What have we become?

I have been behind in my reading of First Things, the wonderful magazine edited by Fr. John Neuhaus. I have been busy with my class on Catholic Social Teaching and preparing for that, as well as preparing to end the catechetical school year here at the parish, and finally completing RCIA process for this year (while most importantly trying to find time for the two little souls my wife and I have been entrusted with). So I am just catching up with the Dec 2007 issue - yeah I am that far behind. But Fr. Neuhaus points to a Fr. Thomas Hopko's address at the St. Vladimir's Theological Seminary last year. Fr. Hopko reportedly noted:

"It happens that men and women who once were human are simply no longer so. They have become nothing but minds and matter, brains and bodies, computers and consumers, calculators and copulators, constructors and cloners, who believe that they wish to conquer as they are enslaved to an oligarchy of "Conditioners" who are themselves ensalved and destroyed by their insane strivings to define, design, manage, and manipulate a world and a humanity bereft of the God who boundlessly loves them."

I find this a very interesting point. Could it be that in our own day we have left what is most important in our lives (not what we think that is, but what God has revealed for us)? I think it is a highly personal question, though we can also answer it for our public culture to be sure. Let each of us consider whether we have not given ourselves over to the fast-paced lives that our modern world imposes upon us. Let each of us consider whether the support of family life has become a bother or our foundation as humans. This is fundamentally what the Church has proposed for over a century, since Pope Leo XIII's brilliant Encyclical Rerum Novarum. Yet, to be sure, there are those who would reject the family as the foundation of our own lives and of society. In my estimation, this is nothing more than lunacy, insanity, and fantasy. What is your position?