When Catholic priests use wine, wafers, and incantations to embody spiritual ideas, they acknowledge the mystery and the metaphor being used. But experts of Technopoly acknowledge no such overtones or nuances when they use forms, standardized tests, polls, and other machinery to give technical reality to ideas about intelligence, creativity, sensitivity, emotional imbalance, social deviance, or political opinion. They would have us believe that technology can plainly reveal the true nature of some human condition or belief because the score, statistic, or taxonomy has given it technical form.
Neil Postman, Technopoly, p. 90
If Technopoly is the cult of technology (the love and acceptance of technology exalted to an idolatrous/religious level), then we have to be on the lookout for its sacraments. We can take two views of the idea of what a sacrament is based on classic Reformed theology. First, in the classical sense of the word, sacramentum refers to an oath of allegiance taken by a soldier to his king and/or country. In other words, participating in the sacrament consecrates the participant to the service of the one administering the sacrament. Second, sacraments are ‘visible words.’ That is, they are visible signs pointing to invisible realities.
If you apply this understanding of the sacraments to what Postman is saying you may get the following (relating to the two points above): First, as we’ve already seen (HERE), individual technologies carry with them certain imperatives. They, in some sense, say to us, ‘Do this and live.’ If this is truly the case, and I think it is, we must be mindful of the fact that those technologies may call upon us to pledge allegiance if we are going to successfully live in this world. Second, the tangible objects of technology may in fact be visible signs of invisible realities. The physical presence of an iPhone in my pocket is a visible sign of an invisible reality about myself and the world around me.
I am not going into specific analysis here, but I want to make one particular point. We do not have answers to where our technologies will lead us, or whether they are necessarily good or bad (or a mixture of the two). We fail only when we neglect to ask questions of those technologies; and these two categories relating to sacraments propose two vital questions: where is my allegiance as I use this tool (or it uses me)? and What invisible realities (about myself, the world, and even heaven) does it point to?
