A technology for every ill

Was it the 1970s or the 1980s that gave rise to the slogan: A pill for every ill? The pharmaceutical industry cashed in on the prevalent mood that, whatever the medical problem affecting you, it had the solution in the form of one pill or another.

Many countries, including Malta, bred hordes of pill-popping people. Someone once said the trend became so crazy that it morphed into an attitude of believing there is an ill for every pill.

There were many negative reactions against this mentality even at the highest and most official levels. Emphasis was made on prevention, healthy lifestyles and other strategies aimed at helping us avoid illness so that we could avoid pills. Pills are not our final and ultimate salvation, after all.

However, it seems society has a need to create man-made saviours. Contemporary culture is now burning incense in front of a newer god: technology.

The belief now is that there is a technology for every ill. Humans are now pinning their hope for salvation on technology. This has become the new mantra. There are even technophobes who believe every ill is born by one technology or other. But I believe these are in the minority.

Technophiles and technophobes may be diametrically opposed but they are united in one common belief: technology is powerful and important. Both believe that we shape our tools but they shape us in return. Technology shapes us, our way of being and the way we perceive and organise the world we live in.

Technophiles like Marshall McLuhan forecasted the dawn of a new era thanks to electronic media.

This was to be the era of an idealised global village; the qualitatively enhanced communication would make us more human and humane.

Technophobes like the ancient Chinese sage Tsu Gung had warned us that those who use machines would grow hearts like machines, predicting an age of dehumanisation. Nearer to today, Neil Postman lambasted television as the harbinger of a peek-a-boo world where we become sillier by the minute.

Pope Benedict in Caritas in Veritate, his encyclical letter on integral human development in charity and truth, warns us of the dangerous attitude which considers technology as self-sufficient "when too much attention is given to the 'how' questions, and not enough to the many 'why' questions underlying human activity". (para. 70).

In line with this mentality, I believe that technology becomes an idol, and like all other idols, ends up short-changing us. Though we are the creators of technology, history shows that we can also become the victims of technology. The leaking BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico and the ensuing massive disaster is ample evidence of our potential sense of powerlessness in front of our own creation.

As Fr Federico Lombardi, director of the Holy See press office, noted quite wisely: "This is not the eruption of a volcano, but a relatively small man-made hole in the seabed".

This disaster, together with the 1984 chemical factory explosion in Bhopal, India, or the 1986 meltdown of the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine, show us that technology can become like a cruel slave master when it is manipulated for the service of the lust for money.

In Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict writes that "technology - it is worth emphasising - is a profoundly human reality, ...technology is never merely technology" (para. 69). As he wisely shows, the technological question has become a radically anthro- pological question.

joseph.borg@um.edu.mt