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Technology 191

that we begin to see an erosion of the classical division between the base,
“mechanical arts” and the lofty, contemplative powers of natural philosophy.
And it was only in the nineteenth century that people began referring to
technology in the singular, an abstraction that was furthered over the course of
the twentieth century with the rise of large-scale, increasingly bureaucratized
networks of scientists, engineers, planners, and managers working in trade,
industry, and government (see Marx 1991; Mitcham 1994).
This “modern constitution” (Latour 1993) emerged in the shadow of
an elaborate collusion between post-Reformation Christianity and natural
philosophy, which, coupled with the history of colonial conquest and
Western technological supremacy, had dramatic, global consequences. On
the one hand, it consolidated the disenchantment of nature, rendering it
an inert cosmos, existing apart from and subject to human inspection and
calculated manipulation. On the other hand, it restricted the religious sphere
to “matters of the heart,” safely segregated from politics and public life and
also from the performative, epistemological, and instrumental prerogatives of
modern techno-scientific practice. One exemplary contribution to this effort
was provided by Calvinist theology, which denied the intermediate power
of bishops, kings, saints, angels, and even the Virgin Mary and, in so doing,
radically distanced both human subjects and the natural order from their
absolute, unknowable, sovereign creator. The founding fathers of modern
European science and natural philosophy, such as Galileo, Descartes, Bacon,
and Newton, likewise stood before what they perceived as a disenchanted
natural order. By overturning the existing Thomist, neo-Platonic, and magical
understandings of nature as a vast web of resemblances, sympathetic rapports,
or final causes, these “secular theologians” transformed nature into “mere
matter”: a uniform entity, extended in space—and therefore amenable to
precise measurement and controlled observation—and organized by universal
principles of mechanical cause and effect, action and reaction (Funkenstein
1989). But as Bronislaw Szerszynski argues, the disenchantment of nature
did not simply entail the “removal” of the sacred. Rather, it heralded a new
way of ordering and conceptualizing the sacred sphere itself:

the very constitution of the world as inert matter behaving according to
mathematical laws in absolute space required a specific transformation
of religious meanings, one that involved a newly literal approach not just
to matter, but also to God. The melancholy of the modern world, the
vast gulf between the sublime and the painful, lonely and finite world of
humans, is thus the result not of the abandonment of the sacred, but of
the adoption of a particular ordering of it.
(Szerszynski 2005: 48–9)