{"id":81974,"date":"2019-05-28T09:00:47","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T13:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=81974"},"modified":"2019-05-28T06:59:35","modified_gmt":"2019-05-28T10:59:35","slug":"fpr-jeffrey-bilbro-what-are-people-for-control-or-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=81974","title":{"rendered":"(FPR) Jeffrey Bilbro&#8211;What Are People For? Control or Love?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The least-discussed chapter in Patrick Deneen\u2019s much-discussed <em>Why Liberalism Failed<\/em> is\u2014I would venture\u2014\u201cTechnology and the Loss of Liberty.\u201d Similarly, Rod Dreher <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theamericanconservative.com\/dreher\/smartphones-are-our-soma\/\">has lamented<\/a> that relatively few readers or reviewers discuss the technology chapter in <em>The Benedict Option<\/em>. These oversights are unfortunate because our current cultural and political climate is unintelligible without an adequate account of the role technology, and particularly digital technology, plays in enabling and shaping our quest for freedom.<\/p>\n<p>Deneen\u2019s focus is on how the political ideology of liberalism pushes societies to develop technologies that enable autonomous individuals to satisfy their desires, although these technologies often backfire and leave us more lonely and enslaved. In <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ivpress.com\/transhumanism-and-the-image-of-god\">Transhumanism and the Image of God: Today\u2019s Technology and the Future of Christian Discipleship<\/a><\/em>, Jacob Shatzer explores the inverse of this dynamic: the digital technologies with which we live subtly yet powerfully shape us into autonomous, liberal subjects. Such technologies habituate us through what Shatzer terms \u201cliturgies of control.\u201d These liturgies create the plausibility structures necessary to sustain the myth of liberalism: that we are autonomous individuals capable of arranging the world to fulfill our appetites. The arguments that Deneen and Shatzer advance are really two sides of the same coin; as one interpreter of Marshall McLuhan put it (perhaps <a href=\"https:\/\/quoteinvestigator.com\/2016\/06\/26\/shape\/\">paraphrasing Churchill<\/a>), \u201cWe make our tools, and then our tools make us.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.frontporchrepublic.com\/2019\/05\/what-are-people-for-control-or-love\/\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">What Are People For? Control or Love? by Jeffrey Bilbro | <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/6JH9WTSzZE\">https:\/\/t.co\/6JH9WTSzZE<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/xyfZp5Xqz6\">pic.twitter.com\/xyfZp5Xqz6<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Front Porch Republic (@FrontPorchRepub) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/FrontPorchRepub\/status\/1133296929780195328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">May 28, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The least-discussed chapter in Patrick Deneen\u2019s much-discussed Why Liberalism Failed is\u2014I would venture\u2014\u201cTechnology and the Loss of Liberty.\u201d Similarly, Rod Dreher has lamented that relatively few readers or reviewers discuss the technology chapter in The Benedict Option. These oversights are<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=81974\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,92,168,95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-books","category-ethics-moral-theology","category-science-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81974"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81979,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81974\/revisions\/81979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}