Humanitas Technica, Volume I presents in print the results of the Lyceum Institute’s first two years of inquiry into the relation between human beings and technology (note: all these texts are available online and free, but for those who prefer print, this is an excellent solution!). Its central claim is that technology should not be understood merely as a collection of neutral tools, nor as an autonomous force beyond human control, but as an intrinsic difficulty of rational human activity: a natural extension of human powers that simultaneously affects the persons, habits, environments, and institutions through which it operates.
White Papers
The first white-paper series, The Difficulties of Technology, develops this diagnosis across psychology, environment, biology, culture, governance, communication, artificial intelligence, and the integrity of the whole person. Technologies extend faculties such as perception, memory, communication, and judgment, but these extensions often produce disproportion: some capacities are amplified while others are weakened. The characteristic danger of technological use and adoption, therefore, is fragmentation—of psyche, body, social relations, institutions, and ultimately the human person. Technological environments form our behaviors even before they are consciously chosen, shaping our habits and standards.
The second series, The Opportunities of Technology, develops the constructive alternative. Its central notion is the restoration of technē to poiēsis: technological making should be ordered toward meaningful human goods rather than efficiency, scalability, optimization, or control as ends in themselves. This requires recovering proportion, human scale, living patterns, place, educational formation, genuine communication, responsible economic and political relations, and fitting temporal rhythms. Technology becomes beneficial when it removes subordinate burdens while preserving the activities constitutive of human flourishing.
Theoretical Papers
The concluding theoretical papers deepen the project’s anthropology and media theory. They examine technological environments through Thomistic faculty psychology, the fragmentation of sensation under digital media, the reduction of communication to information transmission, and the reorientation of memory under electronic and digital conditions. Throughout, the recurring criterion is not whether a technology is powerful, novel, or efficient, but whether its use remains subordinate to the ends of human flourishing and contributes to the integrated formation of persons capable of those ends’ pursuit.
Purchase print copy here.
White Paper Index.
Theoretical Paper Index.
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