the tindog coffeehouse

This is Part 6 of my chapter-by-chapter blog of From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer.

In Chapter 5, Dyer focused on the “corrupting” part, examining how both Adam and Eve and their son Cain used technology as a way to separate themselves from God. But as Dyer illustrated, technology (“the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes”) isn’t necessarily bad. It existed before the Fall, and even after the Fall, God continued to equip his people with more of it. Technology, then, must be neutral. Right?

Well, no.

We concluded in Chapter 1 that technology is, in fact, not neutral; as it changes, we change along with it. How and exactly why we change is the focus of this chapter.

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Source.

Previously:
The story behind ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, probably the greatest holiday dedicated to the mass consumption of food ever. Except of course that it’s not really about the food, per se, but a time of, well, giving thanks. We all know that the holiday dates back to the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621, which celebrated the Pilgrims’ first successful growing season since arriving in America a year earlier. (And actually the tradition dates back to the Pilgrims’ days in Leiden, Holland, when the Dutch held a Thanksgiving feast every October.) But what’s cool — to me, at least — is that my ancestor was one of those early pilgrims.

From everything I’ve researched and read (and admittedly I’m not a genealogist, so I could be completely wrong), the first Spooners to arrive in America landed at Plymouth in 1637. Ann Spooner (born in Nottinghamshire, England, in 1598) arrived with her young sons William (my ancestor, age 16 at the time) and Thomas (age 14).

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I’m currently blogging my way through From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer, and today’s chapter focuses heavily on the “corrupting” part.

In Chapter 4, Dyer established a working definition of technology as “the human activity of using tools to transform God’s creation for practical purposes.” In the Garden of Eden, those purposes were to till the garden and cultivate the land. But once sin enters the picture, everything changes.

Rebellion.

Dyer picks up where Chapter 3 left off, with Adam and Eve still in the Garden. Technology, he pointed out earlier, was introduced by God before the Fall when He instructed Adam to “tend and watch over it” (Genesis 2:15). But after the Fall, it takes on a very different role. The first thing Adam and Eve do after sinning against God is to make something: their first set of clothes, fashioned from fig leaves (Genesis 3:7). Were the clothes a tool created for a practical purpose? Of course. But was it what God originally intended? No.

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Next week will be the 118th time the University of Texas will play Texas A&M in football. And it looks like it’ll also be the last, at least for the foreseeable future. As of July 1, 2012, A&M will be part of the SEC, and the historic intrastate rivalry between the Longhorns and Aggies will officially come to an end. Of course, it’s not the first rivalry to be torn asunder by the seismic shifts of conference realignment over the past couple of years, but it’s arguably one of the best and certainly one of the most personal for anyone who grew up in the state of Texas. Whether you went to Texas or A&M or not, whether you even knew anyone who went to Texas or A&M, you were a fan of one or the other. Even if you bled Red Raider red, you came down on one side of the fence or the other. There was no escaping it.

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This is Part 4 of my chapter-by-chapter walk through From the Garden to the City by John Dyer.

We started out talking about how technology isn’t neutral, how it not only changes the world around us, but changes us as well. And we started to see how we approach technology as a sort-of mini-narrative, allowing us to bridge the gap between our current world and a better one. We then looked at Genesis and how technology really began in the Garden of Eden when God told Adam to cultivate and till the garden, taking God’s initial creation and making something new out of it. But what exactly is technology anyway? Is it the tools used to cultivate the garden, the product of that cultivation, or the know-how that guided the process along?

It seems odd that a book subtitled “The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology” would wait until Chapter 4 to define what the author means by “technology”. But better late than never, I suppose. As we’ll see, however, the definition isn’t as clear-cut as we think it is.

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