According to Martin Heidegger, technology is what defines all of modern life. In other words, we moderns assume that what is real is what can be comprehended by reason; the real is what can be calculated or predicted or manipulated. Anything that cannot be objectively known—known as an object—by reason is not real. For Heidegger, this technological way of thinking is above all nihilistic; everything noble and beautiful that gives human life its seriousness or dignity is regarded, literally, as nothing. The modern view, on the other hand, is that technological thinking frees us from the irrational illusion of indebtedness. Technology can be put at the service of what we now call “free choice” because we have no knowledge of any purposes or ends or limits that are simply given. Unconstrained human choice or willfulness depends on a debt-negating or nihilistic foundation.

A contemporary critic of technology, Wendell Berry, explains that our dogma or “conventional prejudice” today is the uncritical acceptance of the goodness of technological liberation. Our intellectuals and educators mean to prejudice us “against old people, history, parental authority, religious faith, sexual discipline, manual work, rural people and rural life, anything that is local or small or inexpensive.” We are prejudiced against all that is required to acquire moral virtue, to what we must have to subordinate technical means to human ends. We are prejudiced against “settled communities,” against anything that has not been uprooted by the impersonal universalism of technological thinking. But it is only in the routinized and moralized context of such communities that any technology might be viewed as good, as not merely displacing or disorienting human beings for no particular purpose.

Berry agrees with Heidegger that in a technological age those who are best at manipulating others as objects will rule without restraint. Technological democracy tends to bring into existence a new sort of tyrannical ruling class composed of clever and liberated or communally irresponsible merito-crats who employ technology to impose a humanly destructive uniformity on those they rule. These meritocrats—believing maybe more than any prior ruling class that they deserve to rule—are full of contempt for those they control. And they themselves don’t realize the extent to which they are controlled by technological thinking, by a way of thinking that has devalued all standards except wealth and power.

Heidegger and Berry, not without evidence, tend to view America as a sort of technological tyranny in which the unlimited pursuit of money and power that is the result of technological thinking has led the few to lay waste to the communal and moral world inhabited by the many. Technological progress tends to make true or communal democracy almost impossible, as even Tocqueville showed. Berry explains that we Americans characteristically “behave violently” toward the land and particular places because from the beginning we “belonged to no place.” We have regarded the land or nature as an alien or hostile force to be conquered, not as our home. For Berry, what we modern Americans regard as the natural human propensities for wandering and violence are not really so natural at all. Our anxious dissatisfaction can at least be checked by our natural tendency to be bound by habit and familiarity. As even Heidegger says, the existential view that the truth is that we human beings alone have no natural place in particular is not shared by people who have the experience of belonging “deeply and intricately” to some place.

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