Modernity and Technology

The flight of the gods, the desecration of the earth, the transformation of humanity into a mass, the darkening of the world - these are all ways, Wade Sikorski argues in ""Modernity and Technology"", of describing the modern condition. Because of our technical orientation, our insistence that our freedom comes only with our power to control, choose and use things, everything in the world is present to us only as an object of utility, as a means for our mastery of the earth. That, Sikorski argues, is our great tragedy. The beauty of the world, the poetry of being, and true mastery of the earth have been concealed by the imperatives of our technology. After a creative reading of Martin Heidegger's work on technology, Sikorski continues where Heidegger stopped, with a series of chapters dealing how our age's exclusively technical way of being has built the American constitution, the sexual division of labour in the household, the hierarchy in the workplace, and the dynamics of the general economy. He pays particular attention to agricultural economics, where he draws on personal experience gained on his family's ranch in south-eastern Montana. Along the way, he describes the price that the land and the people have had to pay for our control of the earth, as well as the dangers and vulnerabilities that come with our pursuit of ""freedom as control"". As a response and an alternative to modern technology, Sikorski explores the possibilities of ""ark building"", of building sanctuaries that nurture the thinker and spare the earth. Instead of freedom as control, he advances the idea of freedom as friendship. This book is for those generally interested in postmodernism, feminism, political ecology, the history of technology, and the philosophy of science. It is a frankly utopian work, and as a meditation on the ways in which it believes that modern science and technology conceal, imprison and destroy the earth, it offers a critique of modern society.