Thanks to @1TrueCuencoism and @BenWoodfinden for this deeply thoughtful, ecumenical and cross-partisan new journal on Canadian thought and culture @2067Journal. It's off to a great start. 2067journal.ca/sources-of-cu… In this piece, I argue that today, technology is omnipresent and it increasingly embodies a view of human purpose in its design. The question before us now is whether that view remains in service of human ends or is reorganizing them around technology as an end in itself, in its own image. This prevailing picture is that of the progressive ethos of transgressiveness, change for its own sake, all in service of the desire for ever more choice, autonomy, and the removal of all limits. It is itself the product of the philosophical picture of the world we inherited from the scientific revolution: the view that every complex whole is made up of infinitely small parts, and that all higher order levels of pattern and physical composition – from the social sciences, human behaviour, and the mind, to biology and chemistry – are reducible to the movement of ever tinier parts according to the laws of nature, which exert a deterministic force on the world and are explained by fundamental physics. It is a view of the world that sees it as ultimately inanimate, like a machine, which would come to influence how we design and deploy technology. On this telling, everything – and increasingly even humans – can be dissected, and fragmented, and reconstituted for any end, principally through the application of this scientific vision of the world via technology, and all without any real downside. This was not a necessary framing, but a particular philosophical vision made attractive by the power it promised. A pivotal figure in the scientific revolution, Francis Bacon - like Marx centuries later in political thought - would turn the rationale for the pursuit of wisdom on its head, replacing wisdom with knowledge, and the end of contemplation with the goal of greater power over nature for “the relief of man’s estate.” This Baconian dream in which knowledge becomes mastery and nature material for human use is the picture we are enthralled with today. However, the cracks are beginning to emerge in this picture, and in the cultural impact of the technology produced in its image. Scientists are increasingly finding that the atomistic approach is limited. Developments in quantum mechanics posit a realm of indeterminate energy and physical properties at the most basic level of reality, questioning determinism and atomism; and a deeper look at biology and chemistry, and thermodynamics suggest emergent properties, and that causation can also be exerted top-down by macro-structures - not just bottom-up by billiard ball style causation and a reductionism that suggests humans and all complex entities are mere clumps of atoms and molecules. What’s more, we find in our societies the corrosive effects of the application of this atomistic view of science. The result is a highly liberal, anything goes society – reflected in the lifestyles and attitudes of the scions of Silicon Valley. The use of technology to remove all limits in the name of personal choice is undermining all the mediating institutions and stable bonds that hold us together – from family, to community and nation – in favour of a globalized world where people are constantly, and more closely connected to strangers and digital forms of reality than their next door neighbours. Those mediating institutions, when vibrant - and not the digital world - are in fact what the best science shows make us happiest and deeply fulfilled. At its core, this utopian technological view that would refashion everything in its own image is a failure of love and acceptance, in the sense of receiving oneself as a being with a nature and using one’s agency to perfect rather than transgress it. The myth of Prometheus is like a Rorschach test for how one thinks about, and approaches the design and use of technology. Seen as a story of triumph by enthusiasts, I think the lesson is in fact very different. Prometheus is not a figure of wisdom. He is a figure of rebellion against reality itself, and that rebellion, however technologically sophisticated, ends in mutilation and misery. He seeks transcendence through theft, mastery, and technique. He represents the belief that humans become most fully themselves not through gratitude, discipline, or the cultivation of what they have been given, but through revolt against limit, and the refusal to accept all that is creaturely and finite. At the level of the political, the implications are clear. The Promethean outlook stands for subjectivity, the self-oriented pursuit of wealth, power, glory and honour - not to developing a healthy sense of mutual obligation, virtue over individual licence, or a pursuit of the common good as the conditions in society that allow us all to flourish.