The Age of the Machine and the Commodification of Life

James Lewis wrote a piece in the American Thinker on August 19, 2009 which caught my eye because it took a hard look at this issue that Sarah Palin has labeled "Death Panels." As I was sitting in church today something clicked and I remembered some ideas taken from C.S. Lewis's inaugural address at Cambridge, de descriptione temporum. Lewis talked about the metaphor of the Machine. I'm not sure he used exactly those words, but the idea he was discussing is the idea, or really myth, that progress is inevitable. Lewis called this chronological snobbery, but it is one of the defining diseases of our time. He talked about the fact that we live in a machine-age and because of that, the idea of progress seems relatively obvious because we have seen progress in the development of machines in our own times.
It is not a very great leap from this idea of machines and progress to linking human beings more directly into the myth. Modern materialism makes this easy. Evolution and materialism linked together suggest after all that we are only a sort of cosmic accident. We are a mindless assemblage of atoms, become molecules, that happened through some freak to become aware. We can't really account for that. But like those machines we've been getting better, at least if you trace us from amoebas or something, single celled things that became multi-celled things and so on for a very very long time. This is a kind of myth itself in the popular mind and Lewis talks about that elsewhere.
But let's look at the other side of the coin, the traditional view of human beings as created in the image and likeness of God, only a little less than the angels and of incalculable worth. If you are an immortal spirit and matter amalgam, an intrinsic joining of essence with matter to be like unto God than regardless of your degree of health, you are worth preserving.
Ah but remember that machine. Machines wear out. Machines get less and less valuable as they become older because they are only good so long as they are fully functional and their value is proportional to their functional life. You can see where this goes. On the machine metaphor, people become less worthy and more worthless as they wear out. The old are simply beyond repair and not worth painting or fixing up, might as well send them to the shredder they're just not worth much anymore.
I think that is exactly the cusp we are on, the tipping point of shifting from the high view of man all down the ages at least in the West, to this cold machine-like functional and utilitarian view that bears the mark of cold calculation like an assembly line and recognizes in man just another animal, maybe a bit more complex, but just a meat-machine, almost like a computer only slower, more prone to failure, just an accidental machine.
In the final analysis, I think it is this emerging view of man that must be rejected and with it the values that have the sulfurous smell of Hades about them. Screwtape, to use the name of Lewis's fictional devil, quite clearly has a hand in all of this and delights in Tyranny Rising!