We are no longer able to be limited by natural laws observable in the created order. Those laws become merely obstacles to be overcome through technological mastery in order to accomplish our economic or technological ends. This might be one reason why natural law has become forgotten in modern society, not because it truly is irrelevant, but because we can no longer see reality as it is.

Romano Guardini, in his Letters from Lake Como, contemplates the cultural costs of modern technology. What we lost, he suggests, is a relationship between culture as an organic expression of nature, that slowly, over time, conforms itself to the natural contours of the world around us, and only then, gradually, reshapes that nature in return. Instead, industrialization has changed how we relate to nature.

In particular, Guardini sees us now living in a machine-like society. Instead of organically relating to nature around us, we come to dominate it through factories, manufacturing, and industrial means and thus reshape the environment in which we live.

Guardini came to this realization while travelling from Germany southward to Italy. In the places he stayed, he found a human culture more organically related to the land than the factories and machines he had left behind in northern Europe, which orchestrated everything towards machine-like ends.

The Abstraction of Technological Society

Guardini makes several interesting observations, but the one I want to highlight here is this: mass society, or what we might call technological society today, creates a culture that relates to nature in a way that is remote, abstract, and further removed from nature than in centuries past.

No longer do we look at a river and build a bridge at its most narrow, most obvious, or most humane point. We command our motors against the current more than we float down the river on sailing ships under the command of the wind. Instead, as Martin Heidegger observes in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” we build hydro dams to extract power. We create tour guides to present the river as something to be viewed. We build bridges wherever we want for economic or material advantage. We use technology to dominate and master nature.

Now, human beings have always done something like this. But the way we have taken dominion over nature in the past is not the same as it is today. The mechanical machine age and mass society of the mid-twentieth century, and now the technological age in which we live, do something rather strange: we enframe the world as a resource to exploit, control, and count. We use mechanical and technological means to master it for our own chosen ends.

We have bridges, trains, cars, and planes; these are the modern mechanisms of society that control and shape everything. We no longer rely as much on the contours of the land itself, only slowly and incrementally building a culture out of it. Technological society today, mass society of the mid-twentieth century, and machine society of Guardini’s time represent modes of increasing abstraction and removal from a close and intimate relation to the land around us, to the geography in which we live.

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