Kaplan’s least interesting remarks about technology are the more critical ones in which he addresses the phenomenon directly. Much more interesting and of greater import are those interesting lines of connection, the discrete, indirect, and perhaps unintended and unacknowledged  ones in which Kaplan’s thinking  gives to Judaism and to the religion of ethical nationhood the appearance and function of a technological apparatus. The place to look for this more realized technological conception is in The Religion of Ethical Nationhood, Kaplan’s last published and by far most philosophically sophisticated text. Without ever using the Greek term techne, Kaplan offers a self-regulating systems-based approach to religion as civilization, an integrated system in which component features are “organically” interconnected. The technological system stands the human person and human societies in relation to its environment in nature, which human subjects seek to control in conformity to human ends. With a cosmic backdrop, the religion of ethical nationhood as technology is allopoietic, meaning the system is meant to produce effects, an object other than or apart from the system itself, or, in Kaplan’s case, a self-perfecting perfected type of intelligent, self-transcending human subject.

The most visible part of Kaplan’s thinking about technology is the critical one, tending towards  run-of -the-mill anti-technological grist. A threat to general human dignity, technology is identified with automation and roboticization, undermining religion, including the religion of Judaism, and its spiritual values, which for Kaplan were intimately aligned with humanism. In the early diaries, Kaplan complains about modern day apartment life crowds out and makes impossible the sukka, which for him is a standard of simple, plain living, primitive and natural. Not much to it, this is an early reflection from 1917. (Communings of the Spirit, vol.1, 1913-1934, pp.121-2) (CoS). The line of thought finds itself as well in Judaism as a Civilization, where Kaplan notes how “the machine and the technological economy” have “upset” the “whole spiritual life of mankind (Judaism as a Civilization, p.28). In The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion (MOG), Kaplan is alert, politically, to the threat to economic wellbeing posed by capitalism and technology, the way technological civilization, with its tyranny of the machine, has “destroyed equality,” turning “man” into a machine meant to maximize profits at the expense of human welfare (MOG, pp218-25, 233, 234-5). Writing in the 1930s, Kaplan writes a lot about machines, and the need to control and humanize technology, as well as the need to humanize our economic life (MOG pp.287, 209). cf. pp.89, 160) Warning us against capitalism and about technology, Kaplan wants to carve out a space for Judaism in technological society. As the power that makes for human cooperation, Godhood constitutes the force in the universe that intends human wellbeing release from all forms of economic and spiritual bondage (MOG, p.289). As Kaplan was to put it in The Religion of Nationhood, where the thought basically repeats itself, Godhood stands against the disruption or disorganization of human life introduced by the machine, representing the fund of infinite and creative “potentiality” in nature that allows human beings to transcend the merely mechanical, and that group religion can “save man” from being “robotized by technology” (The Religion of Ethical Nationhood, pp.91, 104,

As a thinker, Kaplan was keenly sensitive to historical situations. Published in 1937, The Meaning of God with socialism and communism very much in mind. In his diaries, Kaplan grappled with socialism and Soviet communism as a competing ideology. Writing in the political spirit of the time, he aligned the criticism of technology and the promise of Judaism in explicitly economic terms as the material threat posed by technology’s impact on human wellbeing. Kaplan was well aware of technology’s negative impact on skills, jobs and wages for large numbers of workers posed by machine automation and mass production. Indeed, one can follow in his diaries from this time the keen realization that, for all the brutality and Soviet Communism as a collectivist ideology, which he rejected, that communism worked on a larger and more effective human scale, offering more realistic, practical programs to human economic problems than did either Judaism or his philosophy of Judaism. In contrast, the threats posed by technology as understood in The Religion of Ethical Nationhood take on a different shade. Published in 1970, the criticism of technology reflects the more existential realizations of a religious thinker that are post-war, post-Holocaust, and post-Hiroshima, when war, nuclear war, is understood to pose a threat not just to economic wellbeing, but to human existence itself.

While criticism of technology is easy to read on the surface of Kaplan’s thought, there is a subtle, implicit way by which technological model of thinking always seemed to be just under the surface of Kaplan’s religious and theological thought. The very notion of “process theology” owes itself to both science and to technology. Writing in his diary as early as 1913, religion is described in terms of living and social energy generated by individual reactions and counter-reations in relation to each other in groups, and which in turn generate, or produce, moral and spiritual values (CoS, pp.58, 59). As a form of energy, the soul of the cosmos, God is identified pure potentiality. We might identify what might be called, in the spirit of Alfred North Whitehead, this virtuality as the potential that gives life by actualizing the self-organizing system of nature. Showing Kaplan’s thinking about technology in a more complex and even cosmo-theological light, I would point out that almost all the references to machines in The Meaning of God appear in that chapter devoted to that attribute of divinity that Kaplan called “the power that makes for cooperation.” For all his reservations about technology, Kaplan has drawn a tight association between that aspect of Godhood and the power of technology to improve human life, the power of technology defined as “the intelligent manipulation of…psychic and social forces for the maximum of cooperation and individualization” (MOG, p.128). All of this gets more clearly presented only in The Religion of Ethical Nationhood. The principle of “ethical nationhood” is not so much a sociological category as it is an organizing life force, the principle of international cooperation forming an organic part of an expansive cosmic principle (REN, p.34). Godhood is machine-like, actualized in part as a social force, whose function is pure process, the brining of physical and social forces into cooperation. The idea can be found in Judaism as a Civilization (p.419), and we see it throughout Kaplan’s writings. As the soul is to the human person, so is God to the world, “reality” waiting to be realized” (REN, p.91).

The distinction between art, religion, and technology is not always clear in The Religion of Ethical Nationhood. The ambiguity is constructive or generative. Intentional or not, the elision between “biological, pscyho-social, and spiritual functions is a critical part of Kaplan’s overall conception of the human condition and its plastic constitution or self-constituting. The central place to see this is in the chapter devoted to “Man’s Sense of Destiny,” starting at the precise point where Kaplan talks about art. By this Kaplan meant not modern autonomous art, but rather that effort to shape human life itself into “a work of art,” presented by Kaplan as “harmonious whole,” a “pattern of life [that] would enable us to organize our lives rationally, spiritually, and craeatively.” The tension, also productive, is these values, the ones that can “save man from the danger of being robotized by technology,” are themselves more technological than aesthetic per se. They reflect an “art” based on “a logic compounded of will, skill, reason, intelligence and love” (REN, 104). For Kaplan, this is the true function of “group religion,” and the particular group religion of ethical nationhood conceived as part of a larger technological apparatus, one that is alive, wholly alive with possibility and potential.

As for “human destiny,” Kaplan meant self-metamorphosis and “emergent evolution,” and what gets called today in critical theory “bio-power.” In the same discussion of “art,” which now we should understood better in terms of the ancient Greek word “techne,” self-metamorphosis is understood as “the vocation of man,” the emergence is compared to the “continued development” of “modern man” from the condition of cavemen. The emergence out of “brute force” and “cunning” is psycho-social, also moral-spiritual, and also biological (REN, p.105). The process of this emergence Kaplan thought was now accelerating. Looking at the past four or five hundred years, and now the reader knows that Kaplan has his eye on technologies, he pointed to the increase in population, longer individual life-spans, improvements to health, “the extended influence of the masses” (which I take to mean mass media and communications), the enrichment of mental content, and the spread of democracy. These we know to be the result of technology. For Kaplan, these changes represent more than a quantitative augmentation of human potential and power. Instead they are said to mark “qualitative growth and spiritual maturity,” especially as marked out by moral opposition to war (REN, p.106). These, Kaplan insists, are “latent potentialities” now being “actualized” on a global scale as “man shed[s] all vestiges of jungle heredity” (REN, pp.106, 106-7).

“Human destiny” is biologically plastic and spiritually form-shifting. Increasingly self-aware and intelligent, “man…may metamorphose himself” into “a huger type of creature,” a “creature that participates in the creative process itself” as new technological environments enlarge the field or horizon of human “potentialities.” Soon to possess the biological knowledge with which to change our very genetic nature, able to regulate population growth, psychologically and sociologically expert “to alter the organization of cultural and economic life,” the evolved human creature, Kaplan calls him a “creature,” not a person,” would be unrecognizable to “his” ancestors as related to them in any way. In this conception, the human creature takes “his” place as the “architect or artist of his [sic] own destiny,” both alive and creative, now no longer dominated by biological drives and instincts. The creature stands out as evolved human creature, self-aware of its own telos, “illuminated,” “mature,” and “at one with the rest of living nature.” The transformation is a spiritual one, the emergent future of human mind presented as “prelude to Godhood,” the next step up, a “next higher empirical quality for any level of existence.” Like angelic beings, the evolved human creature is one whose “higher potentialities” are “activated,” “assimilated” or integrated into divine Intellect, nearer to God than we are now (pp.108-11, 112).  In visionary prose, Kaplan presents before the reader Jewish “wisdom or religion” as “the metamorphosis of man into a human animal” (114).

Genetically altered, biological and super-biological, terrestrial and super-terrestrial, could such a creature ever die? Is such a creature even human? The human animal could be a cyborg, standing on the brink of what Kurzweil has called the technological convergence, poised at the point where the human being turns into post-human creature. Not machine, but angel. Not robot, but human animal, neither human nor animal, potentially and actually. Deliberate or not, the slippage between evolved angelic being and the human-animal metamorph both reflects and generates hybrid effects of techno-genesis on human emergence. What this has to do with the religion of ethical nationhood one can safely guess to be as follows. As described by Kaplan, ethical nationhood is a non-sovereign social-political form that divests itself of war and the sovereign right to make war in an age when the ultimate technology is the nuclear warhead.  Assuming the interlocking of society and nature, advanced social organization and the cosmos, the human-animal-angel hybrid stands out as non-sovereign creaturely being. The religion of ethical nationhood is the cosmic backdrop to this new form of cosmopolitan citizenship. Perfected and self-perfecting, a self-actualized field of almost infinite creative potential, the human animals belongs to that special brand of Gnosticism defined by Harold Bloom as “the American Religion.”

Regarding Judaism as a civilization, we would have to read retrospectively to draw precise conclusions about its real or virtual character. Speculatively, we do so only upon the basis of the technological “destiny of man” as dreamed up in The Religion of Ethical Nationhood. Kaplan understood that ours is an age of permanent revolution and that technology is a dynamic force of change, whose energy Kaplan finally figured out how to harness theoretically towards nearing the end of the twentieth century. Stated clearly in the introduction to The Religion of Ethical Nationhood, Kaplan takes particular note of “the computer revolution,” with its power to “stimulate” (if only he had said simulate) “atomic explosions and rocket launchings, and design, develop and test theoretically, inventions that do not physically exist” (REN, p.74-5). The quote comes from Richard Hamming of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, a thought that Kaplan wants very much to put to use for his own purpose. Reading The Religion of Ethical Nationhood, one begins to wonder if, after all, the entire program for the reconstruction of Judaism laid out in Judaism as a Civilization, with its conception of interlocking component features such as land, language, mores, folkways, arts, social structures, etc. was one such design program, meant to simulate an invention, a creation, a form of Judaism that did not then physically exist, did not actually exist. Writing in his diary, anxious about what he thought was his failure to communicate this vision to his own children, he knew that the potential of an emergent Judaism as a civilization in this day and age, at this stage of historical transition was like “trying to make ropes with sand” (COS, p.439).

Writing in his diaries in 1950, Kaplan complained about Abraham Joshua Heschel, “his metaphysical-mystical mind that spider-like issues from itself verbal filaments which go into the weaving of iridescent webs for catching unary flies” (cited in Scult, RAJ, p.216). Kaplan had already registered five years previous the almost identical judgment that “as a romantic mystic, [Heschel] shies away from facts and tries to build his universe of discourse entirely with values” (cited Scult, 213). But how different is Heschel’s from the model or simulation of Judaism as a civilization, Kaplan’s own attempt to make ropes with sand? Not a finished object, these ropes are strands of verbal filaments and of Kaplan’s own emergent faculty of metaphysical imagination. Judaism as civilization will itself evolve, technologically, not as a simple sociological-theoretical object modeled on something that does not physically exists in its own time and place, but as reconstructive project that is utopian, techno-utopian character, not yet actual or actualized. This system is a virtual one, a virtual program, a virtual reality. That’s all it ever was, but this we recognize only in retrospect, under the evolving impact of the computer revolution on Jewish civilization and on the human creature.

Kaplan has almost always been faulted, especially in comparison to Heschel, as theologically and philosophically superficial. Mel Scult has done so much to shake that false conviction about the difference between the two thinkers, but even he recognizes the contrast drawn by Heschel between what he called “the vertical unity of Israel” with “the horizontal unity of Klal Yisrael” (cited by Scult, 219). By vertical unity of Israel we can suppose Heschel to have meant the unity of Israel and God, versus the horizontal plane of Jewish social existence. Kaplan’s model of Jewish civilization lends itself then to a flatness that neither his critics nor champions have necessarily appreciated, but which I would suggest to you as kind of flat and distributive psycho-social-mental energy that comes to define what technology theorists call “network culture,” one that might be better understood on its own terms today than might have been the case in 1970 or 1934, at the dawn of new communication and computing technologies, a world captured better by Kaplan than almost anyone else in the canon of modern Jewish thought.