"a cybernetic destiny requiring the devaluation and revaluation of all values"

"When we represent technology to ourselves as an array of neutral instruments, invented by human beings and under human control, we are expressing a kind of common sense, but it is a common sense from within the very technology we are attempting to represent.  The novelness of our novelties is being minimized.  We are led to forget that the modern destiny permeates our representations of the world and ourselves.  The coming to be of technology has required changes in what we think is good, what we think good is, how we conceive sanity and madness, justice and injustice, rationality and irrationality, beauty and ugliness.

     ". . . To put the matter crudely:  when we represent technology to ourselves through its own common sense we think of ourselves as picking and choosing in a supermarket, rather than within the analogy of the package deal.  We have bought a package deal of far more substantial novelness than simply a set of instruments under our control.  It is a destiny which enfolds us in its own conceptions of instrumentality, neutrality and purposiveness. . . . Unless we comprehend the package deal we obscure from ourselves the central difficulty in our present destiny:  we apprehend our destiny by forms of thought which are themselves the very core of that destiny.

     "The result of this is that when we are deliberating in any practical situation our judgment acts rather like a mirror, which throws back the very metaphysic of the technology which we are supposed to be deliberating about in detail.  The outcome is almost inevitably a decision for further technological development."

     George Grant, "Thinking about technology," in Technology and justice (Notre Dame, IN:  University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 32-33.  I was put onto this by Brent Waters, Christian moral theology in the emerging technoculture, Ashgate science and religion series (Burlington, VT:  Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014), 43-44.  The heading is from Waters himself, at the top of p. 44.  For "Grant . . . at his bleakest", according to Waters, "The fate of late modernity may, after all, prove to be an inevitable, inescapable, and recurring nihilism."