European Journal of Science and Theology, March 2006, Vol.2, No.

1, 79-83

BOOK REVIEW

Power Failure. Christianity in the Culture of Technology

Albert Borgmann
Brazos Press, Michigan (2003), 144 pp, ISBN 1-58743-058-4

Many of us share the intuition that contemporary life is uniquely

inhospitable to Christianity. (p.65) This radical affirmation is the starting point
and the guiding thread of this book, written by one of the most important
founders of philosophy of technology, whose more systematic book on this
matter is Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: a Philosophical
Inquiry. This Power Failure is a difficult book, not only in its reading, but also
in its understanding. The reason takes root, surely, in the fact that it is not a book
conceived as a unitary totality. On the contrary, the book is the result of a
compilation of eight independent essays linked and updated by Borgmann for
this volume. Although often it is difficult to find the underlying sense of the
whole, from my viewpoint that above mentioned affirmation is the concern that,
in one way or another, impelled this aged professor of philosophy (Ph.D. in
Munich in 1963) to the edition of this book. Although he is not a theologian, he
is a Christian philosopher who has wanted to rethink from his experience and
knowledge widely recognized in the academic world the link that exists
between Christianity and the technologically structured society of the advanced
countries. And, in this sense, for him it is undeniable that there is a connection
between the progress of technology and the decline of faith. (p. 7) It might be
thought for this type of affirmation Borgmann is a technological pessimist.
Nevertheless, he himself wants to move away from two extremes: from an
ingenuous optimism and from a vain luddism. He says: We should neither try
to demolish technology nor run away from it. W can restrain it and must redeem
it. (p. 8)
In any case: why according to Borgmann there is this
incompatibility between Christianity and technology? It is correct to notice that
at the beginning of the industrialization, but very especially in the first half of
the XXth Century, theologians had to face the problem of the relations between an
increasingly technological culture and the Christian message. It might say that
Power Failure takes part of the same reflexive spirit. Those who still see
technology as applied science will think it is odd that an opposition could exist
between technology and Christianity. It is important to notice that those that are
unfamiliar with the historical, sociological and philosophical analyses of
technology, tend to consider it to be a simple mean or neutral instrument,
 Book review/European Journal of Science and Theology 2 (2006), 1, 79-83

because they believe technology is simply applied science, as Mario Bunge

conceives it (M. Bunge, Technol. Cult. 7(3) (1966) 329). Currently, this vision
every time is more discarded, because it has been demonstrated that technology
embody values and mentalities.
Nevertheless, Borgmann moves away from conceptions instrumentalists
and considers, rather, that technology is meant to designate not just an
ensemble of machines and procedures, but a type of culture, the kind that is
characteristic of the advanced industrial societies (p. 7). This means that the
problematic of technology for Christianity is the mentality or the cultural
structure that technology implies. To explain the typical structure of our
technological culture, Borgmann proposes the device paradigm. This paradigm
is the result of a dual circumstance: technology or device paradigm is the union
of commodity and machinery. The former alludes to the fact that one of the
distinctive features of technology is the availability of commodities. The latter
introduces the concept of machinery (or hardware), because this mass
availability of commodities is possible thanks to a machinery or material body
(p. 17-18). This is what characterizes to our culture: it is structured round about
the device paradigm; that is to say, round about the consumption of commodities
through machinery.
Borgmann, however, thinks this paradigm is not clear for all people. That
is why he affirms: and yet it seems to me that contemporary culture is
essentially blind to itself. It is ignorant of its essential character. (p.11) In fact,
now things have been replaced by devices. A thing, in the sense in which I
want to use the term, has an intelligible and accessible character and calls forth
skilled and actives human engagement. A thing requires practice while a device
invites consumption. (p. 31) At the end of the day, for Borgmann the question
is precisely to turn to focal things and practices, moving away from devices.
Focal things and practices imply an engagement that does not exist in the mere
consumption of commodities. In this sense, the communities of celebration
(round about focal things and practices) are a need for our individualized and
atomised technological culture. These communities of celebration (including
religion) must be supported for State (p. 58).
But in order to turn to focal things and practices and to meet us around
about these communities of celebration, we must re-discover the moral
significance of material culture. We no longer can keep the character of our
advanced societies (the device paradigm) concealed and invisible. It is needed to
make explicit its way of acting in society and of beginning to reflect on its moral
significance. This is necessary because the factor that most decisively channels
the daily course of life is not moral theory but material culture. (p. 24) Thus,
assessing the moral significance of the material culture, then, comes in large
part to asking what the moral consequences of the rule of the paradigm device
are. (p.32)

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The crucial problem of the relation between Christianity and the new
device paradigm takes root here. What does this paradigm consist? Why is it
opposite or inhospitable to Christianity? The responses to these questions are
centred round about the concepts of grace, contingency, poverty and
frailty. Thus, for Borgmann the indifference of contemporary culture to
Christianity is, theologically speaking, a problem of grace, of Gods presence in
our world. (p. 65) Therefore, if our culture dominated and canalised by the
device paradigm is blind to Christianity it is because its own structure makes
impossible to understand the need of Divine Grace. Why? A phrase of our
author is very clear on this matter: Grace is always undeserved and often
unforethinkable, and a culture of transparency and control systematically
reduces, if it does not occlude, the precinct of grace. (p. 65) In this sense, it
might say that Weltanschauung incorporated into device paradigm is
incompatible with conception of the human underlying to Christian theological
anthropology. Although Borgmann does not express himself in these terms, it
seems to me that this is what it wants to indicate when it introduces the concepts
of contingency, poverty and frailty.
In fact, in repeated occasions our author express the idea of that
technology tries to liberate the human from illness, famine, ignorance,
immobility, etc. As Borgmann states: The promise of technology is one of
material and social liberty, the promise of disburdenment from pains and limits
of things and the claims and foibles of humans. (p. 120) From my viewpoint, in
certain way, this is the Biblical Christian message, although with differences.
Thus, often God's Kingdom was confused in history with an earthly paradise
established by political forces and technological advances, similar to the Marxs
communist paradise. Although, truly, Christianity accepts all what it improves
the conditions of life of people, his message goes further away. The God's
Kingdom is another much deeper and religious thing. As the theologian Olegario
Gonzlez de Cardedal affirms:
The Kingdom is neither a resultant fact of nature, nor a fruit of culture. It
is not the kingdom of the universal peace, not neither of the ends, nor the
alternative society, nor the realized Utopia. The ideals of Illustration, Kant,
Marx, socialism, capitalism and Bloch have born of the heart of the humanity,
affected by the kindness and the sin of the world. As expressions of kingdom of
the human have the glory and the proper limits the human. God's kingdom
preached by Jesus is a spiritual resultant process of the divine plan and not of a
mere ripeness of the human conscience. [] God's kingdom comes to life of the
human, when God becomes definitively real for him, for the reception of Jesus
word and the assent of the offered love. The Kingdom is what happens to the
human when he integrates Christ, is left to encourage for his dynamism, answers
to his requirements and lives before God as him. (O.G. de Cardedal,
Cristologa, BAC, Madrid, 2001, 48, 52)

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In this sense, Christian message does not reduce to liberation from poverty
and misery physical. On the contrary, it also is a message about frailty and
contingency radical of the human. Borgmann makes clear something similar
but not equal when he does a distinction between brute poverty and
advanced poverty. Thus, whereas brute poverty is the poverty and misery
physical of developing countries, advanced poverty is the lack of untamed life
and of intimacy with living things (p. 106) and the incapacity to be moved by
misery (p. 105). Nevertheless, Borgmann seems to have left in the surface what
means poverty, contingency and human frailty. He does not put it in the
ontological sphere, but he remains more in the sphere of practice (of fortitude
and of morality): This is to experience and to take human frailty seriously. Such
serious attention, however, should not segue in the attempt to furnish an
ontological and transcendental proof for the necessary or universal debility of
human existence. Not only is such ethical foundationalism doomed to fail in
point to theory. More important, it tends to go hand and hand with a
soteriological imperialism. (p. 107) It seems to me that Borgmann does not
realize that frailty and poverty, which the advanced societies experience, takes as
a foundation the ontological contingency about which he does not want to
think theoretically. Truly, the religious experience does not reduce to the
experience of contingency, but the former cannot to be understood without the
ontological substratum that the latter provides to it. The metaphysical character
of the human, that is to say, his experience of finitude and ontological
contingency and the search of the Absolute, is what does of Religion an
universal fact: The universality of religious fact in space and in time, which
relates to the exigency of Absolute that we have analyzed more above, is in its
turn and in a bigger degree, one of the most evident and surprising expressions
of metaphysical character of the human. In fact, it is in the religions where is
always concretised the metaphysical exigency of Absolute and this much less of
speculative way (but explicitly) than of a practical way: of a conversion of the
conscience to the divine (R. Jolivet, LHomme mtaphysique, Fayard, Paris,
1958, 20.)
It seems to me that it is precisely this rejection to think in depth the
ontological structure of the human, which does of Power Failure a little
superficial book in its answers. Truly, for Borgmann it is needed to make room
for Christianity (p. 8) in the technological culture. And for that he appeals to a
return to focal things and practices and celebrations communities: The things I
have in mind are good books, musical instruments, athletic equipment, work of
art, and treasures of nature. The practices I am thinking of are those of dining,
running, fishing, gardening, playing instruments, and reciting poetry. On closer
inspection some such thing and a practice are always correlated. These are focal
things and practices in the small and communal celebrations in the large. (p.
124) But from my viewpoint this answer that Borgmann proposes is only
possible if earlier we return to a consideration of ourselves as radically finite.
Justly, it is only possible to make room to Christianity if we take conscience of
that the inner structure of the human is only explained appealing to Divinity.

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Slightly deep answers are the focal things and practices. I believe the problem of
Christianity in our technological societies is such because it does not take
conscience of structure of the human as opened to Divinity. The Jesuit
philosopher Manuel Cabada Castro thinks it is possible and necessary a
philosophical access to God from the humans inner structure: love, thinking,
freedom, will, and, above all, the athematic presence of Infinity in our mind or
soul are only possible to be understood appealing to Divinity, the possibility
condition from them. (M.C. Castro, El Dios que da que pensar. Acceso
filosfico-antropolgico a la divinidad, BAC, Madrid 1999)
The device paradigm has concealed this deep and divine dimension of the
human. That is why, before make room to the communities of celebration, it is
needed to make room to grace (as noted Borgmann), but through experience of
finitude and contingency, and the yearning of the Absolute. Our author is right in
that a culture informed by the device paradigm is deeply inhospitable to grace
and sacrament. The productive side of technology is an enterprise of conquering
and controlling reality. The notions of human incompleteness and deficiency that
signify a primal condition for the advent of grace are mere grist for technological
mills. (p. 127) And precisely these incompleteness and deficiency are needed to
put them in the ontological-metaphysical dimension.
At any rate, this Borgmanns good book is trying to throw light on the
problematic situation of religious experience in a technological society.
Borgmann tries to come to God and to Christianity from the recovery of
experiences with focal things and from communities of celebration through focal
practices. But, from my viewpoint, it is only possible to come to God from God;
that is to say, taking aware of that experience of God is the deepest experience of
the human and that the inner human structure that sometimes astonishes us (and
that has remained concealed under device paradigm) is a reflect of the presence
of God in us. That is why, as distinct from Borgmann, it seems to me that the
solution is more reflective and contemplative than purely practical: the sincere
silence with oneself is more necessary than the noisy celebration with others. In
this way, we can conclude with the words of Karl Rahner: Die Gotteserfahrung
ist die letzte Tief und Radicalitt jeder geistig-personalen Erfahrung, ... und ist
somit gerade die ursprnglich eine Ganzheit der Erfahrung, in der die geistige
Person sich selbst hat und sich selbst berantwortet is. (K. Rahner, Schriften zur
Theologie, IX (1954) 173.)

Professor Jess Romero Moivas

Department of Sociology
Centro Universitario Villanueva
Complutense University of Madrid (Spain)

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