"A culture whose very view of reality is technological, with all the assaults on human dignity that inevitably follow, will have every incentive not to think about the profound questions of human existence that for so long animated Western culture. Education will largely consist in learning not to ask them, and so will be scarcely distinguished from ignorance. But more worrisome still, the inhabitants of such a culture will be unable to think deeply about such questions, because there will be no depths to think about; for they will have already reduced [1] reality to an assemblage of superficial 'facts' and [2] thinking to the arrangement and manipulation of those facts. For such a society there would simply be no such thing as a profound question, only problems awaiting technical or managerial solutions. A society whose members are thus unable to think cannot ultimately be a free society, because they can never see beyond and thus transcend the fate which their powers have unleashed. Their only consolation, and this is also their curse, is that they might never know the difference."Michael Hanby, "The gospel of creation and the technocratic paradigm: reflections on a central teaching of Laudato Si'," Communio: international Catholic review 42, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 738 (725-747). The heading comes from pp. 18-19 of Mystery and philosophy (1957), by Michael B. Foster, though the burden of that book is a very different one.
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