Technological Nihilism vs. Natural Law: Science, Morality, and the Law Today.
T he conflict between the followers of Jacques Maritain and the followers of John Dewey seems to amount to this: each group accuses the other of promoting education for tyranny. Pragmatism, for the Deweyans, frees human beings from the idea of a fixed human nature to pursue freely our ever-evolving ideas of happiness or fulfillment. So it frees us from fixed moral standards and accepts standards that emerge through the results of scientific habituation and moral experimentation. According to the followers of Maritain, pragma-tists are really nihilists: they deny the reality of the natural purposes that shape and limit all human endeavors. So they, in effect, enslave us to the results of technological success, and they deprive us of the educational resources required to resist the high-tech forms of tyranny soon to come. For the followers of Maritain—or the proponents of Thomistic natural law—pragmatism prevents us from educating citizens who can use morality and law to subordinate our technological progress to human good. In the spirit—if not quite according to the letter—of Maritain, I'm going to show that the future of our freedom depends on American education turning to natural law. If neither morality nor the law can control technology, then what can? One answer (and one I will get around to rejecting) is " nothing " — we are destined to be controlled by technology, and not technology by us. According to the philosopher Martin Heidegger, we live in a time with a technological understanding of reality. What is real for us is what can be measured and controlled rationally. What is not rational in that technological sense is not real. So love, virtue, beauty, contemplative thought, and God aren't real. Our opinions about such matters have been reduced to mere preferences or whims. They correspond to nothing real; they are merely arbitrary products of our obsessive imagina-tions. Heidegger's big point is that we can't control technology with weightless whims or preferences—even if we call them virtues or prin