Technological Activity

[Terence]

Reading Otto's story about hands, I am reminded of the
hammer. The hammer I submit is not an extension of the human
hand. It is a tool. Perhaps the most important tool in the
history of man, the clock being the most important machine,
and a better tool, as every carpenter knows, than the
simple, inflexible, zero/one machine we call a computer.  

Some Luddite stuff:  


"The regularization of time, the increase in mechanical
power, the multiplication of goods,  the contraction of
time and space, the standardization of performance and
product, the  transfer of skill to automata, and the
increase in
collective interdependence --these, then, are the chief
characteristics of our machine civilization. They are the
basis of the particular forms of life and modes of
expression that distinguish Western Civilization, at least
in degree, from the various earlier civilizations that
preceded it.
		 Lewis Mumford, Technic and Civilization, p. 281  



"The technical order is the middle term; it carries man's
impulse, greatly modified and magnified, into nature and
transmits natural influences to man in controlled and
altered forms."
from Philip Wagner, The Human Use of the Earth, p. 88.


"Man once lived in a natural environment, using
technological
instruments to get along better in it, protect himself in
it, and make use of It. Now, man lives in a technological
environment and the old natural world supplies only his
space and raw materials. Ultimately, the technological
environment thus
presumes to replace ALL of the natural environment,
performing all its
functions."
from Jacques Ellul, The Technological System, p. 46



It is curious how the preoccupations of the hive fill us,
driving out all memory of the universe into which we were
born. Perhaps the whole human race may be said to suffer
from amnesia, not
knowing whence it came or why it finds itself here. But we
inhabitants of the hive suffer from double amnesia, one case
within the other,
and are removed one stage further from the ultimate reality
in
which we have our beginning and our end. We have forgotten
that we live in
the universe, and that our civilization itself is merely an
elaboration of the palm-leaf hat that one of our ancestors
tried on ten thousand years ago to ward off the sun, a more
complicated
and ample version that now not only wards off the sun but
shuts out
the view. We have lost ourselves within it.
	from Louis J. Halle, Spring in Washington (quoted in
Wendell Berry, A continuous Harmony, p. 15-16)



The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
	Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur"


But, 


"I worship the hammer"  
		--Sandburg

Can this satire, in the tradition of Swift, have value if
technology is not a Human activity?