Ours is a world of proliferating “ologies”. ‘Aetiology’, ‘cognitology’, and ‘onomasiology’ are a few new ones for me. Recently two ‘ologies’ appeared linked in a sentence I read that now unsettles my memory: “Technology defines ontology”.
The word ‘technology’ is well understood; not so with ‘ontology’. The latter is the study of the nature of being, basically ‘what is life’. Perhaps without realizing it heirs to the Judeo-Christian heritage have mastered ontology in their own right, believing as they do in the existence of God, the unity of Truth and natural law. For them being and its nature are irrevocably defined in those first lines of Genesis. To suggest then that technology can redefine being borders on anathema.
Anathema or not, such a suggestion is understandable. One has only to consider how technology determines – and therefore defines – the way we live. In medicine, agriculture, teaching, manufacturing, communications, it facilitates and effectively decides how we do things. It’s easy to see how those who do not believe in a Supreme Being and whose lives are void of transcendent purpose might come to regard technology as the ultimate power. Can’t technology claim its own purpose, its own raison d’etre? This thought is particularly chilling when one considers that artificial intelligence can be developed to the point where without human input technology can engender its own offspring.
Technology may accommodate the world’s path forward, but it doesn’t determine the destination. This noble endeavor is the domain of the human spirit, a spirit which – as Genesis immortalizes – was breathed into us and is guided by God. Two diverging mindsets have arisen in the beginning of this third millennium. While, ironically, both claim freedom as their cause. For one it is ‘freedom for’ and for the other ‘freedom from’. The first is where we exploit technology to liberate us from restraints that frustrate our fuller human development. The second is where we allow technology to remove these restraints so that we might abandon the path to fuller development. The former leads to real freedom, the latter to compliant servitude.
Readers may wonder what prompts this ontological reflection. Last week the trustees of the National Catholic Community Foundation approved a request for a significant distribution to the African Sisters Education Collaborative (ASEC). ASEC was established in 1999 by four Catholic universities in Pennsylvania. and their religious congregations: the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Philadelphia; the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of Scranton; the Sisters of Saint Francis of Philadelphia; and the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. ASEC’s mission is to support the service of religious sisters in Africa by providing them educational and technological training.
There are an estimate of 40,000 Catholic nuns in Sub-Sahara Africa and the majority lack higher education credentials. In spite of this, as ASEC’s website states, these highly trusted women continue to address many of the serious development challenges in Africa today. “From improvements in healthcare, education and infrastructure to increasing access to clean water and sanitation and reducing poverty, African nuns are affecting change on the local, regional and even national levels.” Now in ten African countries ASEC uses computer labs and other technology to provide these nuns with access to education and professional training.
Africa! That continent once called dark now through the enlightened inspiration of nuns in Pennsylvania illuminates ontology’s defining power over technology.