Many have rightly argued that to attack technology or industry in its essential nature is to locate evil in an object or a method rather than in the heart of man. The evil uses to which the processes or products of industrialism have been put ought certainly to be condemned where the sin originated, not in the instrument of the sin's expression.
The argument holds when applied to industriality. It is misapplied in connection with industrialism.
It may help to define terms.
Industriality: a method of manufacturing objects, or organizing labor, that involves mass production, assembly lines, the predominating use of machinery, or other characteristics of the factory production process; on grounds of efficiency, with a tendency toward uniform results.
Industrialism: an ideology that transfers factory methods to human society; that sees an analogy between a machine and a body of men; in pursuit of objective and empirical standards to replace those of religion and metaphysics; with the goal of obtaining the greatest good for the greatest number, defined by utility and pleasure rather than honor or peace.
With this distinction in mind it will be easier to fervently damn industrialism (as all good men ought to do) without disregarding the true source of its evil results.
Perhaps it will be helpful to carry on at greater length. Every object or idea dreamed up by man bears his image. According as the man is obedient or disobedient to the law of God, his creation will bear either a blessing or a curse. The materials used in the creation of an object are certainly not cursed. They bear no evil in themselves. But man does. Therefore when man puts matter to use, the resulting creation must bear an inherent bias toward a good or evil usage.
Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death is a good example of what I am getting at. The book's thesis is that the image-based culture we find ourselves in today carries a dangerous bias toward evil that theprevious era's typological culture did not. He never argues, to my recollection, that a TV is inherently wicked; only that it carries with it a native tendency toward unhealthy ways of life. There is no sin in using a television; but wise men will recognize the dangers and govern their habits accordingly.
I contend that industriality--the industrial method we use to produce most of our goods--carries similarly dangerous tendencies toward utilitarianism, materialism, and the effacement of personality. This century and the last have made abundantly plain the horrors that lie at the end of this road. If we are wise men, should we not begin to meditate on how best to bridle our (admittedly convenient) servant, Industriality, in order to escape its evil bias? May we not even begin to meditate on how to reconfigure our method of production for a good rather than an evil bias?
Alexis de Tocqueville said of democracy,
Whenever social conditions are equal, public opinion presses with enormous weight upon the mind of each individual; it surrounds, directs, and oppresses him; and this arises from the very constitution of society, much more than from its political laws. As men grow more alike, each man feels himself weaker in regard to all the rest; as he discerns nothing by which he is considerably raised above them or distinguished from them, he mistrusts himself as soon as they assail him. (Democracy in America, II.20.)
The factory is the most egalitarian of commonwealths; the goal of industriality in production--uniformity, repetition, interchangeability--is what industrialism wishes to effect in human society; and a democracy is the most fertile ground for the seeds of industrialism. And as democracy tends to eventually center control in the hands of a dictator, so industrialism tends toward brutal, exploitative monopolies.
In That Hideous Strength and the fragment The Dark Tower, C S Lewis sees industrialism (closely allied with other attempts to create a "scientifically governed" society) as the bane of all that made life livable--the true, the good, and the beautiful. In Tales of the Long Bow, if only incidentally, G K Chesterton brings his hammer to bear on the same rock. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell similarly raised the specter of uniform and interchangeable men, no longer individuals. And practically every science fiction movie since the 1920s has stirred up dread in our hearts of a faceless society run on the principles of the factory.
Wiping the factory system of production from our midst will not cure the ultimate problem of the evil in men's hearts. But if we are wise we must acknowledge that as long as we have this dangerous servant in our midst, at least in its current configuration, it will never stop exerting a subtle pressure in the direction of hell.
