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Technology 189

other “animals” with whom we remain in traffic), and also technologies of
enchantment (such as art, music, dance, rhetoric, gifts, and all the other
‘technical’ strategies used by human beings to exert control over the
thoughts and actions of other human beings; Gell 1988: 6–7). However,
pace Gell’s imaginative taxonomy of technological forms, what is left to say
here about the place of “religion”? There are two readily available answers.
One approach involves tracking the actions and beliefs of particular social
groups, distinguished by their religious commitments, affinities, and habits,
who either use or refuse particular technologies in their efforts to achieve
such goals as spiritual purification, missionary conquest, salvation, or the
expiation of sin. So, for instance, we might want to know more about the
theological grounds that lead the Amish to avoid zippers and automobiles,
or Orthodox Jews not to use elevators on the Sabbath, or the reasons
why Pentecostal preachers so heartily embrace microphones and electric
guitars. This first approach, we should note, posits a narrowly instrumental
relationship between religion and technology. The latter is conceived here
as little more than a realm of mechanical devices and material objects that
can be embraced, rejected, or avoided by otherwise integral communities of
religious actors.
A second approach would focus not so much on the uses of individual
technologies among particular religious groups but rather on the larger
discursive framework within which one can locate and evaluate the entire
realm of technology within the ethical and cosmic order: that is to say, to
define the place of technology itself within the religious imagination. So, for
instance, one might treat as “quasi-religious,” if not explicitly theological, the
popular forms of “faith” in technological progress, which see technology as
the guarantor of convenience and abundance and of physiological and civic
improvement. Pointing to the vast array of modern devices and technical
procedures in industrial production, communication, medicine, or urban
planning, technological prognosticators such as Bill Gates, Alvin Toffler, or
Nicholas Negroponte can thus be likened to religious prophets, who invoke
an imminent, salvific future free from toil, disease, forgetfulness, and other
bodily catastrophes. Such progress narratives are structured by an even
deeper faith in machines themselves: a faith that they can and will “do their
job,” so to speak. Others, however, see the progress narrative as little more
than a blind, and dangerous, belief in technological transcendence (e.g.,
Noble 1997) or as the mark of humanity’s defiance of a higher, “sacred” law
or, even worse, as the work of the devil. One need look no further than the
cautionary tales of fate visited on Icarus or Prometheus, or in a comparable
Biblical narrative, the builders of the tower of Babel (Szerszynski 2005: 52).
However, the most trenchant, and theologically the most important, critiques
of the progress narrative are found in the works of Martin Heidegger (1977);