much more readily to us. When we speak of the causality that God exercises we are speaking about a causality that is different from every other causality we know. It is only analagous to the other causes. It should not be confused with them. God's own causality does not work quite the way any other causality works. We tend to suppose that it does because causal ity, and activity generally, at what we might call a lower pitch of being comes horne much more readily to us. The relationship of rain and clouds and the sun and the atmospheric condi.tions fall much more directly within our range of understanding than does God or His actions as .such. There are the things with which natural science or physical science deals: rain, clouds, sun, atmospheric conditions, and their relationship to one another. But in earlier ages, before man had much natural science, before man had an adequate knowledge of the constitu-tion and activity of the physical world, and when he did have some confused notion of God or some myths about a plurality of gods responsible in some or another for thts natural world, man's tendency was, understandably, to allow his.theologizing to substitute for SCientific explanation. Thus there was a tendency, in thinking of thunder as the voice of God, to think of it, not merely in the ways in which we have just indicated--poetically, metaphorically, or in another way, philosophically--but to think of thunder also as the voice of God in such a way as to imply that God was causing,this noise in a manner somewhat like in which a man might cause the noise corning from a drum he is beating. This is not God's kind of causality. You are in a bad way if you think that is the sort of thing God does when he causes something. Religion is badly served by this kindqf,:thinking. The difficulty, you see, with this view begins to show up as soon as ~Jiere is provided an explanation of just what there is in thunder which does cor-respond somewhat to the beating of a drum; namely, the movement of air masses disturbed by a discharge of electrfctty. This action is something like the drum-beat, isn't it? But if one has attempted to explain physical phenomenon in another way, by direct recourse, of the sort just indicated, to God's action, seen itself as a kind of sensible phenomenon, one is here in great difficulty. As soon as a satis-factory physical explanation of the phenomenon in question is provided the field of God's action is curtailed. When you have a satisfactory drumbeater now, in this action of electricity on the air, God Himself is no longer needed as an explanation. He begins to recede from the scene. He shrinks, and the more physical explana-tion you get the less need you have for God. As scientific explanation grows larger and larger God Himself seemingly grows smaller and smaller. The example of thunder which I have used is crude but it is representative of what was going on ;;ita more sophisticated level as our technological age emerged in the 17th, 18th and,. more particularly, the 19th century. This, inCidentally, is why I asked Sister Marcella Marie to mention to you that last littleitem"'Oll'thebibUorapby, "Darwins's Vision and Christian Perspectives, " because you will find in that book a much more detailed explanation -by.Professor James Collins of jUst how this phenomenon which I am now referring to took place. In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, when the foundations for modern science and modern technology were being laid, there was a tendency to provide so-called proofs of the existence of God and the necessity of religion based on what man did not know about the physical universe. Common use was made of the so-called "design" argument in an unfortunate form. Newtonian physics explained a great deal of the design of the universe, the argument gees, but it does not explain everything. The design is too intricate. There are too many details. It is so intricate that it surpasses all the formulae of Newtonian physics. Therefore, it is argued, God must exist to account for this tremendous design- -to explain what you can't explain by Newtonian physics. This is the same as the "explanation" of thunder all over again, isn't it? This argument is, of course, false- -what is called for under the circumstances is to refine our understanding of physics--get a better physics--develop physics--if we want a more complete and delicate expla~ nation ofthe complexity of physical things. God is not what you don't know about physics. This refinement of understanding has, in great part, been achieved over the past few hundred years. One of the ultimate refinements was that resulting upon the discovery by Darwin and Wallace of the principle of natural selection which operates, as we know, in the evolution of living organisms. With these developments in the physical and biological sciences many persons who had known only the ineffective design ar gument for the existence of God revised their thinking and many of them simply decided that God was superfluous. He represents, as was commonly said in the 19th century, nothing more than what science is going to be in the future. God is the course in physics you haven't taken yet. Of course, the effective way to prove the existence of God is to prove his existence not from what we do not know or cannot explain but froin what we do know in real-ity, working with the fact that what we do know implies that God exists. The way to prove God's existence is to start from something we know about an existing reality, such as a fact of real movement: this thing moves here and now. From such a real fact, one can proceed to prove God's existence. This actual change here and now takes place: then you argue from what you know- -from an analysis of what happened--from what you do know, not from what you do not know. This is no time,of course, to undertake such a proof. The point I wish to make here is that the disastrous elimination of God from the present scene in the minds of some people, the over-secularization of the present world, was due, as the history of ideas makes clear, in great part to the mistaken religiosity of earlier man. Excess breeds excess. There is a very valid sense in which we can say that earlier human societies were, in many ways, over-religious--or even better, that they were falsely religious, that they exaggerated the religious at the expense of the secular. I make these points to show that a certain amount of secularization was badly called for and should be welcomed by all truly religious persons. The Catholic Church is perfectly at home in the world which has been selectively secularized. The Church wants the world to be selectively secularized. Our religious outlook, of cour-se, must be as truly pervasive as ever. It must extend to all of man's > '. activities- <ever-yone of them, the tiniest ones as well as the 'greatest ones, and it must relate them all through the human person to God. Our religious outlook must not, however, be random and indiscriminately diffused. There are genuine-ly secular questions, that is, questions concerning this natural world for which religion, even Christian religion, provides no answer. Yet man, and particularly the Christian, is obligated to find the answers to these questions even though he cannot get the answers from revelation. He is obligated by the very nature of his position in the universe and, mor'eover , by revelation itself--by the indication of the divine intent which we find in the scriptures and in the Church's teaching. . " The transition to our present scientific and technological age has come about as man has undertaken the very important business of finding out more about the world in which he lives. Technology is a phase through which human society is moving, a phase for which there has been tremendous pr-epar-ation in the past. To achieve a modern scientific understanding of the universe and a modern technolog-ical way of dealtng. with the universe--an understanding far from complete--we have needed the cooperation of billions of persons. This understanding was simply impossible in an earlier day. Why? Because the store of human knowledge had not been built up enough. There had not been enough millions of people working for enough tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years to build up language the conceptual apparatus, and our contact the world around us so that we could get our thought off the ground in a technological way. From what we know of early and primitive man it appears that everywhere man has sought to control his environment and, in that sense, to take possession of the earth, So, you can say that in some kind of primitive way man is from the very beginning technological. Yet his attempts to control his environment and to take possession of the earth are of course terribly slow and successful only by degrees. If man has been on earth some 400,000 years (to take a fairly firm figure, if a rather less than certain figure--we know that man has been on earth pretty cer-tainly 100, 000 and almost certainly not more than 1, 000, 000 years) for most of this time he has been scattered around the surface of the earth in little bands of people quite isolated from 'One another. As these bands, or tribes of men, spread out across the surface of the-ear-th losing their contact with their origin, evolving their languages into tongues which were soon mutually incomprehensible although descended .from the same original, man spent most of his time ekemg out a living and fending off the ravages of nature and disease. We might even say he spent most of his time dying. As the earth became gradually more populous and the little islands 0'men expanded to meet one another changes began to take place. The most momentous changes of all did not come until the invention of the more elaborate systems of writing, particularly the alphabet. With the help of these systems man was able to store his experience much more effectively than before. In pre-literate civilization, in which we must remember, nobody could ever look up anything, anywhere, ever, the knowledge which one generation of man accumulated could be passed on to others only with great difficulty and as preserved in a haze of myth. With the invention of writing, however, records could be kept and what one generation of men had discovered could be conveyed with greater accuracy to the succeeding generation, although ways of thinking and of expression which went with writing were long in developing. The early literate men were still in a pre-literate stage of thinking for many centuries. For a long time, however, even up to the inven-tion of printing, man remained more interested in the communications process itself than in scouring thewor-Id around him for new material to communicate. Training in oratory or in the art of dispute rather than in research methods re-mained the great central concern of education even in its highest reaches. By the end of the middle ages Inweste rn Europe, however" more and more attention was being given to the visualist approach to the world, and this attention finally resulted in the stress on observation and experimentation and ultimately in the determined pursuit of new knowledge of the physical world which has ushered in our present technological era. you are here at this Workshop just as-cold bloodedly as you possibly can be to find out new things, the "latest developments" in your fields. 100,000 or 50,000 years ago men did not commonly come together for that purpose. Even 1,000 years ago they didn't. They did not come together very often, and when they did their motives were not cast up that way, in terms of the "latest developments" or discoveries. 'The details of the historical process, or pattern, just touched on here are intric-ate and many of them still unknown. Nevertheless we can see that technology emerges at the end of a long development which prepared for it. We know enough now about the evolution of our universe and about the details of history to be aware that history does not repeat itself. It is a linear development, not a cyclic one, and the position in which we now stand is different from anything in the past and will be followed by a future situation which in turn will be different both from our present and from our past. When we see technology in these larger perspectives we cannot help being aware that it is part of a tremendous development in this universe as the universe evolves under the providence of Almighty God. Once we become aware that technology is one stage in a huge and mysterious pattern of development in time, over which God presides, we can see technology in some-thing of its proper religious setting. We have known for some time that we live in an evolving cosmos: The universe is evolving in a number of ways. It is evolving astrophysically, as galaxies and solar systems are formed and pass through their various stages of development. Organic life on our planet and perhaps elsewhere is evolving. ' More important than all this, the world of mind itself is evolving as human knowledge develops with what is seemingly an always accelerating speed. Although we may be defi-cient in some of the awareness enjoyed by earlier man, when we look at the entire store of human knowledge as it exists today and compare this with that of man 2,000 years ago, or 10,000 years ago, or 50,000 years ago, it becomes evident that the present condition represents on the whole progress, and unmis-takable, tremendous progress. As the fund of human knowledge grows, the dom-inance of the spiritual over the material in the universe necessarily grows. Brute matter below man becomes more and more subject to man's control and, more than that, to man's understanding as he learns about this universe and ways of regulating it intelligently through technological means. ,Thus in a true sense the growth of knowledge and of technology represents the greater spiritualization of the universe because through this growth the spiritual • • r-·, component of r eatity, which incrudes intePi&~nce, asserts its greater and gr-eater presence in the material universe." Not,t!1af the material is evil. No, it is good, too, but its goodness is such as to 9a11 forcompietion and direction by the spirit-ual. In this sense the growth of .technology is, undoubtedly a spiritual achievement and an achievement of a very high order. ' Moreoyer, it is an achievement definitely in line with the manifest will of God. Mali'is put here on earth in order that the spir'ttu/l-i :maY'developandassert'itself. 'He is the point at which all the energies in this universe come to focus through the activity of his intellect andwtll, Tech-nology, which represents man's assertion of his mastery over the phyaical: uni ~ ve):1se",is thus an unmistakable ~ood' and tr-emendous good. It is quite true, of course, that any intellectual development in the hands of a free agent--and intellectual development must be in the hands ofa free agent--involves from our point of view a risk. Man's knowledge which gives him power over brute matter9~nbe put to bad use. There Isnothing' we can do about this fact. Every increa,se,in the spiritual in this natural universe entails the poaaibifityof greater evil. E,:yery time Almighty God creates a newhuman soul the possibilities for evil ar-eIncr-eased, We have to face this situation. Every time a child is taught thedif{~rence between right and wr-ongthe possibilities of evil are increased be-cause ope has to be aware of this difference iii order to be able formally to sin. Do we plead, then, that we should not teach little children their catechism because thereby they might learn how to commit a sin that they do not previously know how to commit? This recalls the story of the little childrens' voices heard behind the fence. One of the voices was saying, "Let's go over and take some of those peaches on that tree." Another little voice said, "No. We can't do that. We're good Catholic boys and we can't go over and steal those peaches. That'd be a sin." Then a very tiny voice piped up, "I'll go over and steal those peaches. I'm only five years old and it won't make any difference because I ain't attained the use of reason yet. " This child, you see, had obviously learned how to misuse a catechism lesson, and with a sophistic finesse rare even in adults. Advance in knowledge is no guarantee of advance in virtue. But despite too enter-prising little boys it can make advance in virtue possible. Just as when a new human soul is created the possibility for good is increased, so when the differences between good and evil is explained and properly understood the possibility for good also increases. Hence, despite the fact that from our point of view an increment of the spiritual component in reality entails a certain risk, increasing the spiritual component remains a good, a work which is definitely on God's side. With these considerations in mind, what attitude can a Catholic take toward tech-nological development? He can hardly, I believe, take anything but a positive attftude+-an enthusiastic positive attitude. We must be in favor of technological development. We have to be. While acknowledging its dangers and doing what we can about them, we have to be for it. A Catholic must realize that the general pat-tern of development in which technology comes into being is a spiritualizing pattern - -an upward movement from dominance by the more pure material to dominance by the more spiritual. This is not to minimize the grave, built-in dangers of technol-ogy, the danger of impersonalization and many other dangers, but it is to say that such dangers are to be met not by hostility toward technology itself, but by a posi-tive understanding of their nature and by devising positive ways of countering them. ,--- .. We must acknowledge, to be sure, that the religious and moral problems of the individual man are never solved through all the technological developments in the world. Technological society gives such problemsa.different shape perhaps, but in the technological world as in the pre-technological world each individual is induplicable. His problems are new, fresh, umqueas he himself is unique. These problems must be solved by each individual individUally with the help, of course, of society and moral principles and under God's grace. Each of our lives has to be given its own shape; no other life will have the precise shape that yours or mine have. Technology cannot do this shaping. Technology is not a panacea. But it is a good, and a true follower of Christ cannot be indifferent to a good A Catholic, moreover, must add to all this a final very special reason for favor- I ing the advance of technology, for he knows by faith that the second person of the Blessed Trinity, true God Himself, was enough concerned about this universe to become incarnate in it. He took a bit of its carefully prepared matter, carefully evolved matter, carefully developed matter, billions-of-years-old matter, as His very own body. He entered into the development of this universe which is now maturing as the technological age moves on. To the reasons for favoring technol-. ogy which the Catholic shares with other men, he must as a believer in Christ add this; that technology represents a positive good in a universe of which Christ in His human nature is a part. http://cdm17321.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/ong/id/1319

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