Hannah Arendt (1958):

The discussion of the whole problem of technology, that is, of the transformation of life and world through the introduction of the machine, has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upon the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful. Their instrumentality is understood exclusively in this anthropocentric sense. But the instrumentality of tools and implements is much more closely related to the object it is designed to produce, and their sheer “human value” is restricted to the use the animal laborans makes of them. In other words, homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and implements in order to erect a world, not—at least, not primarily—to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.

… In place of both utility and beauty, which are standards of the world, we have come to design products that still fulfil certain “basic functions” but whose shape will be primarily determined by the operation of the machine. The “basic functions” are of course the functions of the human animal’s life process, since no other function is basically necessary, but the product itself—not only its variations but even the “total change to a new product”—will depend entirely upon the capacity of the machine.

To design objects for the operational capacity of the machine instead of designing machines for the production of certain objects would indeed be the exact reversal of the means-end category, if this category still made any sense. … As matters stand today, it has become as senseless to describe this world of machines in terms of means and ends as it has always been senseless to ask nature if she produced the seed to produce a tree or the tree to produce the seed. By the same token it is quite probable that the continuous process pursuant to the channeling of nature’s never-ending processes into the human world, though it may very well destroy the world qua world as human artifice, will as reliably and limitlessly provide the species man-kind with the necessities of life as nature herself did before men erected their artificial home on earth and set up a barrier between nature and themselves.

For a society of laborers, the world of machines has become a substitute for the real world, even though this pseudo world cannot fulfil the most important task of the human artifice, which is to offer mortals a dwelling place more permanent and more stable than themselves. In the continuous process of operation, this world of machines is even losing that independent worldly character which the tools and implements and the early machinery of the modern age so eminently possessed. The natural processes on which it feeds increasingly relate it to the biological process itself, so that the apparatuses we once handled freely begin to look as though they were “shells belonging to the human body as the shell belongs to the body of a turtle.” Seen from the vantage point of this development, technology in fact no longer appears “as the product of a conscious human effort to enlarge material power, but rather like a biological development of mankind in which the innate structures of the human organism are transplanted in an ever-increasing measure into the environment of man.”

Daniel Sarewitz:

Seventy years of growing entanglement between science and politics show that the truths that matter most in democratic decision-making emerge from the political arena, not the laboratory. When Democrats sell themselves as the party of science, truth, and rationality, what they are really saying is that if you are rational and believe in science and truth then obviously you will support Democratic policies. But given that half the country does not ideologically align itself with Democrats, this is a hard case to make, and those who disagree with Democratic agendas may in turn wonder why they should accept the science those agendas bring with them. Such skepticism may not be irrational, or even anti-science. Yet it has created a space not just for Trump’s endless effusion of lies, but for the attacks he and his minions are mounting on mainstream scientific knowledge and on the scientific institutions that Democrats had labeled as their own.

Meša Selimović:

I laughed at his discomfort. It was inconvenient, no doubt, but one couldn’t help laughing. He talked of his fear like a child, openly and directly, without any self-consciousness. Fear is ugly when we see it in another.

I wouldn’t have it like that! I’d said, pretty insincerely, trying to encourage him, “A man dies only once.” But now I really thought that way. It wasn’t courage but shame at being humiliated. Fear was the worst traitor, Osman had said. But it seemed to me that fear was the greatest shame in this world and man’s greatest humiliation, raised above him like a whip, pointed at his throat like a knife. Man is surrounded by fear as by flame, drowned in it, as in water. He fears fate, the morrow, the law, a stronger man; and he isn’t what he wants to be but what he has to be. He fawns before fate, prays to the morrow, blindly follows the law, smiles humbly at the man in power whom he hates, reconciled to being a monstrous creation made up of fear and obedience.

If man was sometimes sad, it was because he recalled himself as he was in his dreams, as he could have been, were he not as he was. And if the world were not what it is.

I wouldn’t have it like that!

I said, I am not afraid of you, fate! Nor you, tomorrow! Nor you, powerful man! But this I said to myself, and I said it with fear, half free, split down the middle. One part isolating itself because it couldn’t accept, the other silent because I didn’t want to suffer.

Bill Drexel:

According to a publication of the state media company Shanghai United Media Group, the president and cofounder of BGI forbids his employees from having children with birth defects, which he says would be a “disgrace” to the company. Not one of the 1,400 children born to employees has had serious congenital diseases, he says. “In the United States and in the West, you have a certain way,” he told the New Yorker. “You feel you are advanced and you are the best. Blah, blah, blah. You follow all these rules and have all these protocols and laws and regulations. You need somebody to change it. To blow it up.”

If history is any guide, China will do just that. The world has become desensitized to the incredible scale of China’s flagrant human rights violations. Though exact numbers are unknown, the country’s system of forcibly — and sometimes fatally — removing and selling the organs of religious minorities and prisoners of conscience is among the largest and most grotesque violations of medical norms in the modern world. So too is the state’s use of forced abortions, sterilizations, and birth control on Uyghurs in the service of its genocide against the Muslim minority. And though the one-child policy was lifted in 2015, it was the largest reproductive social experiment in the history of humanity, involving untold numbers of brutal, state-administered forced abortions and sterilizations, and leading to an imbalance of 30 million more men than women in the country due to selective abortion of girls. And while these atrocities relied on relatively rudimentary technologies, China’s biotechnology ascent suggests that its next round of ethics violations are likely to be at the cutting edge of eugenics and genetic enhancement.

Anne Applebaum:

Asked about motivations, one used the term nafeer, which refers to “communal labor” or “communal work.” Another mentioned takiya, when “people collect their food together and to eat together, to share it, if somebody doesn’t have food for supper or dinner.” While traveling in Sudan during Ramadan, I saw many instances of men far from home—drivers, workers, or indeed our translators—joining the communal prayers and meals served on the street when the fast is broken at sundown.

It’s easy, from a great distance, to be cynical about or dismissive of the prospects for good government in Sudan, but these are the same kinds of traditions that have become the foundation for more democratic, less violent political systems in other places. Nafeer reminded me of toloka, an old Slavic word I heard used to explain the roots of the volunteer movement in Ukraine. Takiya sounds like the community barn-raisings of 19th-century rural America. The communal activists who draw on these old ideas do so not because of a foreign influence campaign, or because they have read John Locke or James Madison, or because, like the inhabitants of medieval Europe, they want to turn the clock back to a different era. They do so because their experience with autocracy, violence, and nihilism pushes them to want democracy, civilian government, and a system of power-sharing that would include all the people and all the tribes of Sudan.

On both of my trips to Sudan, I traveled out via Dubai, and each time it felt like a scene from a children’s book, where one of the characters walks through a mirror or a wardrobe and emerges in a completely different universe. In Sudan, some people have nothing except a bowl of bean soup once a day. In the Dubai airport, the Chanel store is open all night, AirPods can be purchased for the flight home, and multiple juice bars serve crushed tropical fruits.

But despite the illusion of separation, those universes are connected, and the same forces that have destroyed Sudan are coming for other countries too. Violence inspired and fueled by multiple outsiders has already destroyed Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and is spreading in Chad, Ethiopia, South Sudan, and beyond. Greed, nihilism, and transactionalism are reshaping the politics of the rich world too. As old rules and norms fall away, they are not replaced by a new structure. They are replaced by nothing.

Karl Barth, speaking to a trade union in Safenwil, December 17th, 1911:

Everything now seems to be crystal clear, yet perhaps nowhere else has Christianity fallen farther away from the spirit of her Lord and Master than precisely in this estimation of the relation between spirit and matter, inner and outer, heaven and earth. One might well say that for eighteen hundred years the Christian church, when confronted by social misery, has always referred to the Spirit, to the inner life, to heaven. The church has preached, instructed, and consoled, but she has not helped. Indeed, in the face of social misery she has always commended help as a good work of Christian love, but she has not dared to say that help is the good work. She has not said that social misery ought not to be in order then to summon all her power for the sake of this conviction that it ought not to be. She has entrenched herself behind a falsely understood saying of Jesus, taken out of context, which says that “the poor you always have with you” (John 12:8). She has accepted social misery as an accomplished fact in order to talk about the Spirit, to cultivate the inner life, and to prepare candidates for the kingdom of heaven. That is the great, momentous apostasy of the Christian church, her apostasy from Christ. When social democracy then appeared with its gospel of heaven on earth, this very church dared to stand in judgment over it, because it had denied the Spirit. She referred with smug horror to the little verse about angels and sparrows, and to similar expressions. She accused social democracy of vulgar materialism, and beat upon her breast: “Lord, we thank you that we are not as they are, that we are still idealists who regard spirit as the highest value and believe in heaven.” Thus spoke and wrote the pastors—who would then sit down and eat a hearty midday meal!

Dilexi te:

11. A concrete commitment to the poor must also be accompanied by a change in mentality that can have an impact at the cultural level. In fact, the illusion of happiness derived from a comfortable life pushes many people towards a vision of life centered on the accumulation of wealth and social success at all costs, even at the expense of others and by taking advantage of unjust social ideals and political-economic systems that favor the strongest. Thus, in a world where the poor are increasingly numerous, we paradoxically see the growth of a wealthy elite, living in a bubble of comfort and luxury, almost in another world compared to ordinary people. This means that a culture still persists — sometimes well disguised — that discards others without even realizing it and tolerates with indifference that millions of people die of hunger or survive in conditions unfit for human beings. A few years ago, the photo of a lifeless child lying on a Mediterranean beach caused an uproar; unfortunately, apart from some momentary outcry, similar events are becoming increasingly irrelevant and seen as marginal news items.

80. We must also recognize that, throughout centuries of Christian history, helping the poor and advocating for their rights has not only involved individuals, families, institutions, or religious communities. There have been, and still are, various popular movements made up of lay people and led by popular leaders, who have often been viewed with suspicion and even persecuted. I am referring to “all those persons who journey, not as individuals, but as a closely-bound community of all and for all, one that refuses to leave the poor and vulnerable behind… ‘Popular’ leaders, then, are those able to involve everyone… They do not shun or fear those young people who have experienced hurt or borne the weight of the cross.”

81. These popular leaders know that solidarity “also means fighting against the structural causes of poverty and inequality; of the lack of work, land and housing; and of the denial of social and labor rights. It means confronting the destructive effects of the empire of money… Solidarity, understood in its deepest sense, is a way of making history, and this is what the popular movements are doing.” For this reason, when different institutions think about the needs of the poor, it is necessary to “include popular movements and invigorate local, national and international governing structures with that torrent of moral energy that springs from including the excluded in the building of a common destiny.” Popular movements, in fact, invite us to overcome “the idea of social policies being a policy for the poor, but never with the poor and never of the poor, much less part of a project which can bring people back together.” If politicians and professionals do not listen to them, “democracy atrophies, turns into a slogan, a formality; it loses its representative character and becomes disembodied, since it leaves out the people in their daily struggle for dignity, in the building of their future.” The same must be said of the institutions of the Church.

92. We must continue, then, to denounce the “dictatorship of an economy that kills,” and to recognize that “while the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies that defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is being born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules.” There is no shortage of theories attempting to justify the present state of affairs or to explain that economic thinking requires us to wait for invisible market forces to resolve everything. Nevertheless, the dignity of every human person must be respected today, not tomorrow, and the extreme poverty of all those to whom this dignity is denied should constantly weigh upon our consciences.

113. Indeed, “any Church community, if it thinks it can comfortably go its own way without creative concern and effective cooperation in helping the poor to live with dignity and reaching out to everyone, will also risk breaking down, however much it may talk about social issues or criticize governments. It will easily drift into a spiritual worldliness camouflaged by religious practices, unproductive meetings and empty talk.”

114. Nor is it a question merely of providing for welfare assistance and working to ensure social justice. Christians should also be aware of another form of inconsistency in the way they treat the poor. In reality, “the worst discrimination which the poor suffer is the lack of spiritual care… Our preferential option for the poor must mainly translate into a privileged and preferential religious care.” Yet, this spiritual attentiveness to the poor is called into question, even among Christians, by certain prejudices arising from the fact that we find it easier to turn a blind eye to the poor. There are those who say: “Our task is to pray and teach sound doctrine.” Separating this religious aspect from integral development, they even say that it is the government’s job to care for them, or that it would be better not to lift them out of their poverty but simply to teach them to work. At times, pseudo-scientific data are invoked to support the claim that a free market economy will automatically solve the problem of poverty. Or even that we should opt for pastoral work with the so-called elite, since, rather than wasting time on the poor, it would be better to care for the rich, the influential and professionals, so that with their help real solutions can be found and the Church can feel protected. It is easy to perceive the worldliness behind these positions, which would lead us to view reality through superficial lenses, lacking any light from above, and to cultivate relationships that bring us security and a position of privilege.

Dilexi te:

Each in their own way discovered that the poorest are not only objects of our compassion, but teachers of the Gospel. It is not a question of “bringing” God to them, but of encountering him among them. All of these examples teach us that serving the poor is not a gesture to be made “from above,” but an encounter between equals, where Christ is revealed and adored.

Gilbert Meilaender:

Unable to transcend entirely our location in time and space, we never see any life, including our own, in such a transcendent [“on the whole”] way. It presupposes, really, God’s own perspective; hence, in making such judgments we think of ourselves and others in terms of the relation to God. This need not blind us to the many distinctions within everyday social life, for dissimilarity is, as Kierkegaard notes, the mark (though a confusing mark) of temporal life. “But the neighbor is eternity’s mark—on every human being.” Since we stand equally distant from (or near to) the Eternal One, we are radically equal in those moments when our life is judged “on the whole,” as only God can see it. 

… Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy recounts an old ritual in Austria in which 

the corpse of the emperor was ordered to be carried to the door of an abbey. The chamberlain who leads the cortège knocks at the door. A friar opens the window and asks: “Who knocks?”—“The Emperor.”—“I know no man of that name.” The chamberlain knocks again. “Who is there?”—“The Emperor Francis Joseph.”—“We do not know him.” Third knock, and the same question. After reflection, the chamberlain now answers: “Brother Francis.” Then the door opens to receive a comrade in the army of death, on equal terms with all souls.” 

Once again, Kierkegaard sees the point: “There is not a single person in the whole world who is as surely and as easily recognized as the neighbor. You can never confuse him with anyone else, since the neighbor, to be sure, is all people. . . . If you save a person’s life in the dark, thinking that it is your friend—but it was the neighbor—this is no mistake.” […]

The dignity of our humanity and the dignity of our person thus coinhere. We know persons only as bodies, and when we encounter a living human body our moral task is to seek to recognize the person who is there. I doubt that anyone can simply be compelled into such recognition by rational argument alone. The heart must be open to recognize personal dignity in every living human being… We must be ready to set aside the notion that we should evaluate their claim to personal dignity and accept the truth that, in our willingness or unwillingness to acknowledge it, we judge ourselves.

Luigi Giussani:

The existential awareness of what faith truly is and thus of what Christ truly is—the living discovery of the value of our unity, of our community, of what the Church truly is—these are not the fruit of a reasoning process nor of our study. They are instead the fruit of an encounter.

Encounter means the event of the relationship with a person and with a community whose richness is so authentic that we feel struck by a light and called to a life that is different and more true.

In this encounter, the value of faith and the value of the historical reality of the Church begin to appear in a concrete manner (not one that is abstract or theoretical)—in a real manner, to the point that it provokes us to make a total response. Because when the person is really provoked, he feels the totality of his life put in play.

If it is not like this, if it does not have to do with a totality, it is not yet the discovery of faith but simply the knowledge or practice of some religious form.

We can say, paradoxically, that Christianity is not a religion but a life.