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technology, education, and media

Here are a few more quotes in line with my post earlier today...

"Technology is good, as a means for the human spirit and for human ends.  But technocracy, that is to say, technology so understood and so worshipped as to exclude any superior wisdom and any other understanding than that of calculable phenomena, leaves in human life nothing but relationships of force, or at best those of pleasure, and necessarily ends up in a philosophy of domination.  A technocratic society is but a totalitarian one."  (Jacques Maritain, Education at the Crossroads, 1943, quoted in The Year of Our Lord 1943)

"The severance of ethics from fixed values and standards, ardently promoted by John Dewey and the naturalists, has brought moral chaos.  Theological sanctions discarded, the modern man covets only social, and sometimes only individual, approval of his behavior.  The sense of ethical imperative is evaporating from one range of life after another.  The obligation to durable principles is no longer insisted upon.  The soul of the twentieth-century man no long feeds on objective and eternal norms, but is content with ethical leftovers."  (Carl F. H. Henry, Christian Personal Ethics, 1957)

"The standardizing influence of the Ministry of Education has weighed heavily on these colleges, and their development illustrates what it means to secularize a community, not by officially denying its religion, but by so departmentalizing it that it is deprived of any overt influence upon the community's conscious purpose and activities.  Christianity is emasculated of its intellectual relevance.  It remains a vehicle of spirituality and moral guidance at the individual level perhaps; at the communal level it is little more than an expression of sentimentalized togetherness."  (Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind, 1963)

"With an elite providing the arbitrary absolutes, not just TV but the general apparatus of the mass media can be a vehicle for manipulation.  There is no need for collusion or a plot.  All that is needed is that the world view of the elite and the world view of the central news media coincide.  ... many of those who decide what is news do have the common, modern, humanist world view we have described... It is natural that they act upon this viewpoint, with varying degrees of consciousness... Their world view is the grid which determines their presentation." (Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live, 1976)



*Underlining added by me.  

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