TECHNOLOGY AND EVOLUTION STUDY GROUP

Technology is the cooperative transformation of matter instrumental to a shared goal. In modern society, technology is also an ideology. Ideologies are systems of thought and practice that rationalize and express the system of social power: they operate on the symbolic level, while tools and techniques affect the physical. Societies in which technology becomes an ideology are called technocracies. 

 Modern technocracy is the process of purifying nature by fire (e.g the smelting of ore) and replacing it with prosthesetic devices built of the transformed material (e.g metal). For example, internal combustion engines take the place of legs and robots replace workers. When nature is transformed by fire it produces a disembodied machine equated with starlight. Since nature and the human body are synonymous in this system of thought, the stages of purification can be represented as a series of symbolic operations on the body (= nature) as illustrated by the drawing to the right. By doing activities consistent with the diagram, the head  of the believer is itself transformed into starlight. 

 The technical processes that get institutionalized by modern society are those that best exemplify this technocratic imagery, not necessarily those that are the most efficient or efficacious. This theory also explains why an "earth-friendly technocracy" is a contradiction in terms. Peter C. Reynolds discusses these issues in his book Stealing Fire: The Atomic Bomb as Symbolic Body, from which the illustration is taken. 

Peter’s article “Abandoned Bodies" shows how the suicidal deaths of the Heaven's Gate cult exemplify in grim detail the process shown in the illustration, even though these events took place seven years after the diagram was drawn: Reynolds, P.C. (1997). “Abandoned Bodies.” The Month (November), 421-426. Download a copy here: