Secularization Comes for the Religion of Technology: Or, how to make sense of techno-optimist manifestos, the Open Ai/Altman affair, EA/e-acc movements, and the general sense of cultural stagnation

The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 3

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture, broadly understood. Before my detour into writing something about Vision Pro, the previous two installments had been a bit more reflective and meditative. This installment is written in a decidedly different mode. It proposes a thesis that I think helps clarify some of the weirdness of our moment. It is at once a commentary on techno-optimist manifestos, the perception of cultural stagnation, effective altruists and effective accelerationists. At least, it is an attempt to provide a useful frame by which these might be understood. The general argument is this: we’ve been secularizing out of a dominant religion, but that religion is not the one we assume it to be. It is rather the religion of technology. I suppose the mode here can be characterized as lightly provocative. As is often the case, the essay grew as I wrote it, but I tried to keep it moving along as best I could. I do hope it provokes a consideration and perhaps some helpful thinking about our moment. One last note in the interest of full disclosure: the links to books will take you to bookshop.org. If you make a purchase, you’ll support local bookstores and a small portion will come my way as well.

The Convivial Society runs on a patronage model. The writing is public, and those with the means and desire are encouraged to support it.

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Allow me to casually suggest that the enormous surfeit of cultural analysis on offer has failed to produce an adequate diagnosis of our moment because it has failed to account for one of the most significant unfolding developments.

And yes, obviously I’m the one who is going to tell you what everyone else is missing.

I’m being facetious, of course, but I do think there’s something of value in what follows. As always, you can tell me otherwise.

Let’s start here: The most consequential form of secularism has been almost altogether ignored because the underlying religion has not been recognized as such.

That religion is what historian David Noble called the religion of technology.

Off we go.

1. The more or less standard secularization thesis

The standard, although now much contested, secularization thesis, ascendent in the 1960s, told a relatively straightforward story about the retreat of religion from modern life. According to this story, modernity was characterized, in part, by the exclusion of religion from public life and declining rates of belief and practice. It was also generally assumed that this retreat was final and irreversible.

This thesis has been revised, rejected, and revisited countless times. The story, if there is even one coherent story to tell, is certainly more complex. For my part, I’m partial to the philosopher Charles Taylor’s account in A Secular Age (2007). Central to Taylor’s analysis is the idea that secularization is not what he calls a “subtraction story” (society minus religion). Secularism entails the emergence of some positive alternative (exclusive humanism, in his telling) and amounts not to the necessary retreat or eclipse of religion, but rather to a change in the context and conditions of belief, wherein unbelief becomes not only thinkable, but a live option for large segments of the population, including those who continue to believe.

Alright, keep that in the back of your mind for now. The next step is the key to the frame I’m trying to construct.

2. The religion of technology

When Taylor and others write about secularization in the West, they are, of course, thinking chiefly about a historical process involving the role of Christianity in Western cultures. In other words, secularization is a phenomenon that happens in relation to Christianity or against the backdrop of Christianity. Fine. This was clearly an important story to tell. But …

What if we’ve got the underlying religion wrong? Or, better, what if there’s another religion in play? In other words, what if the secularization of consequence for understanding our present moment is not a process in relation to Christianity, but to another, related but distinct, form of religious belief and practice?

Enter the religion of technology.

The “religion of technology” is a term coined by David Noble in his book bearing the same title. Noble was quite explicit about the fact that he was not proposing a metaphor. He was not suggesting that technology was like a religion, or that people relate to their devices in quasi-religious ways. All true perhaps, but Noble wasn’t interested in such things. He argued that, from roughly the turn of the first millennium onward, there was a concrete, objective historical relationship between religion, specifically Christianity, and the Western techno-scientific enterprise. Here is how he puts it:

“This is not meant in a merely metaphorical sense, to suggest that technology is similar to religion in that it evokes religious emotions of omnipotence, devotion, and awe, or that it has become a new (secular) religion in and of itself, with its own clerical caste, arcane rituals, and articles of faith. Rather, it is meant literally and historically, to indicate that modern technology and religion have evolved together and that, as a result, the technological enterprise has been and remains suffused with religious belief.”

In the book, Noble makes his argument in two parts. The first part traces the entanglement of various strands of the Christian religion with the techno-scientific enterprise. This section shows how avowedly religious aspirations—for transcendence, for immortality, for a return to paradise, for a restoration of humanity from its fallen condition—infused the work of scientists and technologists throughout the late medieval and the early modern periods.

The key here is to recognize that this infusion was not just characteristic of the time before what we’ve come to call the Scientific Revolution. It also characterized the work of those whose names we most closely associate with the Scientific Revolution and many who came after. It is also important to understand the degree to which the modern scientific project, thus infused with religious significance, was, in fact, the techno-scientific enterprise, aimed not merely at the accumulation of knowledge but, more specifically, at the leveraging of that knowledge into power over nature.¹

The second part of Noble’s book offers a series of 20th-century case studies demonstrating how these same religious aspirations, although more likely to be veiled in a less explicitly theological idiom (but sometimes barely so), permeated various techno-scientific endeavors from the development of atomic weapons to space exploration and, yes, the pursuit of artificial intelligence.

“As we have seen,” Noble concludes,

“those given to such imaginings are in the vanguard of technological development, amply endowed and in every way encouraged to realize their escapist fantasies. Often displaying a pathological dissatisfaction with, and deprecation of, the human condition, they are taking flight from the world, pointing us away from the earth, the flesh, the familiar—‘offering salvation by technical fix,’ in Mary Midgley’s apt description—all the while making the world over to conform to their vision of perfection.”

Those words were written a quarter of a century ago, but I suspect you can readily supply examples of this same spirit drawn from more recent pronouncements emanating from Silicon Valley.

Noble’s account is not flawless, you can read some of my more critical comments here, but it does demonstrate the recurring entanglement of religious aspirations and technological progress throughout Western history from roughly the turn of the first millennium onwards.

That this entanglement persists seems clear enough, but my argument hinges on something that Noble either doesn’t register or that he chose to pass over in his account. It is important to acknowledge that the precise relationship between the two entangled phenomena shifted over time, and this shift had significant consequences. While Noble insists that the religion of technology has not “become a new (secular) religion in and of itself,” I’ll argue that something close to that has happened to the degree that the technological element superseded the religious in important ways.

I’ll return to that last point in section 4 below, but first I’d like to supplement Noble’s description of the religion of technology with the work of another historian, David Nye.

3. The religion of technology is a civil religion

In one of my favorite books in the history of technology, American Technological Sublime, Nye tells a fascinating story about how Americans routinely experienced the advent of new technologies as encounters with the sublime. Not all technologies, of course, but Nye documents how technologies of a certain scale and dynamism elicited feelings of awe and wonder that could easily be described as religious in nature. Nye considers, for example, first encounters with the railroad, the factory, the Hoover Dam, the electrified cityscape, the Golden Gate Bridge, and, later, the atomic bomb and the launch of a Saturn V rocket during the Apollo program.

Here, for instance, is an entirely unexceptional excerpt from an 1851 sermon on the occasion of the opening of the Cleveland and Columbus Railroad cited by Nye:

“In a moral and religious point of view, as well as social and commercial, to me there is something interesting, solemn, and grand in the opening of a great thoroughfare. There is sublimity about it, indicating not only march of mind and a higher type of society, but the evolution of divine purposes, infinite, eternal—connecting social revolutions with the progress of Christianity and the coming reign of Christ.”

In America, as the historian Perry Miller once put it, “technological majesty” took its place alongside the “starry heavens above and the moral law within to form a peculiarly American trinity of the Sublime.”

That in itself would be interesting enough and would nicely complement Noble’s “religion of technology” thesis. But Nye’s work also expands Noble’s analysis in a couple of ways that are particularly relevant to the framework I’m trying to build in this post. Nye shows that the experience of the technological sublime was incorporated into elaborate civic ceremonies and rituals that celebrated not only the technological marvel at hand, but also human ingenuity and the body politic.

I tend to gloss these aspects of Nye’s work by noting, first, that the religion of technology as practiced in America is a liturgical religion, replete with rites and rituals.² Second, by also noting that from roughly the mid-19th century the religion of technology was, in fact, America’s true civil religion.

With this in mind, then, let’s look at how the relationship between technology and religion, the relationship that constitutes the religion of technology, shifted through the 19th century.

4. Religion and technology flip positions in the religion of technology

I understand the “religion of technology” to be a deep entanglement of two nonetheless distinguishable elements: a traditionally religious element and the techno-scientific element. While the traditionally religious component (beliefs about the human condition, God’s work in the world, etc.) in the religion of technology initially fueled the techno-scientific endeavor, infusing it with a certain spirit and giving it a distinct set of aims and goals, in this way functioning as the “lead partner,” by the end of the 19th century the techno-scientific endeavor had itself absorbed and overtaken the traditionally religious element, and, in this form, became the quasi-metaphysical foundation of the dominant social imaginary.³ To put this another way, in my interpretation, the religion of technology only comes into its own as a functional religion in the 19th century. At this point, it is not just that religious ideals are fueling the technological project, but that the technological project itself takes on the function of a religious ideal driving culture on its own terms.

The flip that I’m describing corresponds to the transmutation of Christianity through the 19th century into the secular techno-faith of Western modernity. In this transmutation, traditionally religious and theological categories are immanentized or secularized. This is perhaps most evident when we consider the story that came to be told to frame technology’s role in society. So, for example, in this transmutation, history retains its essentially linear, purpose-driven character, but instead of being ordered toward the realization of the heavenly kingdom of God, it is ordered toward an earthly utopia. This ordering of history is understood not as the work of Providence, but of Progress. Just as providence was understood as God’s work in directing history toward the realization of his heavenly kingdom, so Progress was understood as a similarly inexorable force driving history toward a determined, utopian end. Finally, and crucially, the grace of God, the operative power at work in the world to effect the arrival of God’s kingdom, is transmuted into the power of technology. It is the technological enterprise that powers Progress toward Utopia, just as it had been the operations of grace that in God’s providence directed us toward the kingdom of God.

The late historian of technology, Leo Marx, came at this from a different angle, but likewise concluded that through the 19th century technology became not a means to an end, but an end in itself. During this time, “the simple republican formula for generating progress by directing improved technical means to societal ends was imperceptibly transformed into a quite different technocratic commitment to improving ‘technology’ as the basis and the measure of — as all but constituting — the progress of society.”⁴ (Note: that is small-r republican, as in the political philosophy, not capital-R Republican, as in the political party. I know you know this, I always feel compelled to clarify.)

Christian Schussele’s “Men of Progress,” completed in 1862, illustrates the shift. The pantheon of “great men” is not composed of philosophers or statesmen or civic leaders, nor even of “men of science.” These are all inventors, including Cyrus McCormick, Charles Goodyear, Samuel Colt, and Elias Howe. And they are all contemplating Morse’s telegraph.

Christian Schussele’s Men of Progress (1862).

What Marx is describing, when we take into account the long history of the entanglement of technology and religion, and how the religious and technological elements flipped in the hierarchical ordering of the pair, is the ascendency of a new faith, or in light of Nye’s work, a new civil religion.

No painting, to my knowledge, better captures the spirit of the religion of technology in its distinctly American manifestation quite as well (or ominously) as John Gast’s “American Progress,” painted in 1872.

John Gast’s American Progress (1872).

Study the painting for a few moments. Its meaning is not hard to discern. It is the ideology of Manifest Destiny rendered visually. But what I would emphasize for our purposes here, is the degree to which this ideology incorporated technological advance. The significance of the painting comes fully into view only through the lens of the religion of technology, and when we recognize that the religion of technology had become America’s civil religion.

A civil religion may have a variety of social functions. It may serve as a binding agent for the body politic. Nye argues as much for the role of the technological sublime in American culture. Relatedly, it can point a culture at something external to and larger than any of its individual members or distinct groups out of which the whole is composed. In other words, it supplies a purpose that can inspire and drive the collective aspirations of a people. (The question which this might have already raised for you and which you should tuck away for just a moment is this: What happens when a civil religion loses its hold on a society?)

But maybe it’s hard for many of us now to imagine the degree to which the religion of technology functioned to bind and to inspire in just this way through the mid-19th to at least the mid-twentieth century. The next section is meant to convey something of this reality by considering a very specific cultural form that flourished precisely within that time frame: World’s Fairs and Expositions.

5. The religion of technology peaked in 1939.

The year 1939 may seem oddly specific. I choose it not because it marked the beginning of the Second World War, which will culminate with the detonation of two atomic bombs, events which indeed troubled faith in the religion of technology and thus contributed to the process of secularization. Rather, I chose 1939 because that was the year the New York World’s Fair opened.

The modern world’s fairs and expositions date back to London’s 1851 Great Exhibition housed in Crystal Palace, which was conceived by Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert. Throughout the late-19th and early-20th century, a number of notable fairs were held in the United States and were attended by millions of people. These fairs were suffused with religious meaning, and they may be best understood as the great pilgrimage sites of the religion of technology, where belief came to be sustained and encouraged.

“Man’s temples typify his concepts. I cherish the thought that America stands on the threshold of a great awakening. The impulse which this Phantom City will give to American culture cannot be overestimated. The fact that such a wonder could rise in our midst is proof that the spirit is with us.”

That is the journalist Fredrick F. Cook writing about the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. If up to this point the concept of the religion of technology has remained rather abstract and vague to you, perhaps that will help solidify the idea and the hold that it had on the public imagination.

Or consider Henry Adams, who claimed that he “professed the religion of the World’s Fairs.” Adams visited a handful of fairs and expositions, in the US and abroad, during his lifetime, including the 1893 Chicago fair, and considered them indispensable to his education.⁵

The religion of the World’s Fairs, which Adams professed, was the religion of technology, and his incisive but also ambivalent reflections on what he observed at the fairs, particularly at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, eloquently expressed the fraught possibility that this new religion was, at the turn of the 20th century, supplanting the old religion. Adams, who was a man of religious sensibility but not of religious faith, memorably frames his analysis as the case of “the Virgin and the Dynamo.” Here is Adams, writing in the third person, reflecting on his experience at the hall housing 40-foot tall dynamos (or electrical generators) in language that clearly evokes the technological sublime:

“To Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as early Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring — scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breath further for respect of power — while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame. Before the end, one began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.”

American president William McKinley proclaimed that “expositions are timekeepers of progress.” “They record the world’s advancement,” he went on to say. “They stimulate the energy, enterprise, and intellect of the people and quicken human genius.” They did so because they were a manifestation of a cultural force that made the fairs possible and expressed itself through them: the religion of technology. Unfortunately for McKinley, they were also where anarchists came to assassinate American presidents. McKinley was killed at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.

The preeminent historian of the World’s Fairs, Robert Rydell, described the religious character of the fairs in his study of American fairs and expositions, All the World’s a Fair:

“America’s world’s fairs resembled religious celebrations in their emphasis on symbols and ritualistic behavior. They provided visitors with a galaxy of symbols that cohered as ‘symbolic universes.’ These constellations, in turn, ritualistically affirmed fairgoer’s faith in American institutions and social organization, evoked a community of shared experience, and formulated responses to questions about the ultimate destiny of mankind in general and of Americans in particular.”

Taking a page from Noble, I would simply add that the fairs did not resemble religious celebrations, they were religious celebrations.

The two American fairs of the 1930s, in Chicago and New York respectively, exemplified this function and were, even more than earlier fairs, explicitly oriented toward inspiring a vision of the future. The theme of the 1939 New York fair was the “World of Tomorrow.” During its two seasons in 1939 and 1940, the fair drew 45 million visitors, which, as Nye notes, even allowing for repeat visitors, constitutes a large percentage of the total population. The exuberance and confidence that characterized this fair, the scope of its vision for the future, the way it compelled the imagination of the public, and how it wielded the barely questioned (yea even religious) authority of science and technology harnessed by government and industry now strikes us as completely unfathomable. It was another world under the sway of a different religious imagination. The utter earnestness of the whole affair is almost cartoonish. To perceive as much is to observe the effects of secularization come for the religion of technology.

6. Secularization comes for the religion of technology

What I have in mind when I say that secularization has come for the religion of technology is relatively straightforward. The religion of technology no longer commands the kind of assent it once did, it no longer animates cultural creativity, nor does it bind a diverse society together under a collective vision for the future. It neither compels nor inspires. It rose to dominance, brought the whole scope of human affairs under its purview, sealed us off from competing sources of meaning, purpose, and value, and then simply exhausted itself leaving a cultural vacuum in its absence.

The motto of the 1933 Chicago “Century of Progress” World’s Fair was “Science Finds — Industry Applies — Man Conforms.” The degree to which that statement will now strike most of us as dystopian suggests the degree to which a process of secularization has eroded the place of the religion of technology in American society.

Another way to see this is to observe the trajectory from Providence to Progress to Innovation. The transition from Providence to Progress marks the process of secularization in relation to Christianity. The transition from Progress to Innovation marks the process of secularization in relation to the religion of technology. Whatever you want to say about Innovation, it does not compel and inspire the way Progress once did.

I’ve spent most of my time in this essay describing the religion of technology and suggesting the scope of its influence. I’ll spend comparatively little time describing its demise. Nye already offers us a couple of hints in his narrative. First, one of the distinct features of the 1939 World’s Fair was how corporations took the lead in the design and execution of the fair. As I wrote some years ago, at the 1939 Fair,

the religion of technology was effectively incorporated. American corporations presented themselves as the builders of the techno-utopian city. With the cooperation of government agencies, the corporations would wield the breathtaking power of technology to create a perfect, rationally planned and yet democratic consumer society. Thus was the religion of technology enlisted by the marketing departments of American corporations.

The result may be glimpsed in Nye’s final chapter in which he describes the consumer’s sublime exemplified by the experience that is Las Vegas. Whatever you may think of the religion of technology in its ascendent form, its consumerist turn amounted to a diminishment of its cultural power.

Additionally, the advent of nuclear weapons and the specter of a nuclear apocalypse cast a shadow over the technological project that rendered its utopian pretensions far more suspect. By the late 20th century, the environmental and human costs of the technological project were becoming all the more evident as well. The millennium did not arrive and, to many, it began to seem as if we were heading in the opposite direction.

Perhaps most importantly, however, I would argue that the religion of technology was always fundamentally unstable. Technology is a means to an end. The moment it became an end in itself, that is to say, the moment technology became the dominant partner in the religion of technology and took up the role of civil religion, at that moment our present moment became inevitable. When the religion of technology drives a culture, that culture, to riff on Thoreau, will eventually find itself directionless, with improved, and sometimes barely improved or even unimproved, means to nonexistent ends. It will eventually find itself fruitlessly focused on the incremental optimization of quantifiable measures of little consequence. It will eventually find itself in a crisis of meaning and characterized by various degrees of alienation and polarization.

I began this post with the (now laughable) intent of offering a few brief comments on Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto published in October of last year. That conversation now belongs to another age of the discourse, but here’s all that I will add to the many words that have already been written.

I would frame the manifesto as a revivalist sermon, or more specifically perhaps, a jeremiad, calling for repentance and a return to the religion of technology. Such a sermon is a response to the process of secularization, which has accelerated in the last decade.

When secularization comes for the religion of technology, you may also expect to see the rise of reformers calling for changes within the parameters of the religion. When technologists find themselves repenting of their previous work and calling for more ethical technology, you are dealing with a reform movement within the tradition. For what it’s worth, Andreessen’s sermon may also be characterized as a counter-reformation tract.

The secularization of the religion of technology as a relatively coherent civil religion with an assured place in the social order also creates a context for the proliferation of sects within the religion, none of them compelling wide adherence and all of them now appearing to the general public as curious, possibly disturbing oddities. Some of these sects will have apocalyptic tendencies and will have a proclivity to splinter along increasingly arcane lines. Other sects will take a seemingly even more radical tact in seeking to restore the fortunes of the old religion. (That is my commentary on the Open AI/Sam Altman/EA/e-acc affairs.)

To speak about the secularization of the religion of technology is not to suggest, as I hope is clear, that there are no true believers left. Quite the contrary. Only, as Taylor suggested in his theory of secularization, that the conditions in which they hold and espouse their beliefs have changed. To speak of the secularization of the religion of technology is simply to acknowledge that a once dominant cultural force has receded. It is no longer taken for granted and one cannot appeal to its authority.

I myself am not a prophet. So I will make no particular predictions about where we go from here. Mostly, I hope others find this analysis useful as they seek to make sense of our moment in ways that are constructive. On the whole, though, I’d argue that it is good that we have come to this place as we were always bound to. The question is simply whether we can make productive use of the space afforded by this process of secularization to imagine new techno-social configurations that do not elevate technology to a religious category so that it might serve more proper human ends. Time will tell.

1. The poster-boy for both of these developments is, of course, the Elizabethan statesman and PR man for modern techno-science, Francis Bacon. David Noble: “Bacon is typically revered as the greatest prophet of modern science, but, as Lewis Mumford rightly insisted, for Bacon that always meant ‘science as technology.’ Bacon viewed science not simply as a speculative enterprise but as one rooted in the practical arts and dedicated to utility and invention—‘the relief of man’s estate.’”

2. E.g., Nye: “As technological achievements became central to July Fourth, the American sublime fused with religion, nationalism, and technology, diverting in practice significantly from European theory [about the nature of the sublime]. It ceased to be a philosophical idea and became submerged in practice. In keeping with democratic tradition, the American sublime was for all—women as well as men. Rather than the result of solitary communion with nature, the sublime became an experience organized for crowds of tourists. Rather than treat the sublime as a part of a transcendent philosophy, Americans merged it with revivalism. Not limited to nature, the American sublime embraced technology. Where Kant had reasoned that the awe inspired by a sublime object made men aware of their moral worth, the American sublime transformed the individual’s experience of immensity and awe into a belief in national greatness.”

3. The term social imaginary is Taylor’s way of getting at the fact that most of us make our way in the world by virtue of some imagined/intuited/felt picture of reality rather than a set of explicitly intellectual propositions. In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor argued that “there are important differences between social imaginary and social theory.”

4. This quotation is from an essay titled “The Idea of ‘Technology’ and Postmodern Pessimism” collected in Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism.

5. Adams’s reflections on the fairs and expositions are found in his classic autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams.