Do machines make us who we are?  Judging from the manner in which we in the West are, in a manner of speaking, captives of the technology on which we depend, we might very well draw this conclusion.  We live with the world, we live with each other, we live with ourselves, but we live according to our machines.  Most of us love our machines, most of us appreciate our machines.  Even those of us who do not use machines, or at least try to minimize the use of them, still depend on products that, more often than not, are made by machines.
     Although I dearly wish for those in the developing world to enjoy the benefits of machines sooner rather than later, I also wish for them to do so aware of the ethos, the ethos that has ensnared the West in many debilitating conundrums of mind and heart, with which they come.  I encourage them, as well as us in the West, to ground themselves in things a machine cannot make so that they can, as I would wish for the West to do as well, continue to make them themselves, to keep them in their proper place, material products of a material reality.  There is a bigger picture.  If we sever our connection to the transcendent and immaterial, all we have left is our machines and ourselves, the living and nonliving side by side, unmediated, unconsidered, unknown.
     Machines are only as beneficial to the extent that the people who make them do so aware of and submitted to a presence that reminds them that regardless of what they
may think, they are not their own.