Reddit reply in r/PhilosophyMemes: Butlerian — November 20, 2024 | Ali Shukri Amin

1. Development of technology in the abstract is not antithetical to knowing God. The problem is anything in excess and not bound by the ultimate goal of worship. Modern technology was created to serve capitalist means. Therefore, it draws us away from God, destroys the environment, and could even destroy the species - because it's aim is capitalistic growth. Jacques Ellul calls this "technique." We are the cattle of modern technology. It is not an unbiased tool.

This shift began after the industrial revolution.

2. They have this ability at a state level but it is almost never implemented and in practice pre-industrial civilizations didn't have many of the issues we now have. Homelessness essentially did not exist in Islamic civilization for 1400 years until the decline of the Ottoman state and introduction of secular Westphalian states into the Islamic world. Food, housing security, safety, were all fundamental human rights.

What you are describing is a modernist Whig historiography where modern advancements are seen as making life objectively more comfortable than the past and I don't subscribe to that. The data doesn't indicate that this is true except in specific areas like vaccines, toilets, etc.

I would argue modern medicine has untold long-term effects that are possibly worse than people dying or suffering from disease. If pthalates in the environment as a result of the industrialization required to produce modern medicine make us all infertile, all of the relatively small percentage deaths before modern medicine are actually far less of a loss.

If there was a way to merge modern Western EBM with classical medical traditions and leave out the long-term consequences that would be ideal.

3. Not all technology is bad. I am not a Luddite. I am against technology that impedes on spirituality, family, community, mental health, physical health, access to nature, or that totally replaces fundamental life activities. A technology that doesn't impede on any of these in a significant way is good, like a telescope.

4. Capitalism is wealth production for the sake of wealth production, at the expense of God, family, the environment, and anything else. Preservation of wealth in Islam is production of wealth not as an end goal, but to support the other goals and because human beings naturally desire to work for wealth. If a free market is limited to not impeding on the other aims of the Sacred Law, then it is something desirable.

Once we are circumambulating the god of the dollar 12 hours a day 365 days a year even if it kills us, the environment, and we have no time for worship - THEN wealth becomes bad because it becomes a replacement for God.

Cf. The Protestant Ethic of Capitalism by Max Weber