Written by: Stefania Tarasut on April 11, 2014

I tried to summarize The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society by Murray Jardine, but Walter Mead, former President of the Polanyi Society and Professor Emeritus, Illinois State University, does a much better job than I ever could. Mead sums the book up by saying,

Jardine’s discussion is a grand narrative that leads readers from early pagan culture through the various stages of contemporary Western culture with its serious governance problems. He affirms human creativity and outlines how technological advances let to modern styles and standards of living unimaginable in earlier periods. Our capacity for creativity seen in this development has not been adequately guided by a system of morality that provided correctives. We have slipped into the excess of consumer-oriented materialism, which threatens our survival. A solution is desperately needed and Jardine suggests the high virtues represented in the Bible and the best of the Christian tradition- particularly Christian compassion- can provide proper limits and direction.[1]

In other words, when it is all said and done, we need to go back to the Bible and allow it to define our culture and community. People are tired. Communities are broken. Cities are not designed properly. We work too much. Jardine’s point in this book is that the only “possible alternative to this exhausted culture would be a culture based on biblical understanding of God, the world, and humanity because only this understanding can make sense of human creative capacities and their technological manifestation… developing a culture that embodies the virtues of faith, hope, and love… [And] reconstruct face-to-face communities where people actually talk to each other more.”[2]

I like what Jardine says. I think I even agree with him, but I don’t think that he is very realistic in the things he says. His focus is on the individual changes, but the changes he desires are systemic changes. It took us thousands of years to get here… it will take us thousands to go back to the way things used to be. However, you cannot turn back the clock, and I feel like that’s what he is saying… that we somehow need to turn the clock back without turning it back. We cannot keep the technological advances and go back to a simple community life. I don’t know how that would be possible.

I think Jardine gives humanity too much credit… faith; hope and love are not our strong points as a Christian community. Also, which faith tradition would be emphasising in this new Christian culture. Christianity is so divided, we would never agree on anything.

In the conclusion Jardine says, “it is inevitable that sacrifices must be made to build new forms of community and ultimately a new culture. The early Christians often sacrificed their lives; it hardly seems too much to ask present-day Christians to forgo some income to work shorters hours.”[3] That’s something to think about!

About the Author

Stefania Tarasut