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- Chair:
-
Katja Triplett
(Leipzig University)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Iota room
- Sessions:
- Thursday 7 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Vilnius
Long Abstract
The papers and their abstracts are listed below in order of presentation.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Thursday 7 September, 2023, -Paper short abstract
The paper aims to analyse Mahatma Gandhi’s (1869-1948) attitudes to technology and their connections to his socio-economic and political ideas focusing on the religious aspects of his thought, as it views them ass the direct source of his ideas concerning technology.
Paper long abstract
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), the leading figure of the Indian independence movement is usually examined as a religious and political leader. His ideas concerning economy and technology were and are often considered as utopian and idealistic at best or criticized as backwards and even out of touch with economic and social reality. While they were never implemented on a nationwide scale, due to Nehruvian policy of economic development emphasizing the need for industrialization and technological advancement they were nevertheless an important part of Gandhi’s though and public activity.
The paper argues, that the attitudes towards the use and spread of technology and its influence on social and individual life, economy and politics stem directly from Gandhi’s interpretation of Hinduism and go beyond simplifying labels such as 'luddism' or 'anarcho-primitivism'. The paper aims to examine these attitudes focusing on three values of religious significance namely, ahinsa (nonviolence) aparigraha (nonpossesiveness) and śrama (labour), while looking into their religious origins and meanings attributed to them by Gandhi and covering the way he used them to present his vision of society and the role of technology in its life. The paper, while being based on Gandhi’s writings, will also take into account the criticisms delivered by his contemporaries and the non-Indian influences that have shaped Gandhi’s approach to technology.
Paper short abstract
This paper will study comparatively three influential texts by religious thinkers, hailing from Conservative Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam, that engage with the ideas of emancipation, alienation and humanity in regard to technology in the second half of the 20th century.
Paper long abstract
Over the centuries religious thinkers have nurtured ambivalent feelings and ideas towards seemingly ever-changing technologies and their impact on individuals, societies and nature. Rashi (1040-1105) famously commented that Tubal-Cain, the first blacksmith mentioned in Bereshit/Genesis, had “improved the work of Cain by providing weapons for murderers”, a reference to the destructive use of technology and an expression of scepticism towards technological progress. Yet, over recent years, when faced with the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic and the measures taken to rein in its spread , religious communities and leaders have learned nolens volens to engage with new technologies to further their aims. This has not happened without much debate within various religious traditions. The roots of those discussions often were in earlier controversies regarding the challenges represented by technology for human self-definition.
In this paper I aim to look comparatively at three influential texts by religious thinkers, hailing from different traditions, namely Conservative Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam, that engage critically with the ideas of emancipation, alienation and humanity in regard to technology, broadly defined, roughly in the second half of the twentieth century. The essays I will look at are a) The estranged Roman Catholic author Jean Bernanos’ La France contre les robots (France Against Robots, 1947), b) Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (1951) and c) the Islamist thinker and poet İsmet Özel’s Üç Mesele: Teknik, Medeniyet, Yabancılaşma (Three Problems: Technology, Civilisation, Alienation, 1978). Ultimately, my aim is to reflect on how technological change as a theme has impacted the thought of thinkers within certain traditions within Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the twentieth century before the advent of the digital age.