Former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor David F. Noble's new work is a truly powerful, brilliant exposé on the foundations of our current global crisis. His premise is deeply subversive -over-arching and, the results are directly immediate to the groundings and strategies for activism--especially in the land of evangelical Minnesota NICE.

Drawing from amazing scholarship, Noble details the origins and history of Western science as driven by a misogynist, millennialist reassertion of Adam to once again dominate a New technological Garden of Eden. "The millennarian promise of restoring mankind to its original God-like perfection - the underlying premise of the religion of technology-was never meant to be universal. It was in essence an elitist expectation, reserved only for the elect-the "happy few,".... (p. 201)

The documentation of his work is brilliant (he was not an MIT professor for nothing!). The depth of the problem is manifest by a technological fetish that sees apocalypse (i.e. the destruction of the planet from global warming, nuclear exchange, you name it) as a noble effect of the new divinity of Man.

Again one cannot emphasise enough the importance of this work. For instance if we are all fighting against corporate capitalism we need to realise the root mythology that grounds people's subordination to the system. "The expectation of ultimate salvation through technology, whatever the immediate human and social costs, has become the unspoken orthodoxy, reinforced by a market-induced enthusiasm for novelty and sanctioned by a millenarian yearning for new beginnings." (p. 207) One encounters this faith in technology constantly.

One can go on appreciating this deeply disturbing ideology that permeates our culture as the assumed world view and has been an instrument of empire building out of Europe since the Benedictine monks of the Carolingian conquests of the 9th century. A lineage of an elite vanguard can be traced all the way up to artificial intelligence - genetic engineering-nuclear space war - ideas being advanced as hopeful even by the administrators in my "Master of Liberal Studies."

Emphasising again that these are not just survivalist militia types - these apocalyptic-millennialists are researchers at the universities, these are the capitalists and the federal administrators of technology. Von Braun, the "millennialist" Nazi rocket scientist, after becoming a leader of the United States space program, became also a staunch born-again Christian in a saturated evangelical NASA mission for instance--just one dramatic example that Noble describes. (Dr. Strangelove comes to mind).

As Noble writes, the US was seen as the second Garden of Eden to be perfected by the civilising technology of the spiritual vanguard (the Puritans for instance). To give a local example, the native peoples of this area were considered by some elites to be a lost tribe of the Israelites! (Solomon's Temple, the New Jerusalem are all prominent in the development of science/industrialism - one and the same as Noble demonstrates with great documentation). The first US colonists in this area of Minnesota were elite Presbyterian missionaries who tried to "teach" the Dakota farming - even though the Dakota already knew how to farm but as Noble notes, "Westerners 'assumed that the unprecedented achievements in experiment and invention'...[of] native knowledge and tools...'were the products of male ingenuity and male artifice' alone."

If one wants to get to the root of our current crisis one needs to deal with the misogynist, millennial drive of Western culture that reifies technology as a means to create the Second Adam to join God as Co-Creator (Adam was the name given to the first manned spacelight, the seed programs of Artificial Life, and the composite human genome--besides many other overt millennial references continuous over a thousand year period and exposed in detail by David F. Noble)

From one's own research it is clear that Monsanto is seen as the saviour of the world - the apostles of our age! (See the excellent book "Farmageddon" by Brewster Kneen for example). (Noble does not use email from what one has heard and his previous books on luddism, the origins of engineering as capitalist management, the labour-context of automation are all brilliant).

Noble was fired from MIT for political reasons, as he legally proved, and the American Historical Association condemned his ousting. The Smithsonian also fired him for his Automation Madness exhibit that featured Enoch's Hammer - an original tool of the luddites in the riot as mass movement truth. The exhibit also detailed the social-exploitative process of technology development.

Noble has worked to organised labour and students and is based as a professor at York University in Canada.

Book Description
Are religion and science really at war with one another? Not according to David F. Noble, who argues that the flourishing of both religion and technology today is nothing new but rather the continuation of a 1,000-year-old Western tradition. The Religion of Technology demonstrates that modern man's enchantment with things technological was inspired by and grounded in religious expectations and the quest for transcendence and salvation. The two early impulses behind the urge to advance in science, he claims, are the conviction that apocalypse is imminent, and the belief that increasing human knowledge helps recover what was lost in Eden. Noble traces the history of these ideas by examining the imaginings of monks, explorers, magi, scientists, Freemasons, and engineers, from Sir Isaac Newton to Joseph Priestley to Wernher von Braun. Noble suggests that the relationship between religion and technology has perhaps outlived its usefulness. Whereas it once aimed to promote human well-being, it has ultimately become a threat to our survival. Thus, with The Religion of Technology, Noble aims to redirect our efforts toward more worldly and humane ends.

Synopsis

This groundbreaking book turns on its head the cherished idea that technology and religion are separated by a great divide. Taking a historical approach, David F. Noble shows that Western technology is rooted in Christian myths and ancient imaginings, and that there is actually no fundamental conflict between science and religion. -[This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.]

Amazon.com

The Religion of Technology is equal parts history and polemics. Noble explores the religious roots of Western technology by linking today's secular technophilia with the ancient Christian dream of humanity's redemption. Noble argues that, historically, the most powerful technological advances (Newtonian physics, the engineering profession, space exploration) have been driven by explicitly spiritual and humane ambitions, but that the last several decades have brought a new kind of technology that is impatient with life and unconcerned with basic human needs. The Religion of Technology is an authoritative, erudite, and often persuasive book.

About the Author

David F. Noble is Professor of History at York University in Toronto. Currently the Hixon/Riggs Visiting Professor at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, he has also taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Drexel University, and was a curator of modern technology at the Smithsonian Institution. His previous books include America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism and Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation.

The problem with these kind of books in a fast-changing world and a country where Prime Ministers come and go is that while the perceptions of the past remain unchanged, the conclusions part become hopelessly outdated and irrelevant. VP Dutt, with his new volume on India's foreign policy, will remain on safe ground for the moment - the just-concluded polls ensuring that there is no change of guard at New Delhi.

Dutt does delve into the past, but he devotes more space and words to the developments of recent times - to be precise the Pokhran II blasts and its aftermath. The preponderance of Pakistan literally dictating India's stand on various international issues (all, albeit inextricably linked to the nuclear test explosions) is indeed a case in point. There is little argument in blaming the author for his consectaneous "obsession" with the Pakistan factor while discussing India's foreign policy.

It is one thing to have a changing world. It is quite another to have a country which adopts stands on certain issues that are bound to have an immediate and far-reaching effect on international politics. This is what has happened with India. For a country, which took the lead in the now-defunct Non-Aligned Movement, but maintained such relations with the erstwhile Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) that were anything but just friendly, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a big loss for India.

Pakistan, which apparently made the better choice of a friend in willy-nilly opting for the United States, clearly emerged as the better-placed. The US was THE country to have around as a big brother. India had few countries (read, friends) who would stand by it in international fora. The Nineties heralded the beginning of a new era for India's foreign policy - to come into its own.

The dominance of the Big Five at the United Nations was essentially a dominance of the US. The world was beginning to look one big lonely place. More so, when one's bargaining position on various international matters was taking a beating. By and by, the issues of security and foreign policy started becoming two sides of the same coin.

"There were nuclear weapons, or the capability to produce them, all around the vicinity of India. In fact, India is surrounded with nuclear weapons. There are nuclear weapons in China (and nuclear bases in Tibet). There are nuclear weapons in Kazakhstan and Ukraine and, of course, in Russia. US ships carrying nuclear weapons cruise the seas around India regularly and Diego Garcia remains a major nuclear base of the US. And then there is at the very least the nuclear weapons capability of Pakistan. Although Nawaz Sharif had once claimed publicly that Pakistan had actually nuclear weapons on the shelf." (p 358)

Given this backdrop, it was becoming difficult for India to establish a position for itself in the international community. Going nuclear was a fait accompli. And the Atal Behari Vajpayee (despite its tall claims) had little to do with it. The Pokhran II blasts were a fallout of Nehruvian legacy, argues Dutt. It was Jawaharlal Nehru's stress on science and his policy of keeping abreast with nuclear research that enabled India to maintain its nuclear option. It was the previous four regimes that had kept the ground ready for the tests that took place in May 1998.

The preparations had started as early as 1980-81 under Indira Gandhi, continued under Rajiv Gandhi and were in full readiness under PV Narasimha Rao, HD Deve Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujral. Rao was on the verge of giving the go-ahead signal for conducting the tests in 1995, but the US got wind of it and coerced Rao to abort the plans. the lessons were learnt, and the Vajpayee government managed to hoodwink American spy satellites into conducting the Pokhran II blasts. Pakistan's was only a counter-reaction.

The bulk of Dutt's work was done before the nuclear blasts and, hence, understandably, devotes relatively little space to the fallout. Thankfully for the author, the continuance of the Vajpayee government in New Delhi, on the face of it, might appear to be a relief for him. But therein lies a contradiction. As is evident from the pursuance of India's nuclear doctrine, it just would not have made any difference. Had there been any other person at the helm of affairs in New Delhi, the Pokhran II blasts would have still happened.

About the author

VP Dutt, former nominated member of the Rajya Sabha and former member of the Parliamentary Consultative Committee on Foreign Affairs, is former Pro Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University and headed its Department of Chinese and Japanese Studies for a number of years. He has been commenting on and writing about India's foreign policy for the last 40 years.