Sources

sahar1998

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On Globalization, Technology, and the New Justice

Tom Darby

Today the word globalization is on the lips of most people livingeverywhere on our planet. But this word never was uttered muchmore than a decade ago. Many have tried to accurately say when the term erupted into common usage, but on this subject there is no agreement. However, it is clear that the word would have made no sense before the world ceased to be multipolar and then bipolar, specifically before the end of the World Wars—WWI, WWII, and WWIII—the last of which we still insist on calling the “Cold War.” While the world wars were about planetary rule, in that they were about who had the best means to the end of ruling the planet, they too were European (ergo, Western) wars, or one might say they comprised a century of European (and by extension North American, Russian, and Australian) civil war that brought the whole globe under its sway. But now that the century of world war is over and the planet is under the sway of a hegemonic West, it is possible to speak of globalization as a concrete, serious, and hence real phenomenon.

On Globalization

So, what a few years ago was esoteric and abstract now has come to be part of life for an increasing number of people on this planet. Our

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experience of this shrinking world and our expanding picture of it, like the very breath of our lives, in a mere few years has become a kaleido- scope of the real as imagined and the imagined as real. It is a world in which the non-West is progressively transformed into versions of the West, and the West shaped by that very Other it transforms. But this world, which, not so long ago would have been unimaginable, deludes us. It deludes us because it increasingly embraces us, smothering the mysterious under the cloak of the everyday, denying us the experience of wonder. In progressively becoming our common, virtual, yet empirical world, it also is becoming a more vulgar world, for in this world everyone is either already fit into the frame of the “Western Picture,” clamoring to be within its frame, or with increasing vigor resisting this new phenomenon.

I wish to begin with the most familiar, with those who resist glo- balization in the West; later, in the conclusion, I will compare them to non-Western protesters. Western protesters often regard globalization as the plan of some kind of “sinister inclusiveness” forced upon us all by some shadowy group that “controls” globalization, a force often called, or at least identified with so-called “corporatism.” Here, at best we have ironies, at worst, mere conspiracy theories.

It is advisable to ignore the conspiracy theories and to focus on the more worthy ironies. The greatest irony is that the very Westerners resisting this “inclusiveness” bound to and inseparable from the universalizing and homog- enizing character of globalization—in their clinging to the categories we once used to explain experiences that no longer apply to our world—namely the categories of “Left” and “Right”—are constitutive of the most exclusive and thereby the most non-“progressive” of political “movements” today.

What most, if not all, of these Western protest groups of globalization have in common is not so much their seeing corporatism as the cause or a cause of globalization, but in their assumption that globalization can be authored, managed, or controlled. With this is the view that technology is value neutral, that it merely is applied science. But this is precisely the view held also by the National Rifle Association (NRA), the “poster boy” of the most powerful “right”-wing lobbies in Washington, and their perspective, captured by their mantra: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

The existence of such ironies can be accounted for, at least in part, by the sheer disorientation brought about by the changes associated with the modern age in general and with our late modernity in particular. Our time really is different from previous ages of Western history. And this is clear today, for it is only in our time that one can have a picture of the world as a whole, albeit from every perspective.

How can this be so, and be so from every perspective? Perspective has to do with where one stands as one views an object—the object,

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in this instance, being our globe, our planet—and the point is that today we have an unlimited perspective from which to view the same object. This is so because today it is possible to view the planet from all standpoints, to have an unlimited “standpoint,” hence a standpoint without standpoint.

What makes this new perspective possible is our technology. In other words, our technology is the independent variable of globalization. Or, put another and perhaps clearer way, neither globalization nor any- thing like it that could give us this view of the whole would be possible without our technology.

This is not to say that related phenomena—spiritual, political, and technical (but not technological)—that gave rise to the ironies and disori- entation of today have not existed in the West and in other civilizations and in other ages. On the contrary, the spiritual crisis that led to the warring cities of Greece during Socrates’ day is directly related to the technical (but not technological) ability of the Athenians to become an imperial, commercial, and naval power inciting the envy and hatred of her neighbors. The picture that Plato sketches at the beginning of his Republic is this very picture. But the world of Athens and of Greece was much smaller than ours. Yet it was a world or a “whole”—a cosmos— a city with clear boundaries, until her boundaries expanded and Athenian power spilled out into the space of the larger eastern Mediterranean. Later, the eclipse the Roman world led to the world of Christendom, which in turn, fell under the sway of modernity and its defining perspec- tives and practices that we call technology.

However, because all of these worlds are bound by their limited perspectives, the word world does not pertain in the literal way as we now speak of it (world = globe = planet Earth). Hence we use the word globalization because we can, and we can because it is the world that we now inhabit and that we can see. And what we see is this new perspective and its attendant practices that we have described as the phenomenon of globalization. However, it was not the power shifts of the last century that have given us the ability to view the world as a whole; underlying both our new perspective and those eclipsed political configurations is technology. Technology is the independent variable of globalization. Hence, any attempt to understand this new phenomenon without first under- standing technology is a waste of time.

On Technology

So, what is technology? One can begin with this thoroughly modern word and try to recover its meaning synthetically. Technology is a compound

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of the two Greek words techne and logos. Techne pertains to the univer- salizing and homogenizing of making (poesis). This re-presentation in the form of a thing (= object = a being that stands before us) is demarcated by clear boundaries (= completeness = wholeness). This is why we can say that a “thing,” in its constituting completeness is an ordered whole that is fit for a purpose, or, therefore, is an End in itself. Hence, making is about Ends, in the sense that the finished object or thing justifies itself.

Making, while a necessary condition for the appearance of technol- ogy, is not sufficient for the appearance of technology. This so because technology is not a compound in word only, for it is compounded from the co-penetration of making and knowing. Logos, in archaic form, is a gathering together of experience that leads to perception, or, we might say, to knowledge. This is why the “word” logos often is translated as “word,” in that a “word” is the result of the gathering together of experiences culminating in knowledge.

But logos does not refer just to any gathering of experience, for, because knowledge is its result, logos refers to a way of seeing. This is why it often is said that logos is a “way” or even “the way.” To speak of a way is to speak of means (as opposed to ends). So, technology in pertaining to techne and logos, at the same time, is about means and ends.

Technology is the progressively rational (= efficient) arrangement of means and ends (for humans) and cause and effect (for nature). The former, therefore, has to do with possibility, that is, perception, and the latter with actualization, hence, with practice. Technology has as its project the transformation of nonhuman and human nature.

By “nature” I refer to the limits and possibilities of any being. Nature, therefore, is whatever exists and is not otherwise. Nature is that which appears to be what is. It is the “whatness” that appears to us. For this reason nature both nonhuman and human often is called the “given,” the given referring to those boundaries that make it possible for us to compare and to contrast one being with another, thereby allowing for our ability to measure limits and possibilities, which, in turn, enables us to classify, and hence to name.

Measuring, classifying, and naming are all aspects of justifying. Dike, the Greek word for justice in its most archaic form, pertained to a pile of stones that marked the boundary between a public road and a sacred grove, hence to the demarcation between the spheres of sacred and profane. The point here is that justice has to do with the boundary itself. To be exact, justice is the in-between, a magical threshold that allows one to see the inside and outside, the up and the down, all at once. So, justice also has to do with seeing and therefore with the kind of knowl- edge necessary for knowing what is or is not fit for one to say or do. In

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the example of the sacred grove along the road, being able to discern the boundary is a prerequisite for our knowing if in crossing the line we are doing what we are fitted to do—that is doing what is right (= that for which we are fitted = just) or trespassing.

However, there is a difference between the ancient traveler and ourselves. For the ancient the pile of stones marks a given boundary, but for us there are no given boundaries that cannot be altered or obliterated; hence, there are no given standards that are inviolate. Nature and justice as standards for true speech or right action are at the heart of what we call technology and we will see why technology dictates them problematic.

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While nature and justice are not themselves standards of the modern age this does not mean that the modern age has no standards by which to measure fit speech (truth) and fit action (right), that is, justice. The standard for modernity is technology, and the standard for technology is efficiency. Efficiency, the end (= purpose = completeness) of the projec- tion of technology constitutes the boundaries of technology. Efficiency can be measured only as a progressively diminishing difference between these means and ends or causes and effects. Thus, technology is 1) self- referential, 2) relatively autonomous, and 3) progressively sovereign, and, being so, 4) tends toward the systemization of nature both human and nonhuman. If the relative difference of means and ends (or cause and effect) were ever reduced to zero, or to complete efficiency, then tech- nology would become a totality (i.e., a total or complete system).1

Although in our time technology is embraced by not only the West but by the non-West as well, technology is a compound of Western perceptions and practices. The perceptions point to the radically revised relations of God, Nature, and Man that crystallize in early modernity, but go farther back to practices of radically increasing prowess,2 which, in turn, dynamically shape, and are shaped by those radically revised perceptions. First, I refer to the perceptions of Bacon, who urged us to put nature on the rack and to vex and torture it so as to force its “reasons for being,” and to Hobbes who told us that man’s artificial creation, the “World,” is superior to God’s natural creation—the Earth and the beings upon it—except, of course, man. Bacon was among those whose observations of nature led to what we call “the scientific method,” which, in turn, enhanced our control over nature qua nature, through developing a way of transforming nature, and eventually systematizing it.

But, as Martin Heidegger notes, Bacon’s new perception of nature was not enough, in that it pertained exclusively to perception. What was

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needed to bring about the scientific method was a practice coupled with this changed perception. This practice—a practice that allowed man to act upon nature—resided in imitating God’s action, in creating the world and His eruption into the Earth and the World, that resulted in His embodiment within the realm of nature (Space) and history (Time). I refer to what lies at the heart of Christianity itself, to the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ. This doctrine became a practice with the medieval Schoolmen who attempted, through their interpretation of the Word, to embody the divine Will itself. But I suspect that these roots lie even further back, in the cabalistic and gnostic practices of both Jews and early Christians.3

The perceptions of men such as Bacon, together with those practices rooted in Christianity, result in attempts to systematize nature qua nature, while Hobbes systematizes human nature. Hobbes begins with his attack on God’s creation and Aristotle’s doctrine of causality. His “artificial man,” Leviathan, is a systemization of human nature, in that it is a system built by man—man as the Maker who makes Himself.4 But this New Man is a creature with neither conscience nor a longing for transcendence. He has exchanged his conscience for the rational calculation of self-interest and his human longings for transcendence for his immanent safety. Bacon and Hobbes were among the men who discovered that the power of modern science (= technology) lay in its tendency toward systemization. Because of this, they are harbingers of the new age for the West.

But, according to Heidegger, this still is not enough, for in order for it to be, technology requires the advent of research, for without research, there is no procedure, or way (lo modo), as Machiavelli calls it (lo mode = the way = the way of of today, hence what is the modern; e.g., a present oriented toward the future). However, research is not just procedure, it is the projection into nature (into what is) of that “fixed ground plan,” or, perhaps better, what is rendered as “strategy,” (Grundriss). The projection draws (wills) the boundaries, in advance, and the way of knowing must adhere to these orders or boundaries. Heidegger calls this “binding adherence” to research “rigor.” Projection of the fixed ground plan is the first command of research. “Science be- comes research through the projected plan, and through securing that plan in the rigor of procedure.”5

Its second command is methodology. Methodology is the way of clarifying the known, and relating the unknown to it, thereby increasing the sphere of the known as facts. This is at the heart of what I call metaphor (meta + phoros = to speak across = to connect different expe- riences or perceptions). This leads to explanation, explanation to law, and law to experiment; the latter itself, mirroring—albeit in a disembodied or

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abstract way—learning itself: “The more exactly the ground plan is pro- jected, the more exact becomes the possibility of experiment.”6 Exactness leads to the objective knowledge we call “facts,” that is, information (= decontextualized knowledge) because the “ground plan” that is willed and projected is both controlled before the experiment itself, yet continually adjusts itself to its results. Thus, the way of method is what I identified above as the self-referential, self-adjusting aspect of technology.

The third command of research is that it be what Heidegger calls “ongoing” [Betrieb], that its activity both pertain to its proper (ordered = bound = fixed) sphere, that it, in other words, be specialized, and that the facts be coordinated so that the methodology can be adjusted to the results. This simply means that one must specialize and that specialists need to communicate and cooperate. This is why the business of research must be ongoing.7 “Ongoingness” (my own ugly Heideggeresque term), as I see it, is the researcher’s unswerving attention to the command of technology and the willingness to follow its command.

Research brought technology to this point. But because of what became an overwhelming mass of facts (again, facts = information = decontextualized knowledge) generated by it, a new way of ordering, storing, and explaining was necessary.

❖ ❖ ❖

That which concerns us most as members of a family, tribe, village, town, city, or larger cultural or civilizational unit is what I call the “Underlying Concern.” The way we make sense of these experiences that most con- cerns us is what I call the “Overarching Metaphor.” Each “Age” is defined by the relation of its Underlying Concern and its Overarching Metaphor.

For example, in the history of Western perceptions and practices, there have been several configurations. First, because of the radical changes that culminated in the spiritual crisis caused by Athens’ aforementioned loss of her war with Sparta, Plato saw that the Overarching Metaphor of the Greek polytheistic pantheon could no longer explain Greek life. He saw that the Overarching Metaphor had become bereft of meaning and hence had lost its authority. Plato related the “new” experiences of the Greeks to the patterned change in the heavens shared by all Greeks, and upon this relation, philosophy was founded. Aristotle too used patterned change or “nature” as his metaphor, but rather than relating the expe- rience of the citizen to the city and then the patterns in the sky, he found his patterned change in the biological world expressed as the relation of species to genus.

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The Hebrews’ metaphor was their relation to their God, manifest as their covenant with Him, their history as an enactment of His will. St. Augustine in his blending together these Hellenic and Hebrew meta- phors gives us the City of God and its relation to the city of man, the explanatory power behind Christianity. This metaphor—albeit with much difficulty—served to explain experience to the Christian West from its inception during the fifth century C.E. until the modern world.

❖ ❖ ❖

Due to the radical and rapid changes compounded into the perceptions and practices (ways of viewing and ways of doing; hence, ways of think- ing and ways of acting) that constitute technology, the modern world has had three phases, or what elsewhere I have called “waves.”8

Each wave has had its own metaphor rooted in its own experience and its own symbol that best allow for ordering, storing, and explaining each phase of the experience of modernity. Each metaphor, along with its symbol, has been technological.

The experiences of Bacon’s and Hobbes’s day required a mechani- cal metaphor, which was encapsulated within the symbol of the clock (= kinetic system). Because symbols are wholes, they too are systems, as is the very machine we call the mechanical clock. The day of Kant, Hegel, Marx—and to a lesser extent of Nietzsche—needed a hydraulic metaphor, symbolized by the gun/engine (= the digestive system).

During the previous century, and for most of the twentieth century, the hydraulic metaphor, and its symbol, the engine, have sufficed, and indeed, most people are still stuck with the vocabulary based upon these older metaphors and symbols, in that we still describe both nature and human nature in terms of forces, pressures, processes, and movements. Our everyday assumptions about both nonhuman and human nature are those mechanical perceptions granted by Galileo and Newton, and the hydraulic perceptions associated with the second law of thermodynamics.

While most people today (including philosophers and scientists) still rely on these metaphors and symbols for explaining their experience, reflecting on Heidegger, I think that while all technology pertained to a summoning forth of energy from nature, transforming it, and storing it for future use, that something fundamental had changed. Heidegger calls this process of extraction and transformation “Enframing” (das Ge-stell), and its storage for future use, “standing reserve.”9 Although still in embryonic form, what Heidegger saw as so basically different was that energy could be extracted, transformed, and stored differently, and that which, in his part of this century, was hardly manifest, at the begin- ning of this century is commonplace.

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Having said this, let us now take an excursion through the three metaphorical attempts to explain what has concerned moderns most in our technological age, an age beginning somewhere around 1600. Modernity, I remind you—because of rapid and hence disorienting change—has had several overarching metaphors, all of them technologi- cal. We have had a sketch so far of two. So, we go from there. And now we must go farther down to the deeper fundamentals.

❖ ❖ ❖

First, mechanical energy was extracted from nature and stored in the weights and springs of machines such as clocks—machines that held the energy of nature in reserve until they transformed it by setting it on its way, by unwinding a spring or releasing a weight. Next, hydraulic energy was extracted from nature, transformed, and reserved within the walls of a frame called an engine and set on its way by releasing water, steam, or a regulated explosion to drive a turbine, a piston, a jet engine, a rocket engine, or, at the end of this wave, crude nuclear power. But what fundamentally has changed is that now we are able to extract, transform, store, and set on their way the less apparent, even invisible, yet funda- mental energies of nature. I refer to what lies within our inner space such as the DNA of our bodies and to that energy within the atomic structure of all bodies (beings), electricity—the spark of life, and, one might say, its spirit. I speak of the wave of the electric metaphor, the symbol of which is the electric computer, without which the present phase of the Western project, the “end of history” and “globalization” would not have become possible, much less apparent.

The universal use of the electrical computer marks the appearance of the coming together of perception (knowing) and practice (making) through the co-penetration of the computer’s superstructure (its soft- ware = perception) with its infrastructure (its hardware = practice). I say appearance, as this coming together only appears to be, in that the space between them is relatively but progressively invisible. This is so because in the space in-between is time itself. Granted, we see neither force nor pressure, but we see their effects, relate them to their causes, and call this change. But the change we see in our time is coming so swiftly that we see it less and less, and we are progressively coming to consider what we don’t see as normal, for the normal is precisely what is nearest, and therefore, not questioned. Time is Being. And both Time and Being are progressively becoming invisible.

Whereas, the power (efficiency) of mechanism is measured as force, and that of hydraulicism as pressure, the power of the computer lies in the difference in-between the on and off pulse of a charge of electricity,

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and thus is measured by speed. Hence, the technology of mechanism and hydraulicism is manifest in the representation (Vorstellen) of the apparent as objective, ergo concrete, in that it demands the centralization, hence the massification of force and pressure in machines; and in human tech- nologies, the massification of money in economies, the massification of people in societies of large nations in great cities, governed by extensive bureaucracies, all protected by great armies. So the power of the tech- nology of our day is derived from the relative but progressive rate of diminished time, with the apparent disappearance of the representation of the time that the West has called history.

Thus, electronic technology demands not the overstatement of appearance (representation) that in the time of the mechanical and hydraulic metaphor Heidegger calls the “gigantic,”10 but the dissolu- tion of the boundaries in which power was previously contained, hence the decentralization and dispersion of power. Artists, as usual, realized this first. Witness the blurring boundaries of the image in impressionist art, then broken images in cubist, multiperspectivist (hyper-relativist) art and finally, the universal homogeneity of abstract art. Now, there is our present antireality, and hence reactionary movement—so called postmodernism. While artists need not account for what they see and do, unlike those modernists, most postmodernists are not artists, nor are they philosophers. Rather than questioning what is, they resent it, and so, with their rhetoric, try to conjure it away, but in their reaction to modernity, are, in turn, conditioned by it, and hence, unwittingly, are an integral part of it. Postmodernism is the last puff of the age of the engine: history’s fart.

But in terms of the serious demands of our technology today, I am thinking of the level of coordination in scientific and humanistic re- search, and how without the advent of the computer this would not be possible. I am thinking of electronic communication in general, but specifically of television and the “World-Wide Web,” and how these two modes of communication are destined to come together and then merge with technologies we now are unable to imagine. And, I am thinking of how all of this makes us witness to the ever swiftly disorienting eclipse of the sovereignty of the nation-state as it thrashes about to control these technologies through legislation justified by pietistic rhetoric.

As we witness this, a new political actor is waiting in the wings, ready to present himself on the world stage. This new form of rule—this new way of seeing things and doing things—has a shape too vague to define. We who live today at the eclipse of the second technological metaphor, the Age of the Engine, and in the dawn of the age of the third technological metaphor, are, rather, witnessing what Hegel describes in his Phenomenology as the “New World.” This political form which Hegel

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described turned out to be the beginning of the universalization of the nation-state, and in turn, the arrival of the conditions for both its demise and the hazy outline of the political form that will eclipse it, bringing about the Age of the Computer. But because we cannot yet name this new political form we simply are left with describing it in relation to the other two technological metaphors, the mechanical and the hydraulic.

Our technology at the beginning of this century is manifest by the disembodiment of power in the form of the appearance of the invisible. This is why the power of technology now often is referred to as soft power, soft because it is both malleable and boundless. It is a technology the power of which either appears benign or, because of its stealth, appears not to exist at all. Its use always is justified by that abstraction called “values.” This power is as soft and as elusive as the electronic image itself. Mass communications is both centralized and dispersed power. It also is mass illusion and delusion in that the more decentralized and dispersed it becomes, the less natural and historical reality exist.

Given the “world picture,” more and more people are coming to take the virtual as an improvement over the givens of nature and history; or they simply are taking the virtual itself as the given, and therefore, not questioning the picture they see.

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So we zap the TV. There is CNN. Well, maybe not. Perhaps a talk show in Icelandic, Slovak, or Urdu. But for now, most are in English, except, of course, Al Jazeera. Tomorrow? Maybe Chinese. Crudely put, news or talk about the news is “history as journalism,”11 as Heidegger termed it. This is the world picture—the world as a picture—the world pic- tured as a whole in which the past and future are zapped into an electrical image of the present. The specific language matters less and less, for the format (the frame) increasingly is the same, for the content is conditioned by the context and the context by the perspective. “Truth is relative,” so they say, but this is not the point. While truth is relative to the perspective from which the world is being viewed, limiting, thereby, both what one “sees” and how one interprets it, greater num- bers of people are seeing versions of the same picture. Thus, more and more people are becoming less and less tied to their little corners of their necessarily limiting standpoints—and coming closer to what Heidegger calls a “standpoint without standpoint.”12 This point is so obvious that it likely is to be missed (and this is the point), for it is about that which defines us most, but which we question least. It is about our “Archimedean Point,” our technology in general, and, elec- tronic technology, in particular.

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Let me repeat myself: technology is our common denominator, our independent variable. Thus, it both defines the world upon which we stand and our view of that world. Simply put, no thought of our world makes sense without taking into account the phenomenon of technology. Its major reason for being depends on our perception that all there is is only in relation to us, and thus, is there for our use. But because of technology, we are able to do/make what we see—to re-present a universe as we will to see fit.13

But representation entails negation, in that it is the given that is re- presented—both the historical and natural given. The magic of negation lies in its transformative power. While technology is about the transfor- mation of the given, all that has been given to us is not yet transformed.

On the New Justice

One must conclude from the above that while one now can conceive of globalization, the planet has yet to be universally and homogeneously, ergo, completely transformed. Because of this fact we should remember that technology is about the relation of knowing and making—that is, viewing and doing. We have the perspective that allows us to view the whole (i.e., the planet), and while we may even go so far as to call this perspective of the whole (i.e., globalization) technology’s “concrete uni- versal,” our means for concretizing this universal, that is, to make it actual, still is in process. Thus, globalization is a process that aims toward total efficiency and this is why, during this age of technology and glo- balization, efficiency is the only rule or measure, the only authority that we invoke. I say this because our old authorities that held fast to the metaphors that account for experience—a God of History, the Good of Nature—the authoritative standards for our positive law—have given sway to the measure of Efficiency. So we now must ask the question: Since efficiency demands a coordination of cause and effect, means and ends, hence a transformation of the given into the same, and since justice is a measure, in our increasingly boundless world, what kind of justice is Efficiency? This, I think, constitutes the reason behind our present and future conflicts. These conflicts are about the relation of globalization, technology, and justice.

In order to attempt to see even an outline of an answer to this question, we must now return to our present and to those who are violently protesting against this transformation of the planet that we now call globalization.

Globalization is just the latest, but so far, the most profound ver- sion of what we for a while have called “modernization.” However, the relation between globalization and the modern are in dispute and the

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disagreement concerning the relation has to do with how one views technology and its relation to justice. I mentioned above the opposed groups of Westerners who oppose globalization, groups such as: environ- mentalists and farmers; white-power thugs and the North American Indian movement; Basque nationalists and self-proclaimed anarchists; the “slow- food movement” and European neo-fascists. All of these groups whose resistance to modernity is in the form of the anti-globalization move- ment are profoundly, yet usually unintentionally, connected to the non- Westerners who violently oppose globalization. I refer, of course, to the violent opposition unleashed on September 11, 2001. Let us look more closely at the Western and non-Western protesters.

Many of the Western protesters see themselves as heirs to the pro- test movements of the last century. The most apparent proof of this is in their recycling the styles of the 1960s and 70s. Yet, the difference is that at least most protests of the twentieth century sought changes that were seen by the protesters of that time to lead to justice, in the form of civil rights, for example. The protesters of the last century wanted change. However, neither the self-described “hippie anarchist” who sees the antichrist as a hamburger joint (McDonald’s) or as a coffee house (Starbucks), nor the white-power thugs on the hunt for some dark- skinned immigrant who knows how to cook curry, want change. In fact, they are fearful of change. The Western protesters of globalization are profoundly conservative. Globalization is correctly seen as the agent of change, the change that has make it possible to have a Big Mac in Beijing or to enjoy what now is the favorite food of London: curry.

Globalization, for the anarchist hippie amounts to the grave injus- tice associated with what is seen as a global corporate takeover of culture, of nature, of—well—the planet—by those who “control” technology. And, for the white-power thug, globalization has written the ticket al- lowing the hoards of curry-making dark-skinned people to steal the rightful opportunities of white people. But the relation of globalization to justice not only connects these two quite different Western protesters, it too is what connects them to the non-Western globalization protester, the most extreme example being the terrorist whose actions are but a reflection of what he sees to be the grave injustices wrought by globalization, the gravest of which is seen to be destroying his religion and his traditional ways of life, while mocking his backwardness and weakness.14

Conclusion

It should be said that while neither the Western nor the non-Western protester understands the phenomenon protested, these protesters are correct in connecting globalization with justice. But both the Western

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and non-Western protesters are correct for the wrong reasons. However, when I say that both groups are correct in their making the connection, I am not forgetting that there are many different kinds of people from both the West and non-West who do not like this new justice, and the reasons for their protesting globalization are quite varied. However, al- though their reasons take several forms, none among them has any understanding of globalization. Their profound ignorance is due to their lack of understanding of the phenomenon and meaning of technology.

Were they to understand the “nature” and “meaning” of technol- ogy they would know that its only standard is the justice of efficiency.

First, if the protesters of globalization knew this they too would know that one cannot have modern (= technological) practice without modern (= technological) perception, and this, of course, dashes the hopes some have expressed for a technology bound by something so non-Western as Islamic law.

Next, they would know that globalization, in its being driven by technology, is a process that is relatively autonomous and progressively sovereign, and because of this, unlike the little man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz movie, there is no wizard and there is no curtain; yet Oz is real.

Last, they would know that once on the technological road to Oz there is no turning back, and getting off the road and striking out into the bush is unthinkable, for to get off the trail would bring unthinkable injustices, perhaps resulting in the destruction not only of the West but of the non-West as well. So, old answers do not satisfy new questions. In this new world we must find that for which we are fitted. It will likely be a long and hard search, and should we find it, it may not be an easy fit. Yet, we still can question, so we can still hope. And our hope is the proof that we still are human.

Notes

1. According to the second law of thermodynamics, systems tend toward totality, and totality leads to entropy. In relation to the emerging “system” of “planetary culture,” entropy (= nihilism).

2. This radically increasing prowess appears early in the modern age with what I have called elsewhere, interrelated “Sovereign Regimes” of religion, art, science, and politics, appearing in this order. See “The Three Waves of Technol- ogy” in The Literary Review Of Canada [LRC] (Oct. 1995); and also see Heidegger who inspired my elaboration of his idea in An Introduction to Meta- physics, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 48. Incidentally, my three waves have nothing to do with Toffler, but everything to do with Plato. On Plato, I elaborate below. See n.8.

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73On Globalization, Technology, and the New Justice

3. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concern- ing Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper Colophon, 1977), 122. My suspicions are best explained by “Epilogue: Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Ni- hilism,” in Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon, 1963), 320. Also, see, Eric Voegelin, Science Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1968); and Flannery O’Connor’s novel, WISE BLOOD (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962).

4. In his three-page introduction to Leviathan, Hobbes attacks Judeo- Christianity and philosophy. This attack is Hobbes’s hypothesis or, the projection of his “fixed ground plan.” Here he says man is superior to God, which is the same thing as saying there is no god but Man, and he metaphorically describes Man’s “artificial creation,” Leviathan, as a clock-like machine. In his attack on the heart of philosophy (science)—Aristotle’s “Doctrine of Causality”—he com- pounds Aristotle’s first and third causes (material and agency) and the second and forth causes (idea and purpose), thereby bringing together a new practice and a new perception. What follows, e.g., the text itself, is a proof of his ground plan. As Hobbes advises: “Read thyself.”

5. Heidegger, “In the Age of the World Picture,” 120. 6. Ibid., 122. 7. Ibid., 125. The “ongoing activity” of research requires institutional-

ization. In our universities the researcher will replace the scholar, as, indeed, today this almost has come to be. It seems that the only refuge for erudition left is in the liberal arts (artes liberales), a small enclave for humanity, perhaps its last hope for dignity during “the age of the world picture.”

8. Darby, see n.2, above. While in actuality globalization is new, the experiences engendered by it are old. These experiences are the theme of Republic. In Plato’s dystopian book V, Plato, playing on Aristophanes’ “The Assembly of Women,” outrageously eradicates the difference between the public and private realms, by 1) eliminating eroticism, then 2) the family, and last 3) the difference between action and thought. These conditions are his famous “waves.” His first wave is about universalization, his second about homogenation, and the third is the end of politics and philosophy with the reign (state) of the philosopher-king. This is the greatest of Plato’s serious jokes. And, then there is Genesis 11: 1–9, that recapitulates the Fall in the story of the Tower of Babel. But then there was God and the Good. Destiny has a beginning and an end.

9. Heidegger, “The Turning,” in The Question Concerning Technology, has Enframing and Standing Reserve as its major theme. My term for “Standing Reserve,” has its shallow roots in our late-modern experience and is part of our worn-out late-modern vocabulary. My word for it is simply, “Stuff.” See my Sojourns in the New World: Reflections on Our Technology (Ottawa: Carleton Uni- versity Press, 1986).

10. Heidegger, “In the Age of the World Picture,” 153. An explanation as to why the U.S.S.R. fell: it was not able to make the transition from “hydrau- lics” to “electricity,” and instead of exploding (= revolution), merely imploded from leaking pressure due to a lack of fuel (= money), thereby collapsing under the gigantic weight of its engine (= frame). Now the rubble (Russia) has reverted

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to a frontier (= lawless = criminal) society somewhere between “mechanism” and “hydraulicism.” The U.S.S.R. tried to escape the past and today Russia is being squashed by its past as the U.S.S.R., and a series of anemic revolutions could pop out anywhere and anytime. Yet, the Russians still make the best rockets, e.g., engines, their only significant contribution to the International Space Station Project. For now, the micro-electronics of the “electric age” still must depend on engines to move its hardware, e.g., its frame (= body = being). Tomorrow, when another way is found, perhaps the Russians will become like the early-modern Chinese, who, after having invented gunpower and ballistics, then were reduced to making and exploding firecrackers to ward off the spirits of evil ancestors.

11. Heidegger. What is meant by “History as Journalism” is the following: 1) politics and its result, history, is transformed into culture and culture into entertainment, 2) imploding the past and future into the present, and 3) instant global communication. See, as described in An Introduction to Metaphysics, 37– 38. During the last days of the last century we were entertained by the electronic implosion of the drama of sex and death on CNN—the impeachment of the American president during the electronically controlled bombardment of Iraq. Also, there was the TV horror show in real time. Yes, I refer to the events of September 11, 2001.

12. Heidegger, Nietzsche: The Eternal Return of the Same, Vol. II, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 117.

13. Heidegger, “In the Age of the World Picture,” 132. Also, I remind the reader that while CNN carries this picture, so does Al Jazeera.

14. For the best short yet convincing account of why the Islamic “world” is clashing with the West see Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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What Globalization Do We Want?

Don Ihde

The title captures the double sense that indicates that globalizationcarries with it both an element of choice and yet also non-choice.What is needed is to orient ourselves. The focus here is the technologies that enable globalization and the forms of embodiment these technologies entail. First, let us take a look at some technologies that relate to the international, communicational, and transportational dimensions of globalization.

Drawing from common academic experience and casting the nar- rative in a phenomenological framework, how is globalization experi- enced, perceived? What does globalization look like close up? And, correlatively, what requirements are there for globalization to look like whatever it turns out to be?

For example, here is a recent e-mail request, probably not unlike many that other academicians receive: “I am now preparing an article on the issues of globalization and digital art (entitled: World Wide What?). Finn Olesen (Media professor in Aarhus, Denmark) has told me that you have written about globalization as a phenomenon that took its very beginning when we had the first photography of the globe. The whole idea of seeing the planet Earth as a whole for the first time grounded this new concept. Needless to say, from my photographic perspective I find

75Co py ri gh t © 2 00 4. S ta te U ni ve rs it y of N ew Y or k Pr es s. A ll r ig ht s re se rv ed . Ma y no t be r ep ro du ce d in a ny f or m wi th ou t pe rm is si on f ro m th e pu bl is he r, e xc ep t fa ir u se s

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this approach extremely interesting and a groundbreaking way of think- ing visual representation. However, Finn could not remember where you had written about this issue. So I was wondering if you could possibly refer me to the relevant article or book?”

Then, my response, which recognized the reference from a 1996 article on “Whole Earth Measurements,” with the subtitle, “How many phenomenologists does it take to detect a Greenhouse Effect?” The article takes up questions and technologies related to how one could measure possible earth warming. And, relatedly, there is the question about how much of a warming effect is “homogenic,” or related to human activity. The very notion of a whole earth measurement is dis- tinctly late twentieth century. I was arguing that for these ideas to make sense, one has to have some notion about how science and technology are a material technoscience, but also one has to have some way of dealing with the entire Earth-as-planet:

Classical phenomenology, I argue, lacks the first of these concepts, and Heideggerian romanticism rejects the latter. Let us begin with a very simple phenomenological question: from what standpoint or perspective can the issue of whole Earth measurements be made? If, at base, our very knowl- edge is constituted by way of our bodies and through percep- tion as both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty seem to contend, then what is claimed about whole earth measurements becomes problematical . . .1

In the context of the original article, I then go on to show that only through instruments do sub-perceptual entities get perceived and that this instrumentation is essential to technoscience. I conclude that it is Husserl’s concept of science that is deficient since he concentrates—as all early- twentieth-century philosophy of science did—upon science as primarily a phenomenon of mathematization rather than instrumental, technologi- cal embodiment, yielding new perceptions. Husserl’s Galileo remains a Galileo without a telescope! A different critique applies to Heidegger who conceives of Earth as ground and that in the context of extreme romanticism about nonmodern and nontechnological notions. But for purposes here, I am concerned with how to get a perspective on whole earth phenomena:

The . . . conception needed is perspectival in the sense that one must have a sense of a “whole Earth” as that field which is measureable and this is what I am calling Earth-as-planet.

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The idea of Earth as planet, as a finite sphere, is itself quite ancient: it is anticipated by Aristarchus, it is assumed by Copernicus, and its size has been measured along with these notions, both in Greek and early Modern times. But one could argue that it is not seen as planet until it is so embodied in the earth shots with which we are now all familiar. And it is here that I enter the last set of arguments with classical phenomenology . . . . Put crassly, what might Husserl and Heidegger see when they look at a Moon shot of Earth-as- planet, or when they look at other imagings of environmental phenomena? If the answers are “pictures” or “images,” then the look involved is both naïve and cast in terms of modern epistemologies which remain caught with a passive theory of perception, which sees only “surfaces” and “representations.” And, if in the Heideggerian case, there is more penetration, but a penetration which yields the referent phenomenon as itself a “picture,” then the seeing remains short of scientific seeing as evident in science praxis. Indeed, such a look would remain short of even the primary insights of a phenomeno- logical epistemology claimed by both but restricted to every- day or prescientific lifeworld regions.2

Although I have here “cut and pasted” an exchange from commu- nication and publication technology, the above illustration reveals an- other set of technologies that relate to another global phenomenon concerning the environment. It should be clear that any whole earth phenomenon also entails some dimension of globalization. And that problem as a global problem is emergent as a twentieth-century phenom- enon. That is, to have elevated to an explicit theme the environmental “health” of the earth, is different from the prehistory of environmental- ism, which contained differing attitudes toward nature, animal life, or extra-human life that were embedded in different religious and cultural beliefs and practices. Thus, the analogy between the abstract knowl- edge that the earth was a sphere, finite, and in motion within the heavens—knowledge gained in antiquity—and that same knowledge perceptually experienced, either at first hand by astronauts, or mediated through photography, as in NASA earth shots. To have become a rec- ognizable part of a lifeworld implies this much more recent perspectival perceivability. To that extent, my Danish compatriots had a point con- cerning claims about globalization. And, to that extent, if one has a concern for the global environment, one must include this dimension in any wanted globalization.

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But let us now take a second slice through this opening to the experience of globalization. The e-mail correspondent, Lone Sonderby, and Finn Olesen, are Danes. The concrete occasion from which this exchange occurred goes back to a graduate Internordic Seminar in Aarhus, Denmark, last March; communication about this seminar continues “vir- tually” through e-mail. An academic lifeworld is today itself “global” and is embodied in a series of alternations of face-to-face and electronically mediated communications. In one sense this alternation of face-to-face and electronically mediated meetings is merely a variant upon a much older form of face/virtual communications, now embodied in a different technology. Many years ago I had considered doing my dissertation on Georg Johan Hamann, an Enlightenment contemporary and friend of Immanuel Kant. Hamann was a philosopher of language and an essayist who knew most of the principals of the times and had an enormous correspondence with almost anyone who was anyone in the eighteenth century: Kant, Herder, and dozens of scholars of the time. But, instead of e-mail, he wrote by hand—not even the typewriter had yet been invented. And, re-reading this correspondence, we can no doubt marvel at the high art of literary expression undertaken by hand. Here, too, was an alternation of occasional face-to-face meetings (now lost to us since not recorded) and written correspondence. (Note an irony here: only the virtual, or technologically mediated communication remains!) Without casting any negative, or for that matter nostalgic and romantic evalua- tions on this face/virtual alternation, one can immediately see by varia- tion how different today’s version is from the eighteenth century’s. Spatiotemporal pacing his drastically changed: letters by coach or sailing ship took weeks, months, or even longer to reach their destination. A written response, once received, would be thought through and slowly penned, and in the end it might be several scripted pages long. But, although by contemporary standards this is “molasses” space-time, it remained an alternation between face/virtual communications.

An example of such lifeworld alternation can be found in any short period of e-mail cataloguing: In the last few weeks I have communicated with Andy Feenberg, currently teaching in Kyoto, Bruno Latour, about to vacation in France, many of my colleagues in Stony Brook—from my summer home in Vermont; Donna Haraway, in her commune retreat in California, responded to the already cited Danes, and in addition helped with the visa processing for two more Danes coming to Stony Brook in the fall, thanked Laszlo Ropolyi in Budapest and Nikos Plevris in Athens for their arrangements for recent trips. Add now the frequent commu- nications with graduate advisees, publishers, and editors, to which should be added numerous messages from many countries with inquiries and

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perhaps once-only correspondence. All of this is, if not “real time,” at least occurring within the parameters of a few days. This set of exchanges is repeated in the experiences of many academics in any contemporary, interconnected pluri-university. It is a life textured by “global communi- cations.” This globality compresses older space-time into a kind of inti- mate immediacy, a near-distance whose space-times are equivalent for all geographical places. In a practical sense, I would find it very hard to have a style of life that entailed communication and travel without this com- pressed alternation of face/virtual communication.

This contemporary form of virtual/face-to-face alternation is both the same and different from older variations of the same phenomenon. It is the same in that it is an alternation between several types of com- munication and human interchange. And it is important to emphasize that the alternation itself is important—Jean Paul Sartre’s drama, No Exit, in which the theme is that “hell is other people,” expresses the possibilities of too much face-to-face, and for those in closed communi- ties, for example monastic communities, it is perhaps inevitable that some such communities would adopt rules of silence! Nor would a virtual-only world be a happy one, and while I cannot really imagine such a world, if elevated to virtuality only, a communicative world of this sort would simply be the inverse of the enclosed tightness of the former.

The difference, of course, is that globalized alternations relate dif- ferently to both the spatiality and the temporality of those alternations. Potentially the virtual is global in extent, and experienced in a condensed temporality. The technologies that enable such extent and durational changes, however, are “soft” in the sense that we need not use them— I for example, do not have nor like cell phones, so I simply don’t have one—or we can use them over any range of uses. I still know academic friends who refuse to do word processing, but also know compulsives who get sucked into hours of time “on line.”

Having now begun with two common, related experiences of glo- balization, I now want to move outward and begin to approach the more normative dimensions of the question: “What globalization do we want?” Not everyone wants globalization, even if in some ways some kind of globalization is “inevitable” or is “already at hand.” And, while there is a need to maintain a critical attitude toward the culture formations that will result from any kind of technologically mediated globalization, it is also wise to avoid two traps that many critics fall into.

The first trap may be called the “functional contradiction” trap. With only slight caricature, witness a group of young graduate students eager to take on the issues of globalization, perhaps filled with doubts about “Technology,” that transcendentalized notion of a metaphysics

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that turns the whole world into “standing reserve.” Perhaps they are also activists and ready to take to the barricades. What are their armaments? Laptops, e-mail, airplane tickets (obtained through some on-line ser- vice), and for entertainment in moments of boredom computer-run video games, or CDs playing the latest rock or techno music. These bright, young anti-globalists are themselves quite unlikely to pull the plugs on their own technologies.

The first trap likely reverberates with a second trap, which may be called the “nostalgia” trap. This is a form of criticism that, while worry- ing about changes made possible by technologies (only some of which will be followed), often contains a romanticized evaluation of life before the new technologies. Here is a cute example concerning a 1925–1926 set of worries about the onset of radio broadcasting:

Broadcasting, it was claimed, would not only keep people away from the concert halls, it would stop them from reading books. It would encourage contentment with superficiality. “Instead of solitary thought,” the headmaster of Rugby com- plained, “people would listen in to what was said to millions of people, which could not be the best things.” Radio would make people passive. It would produce “all-alike girls.” At the same time it would strengthen the forces making for healthy domesticity. “Charmed by the voice,” husbands would stay at home in the evenings. Children would find a new source of daily satisfaction, shared no doubt by their mothers.3

In retrospect, these predictions concerning the dispersion of radio broadcasting seem far too vast, far too deterministic, and quite off the mark. But they do resemble the mindsets of those today who might be identified with “critical theory” and the notion that such technologies encourage “mass man” as opposed to the elite cultures of the capitalized “Kultur.” Of course, the utopians concerning technologies can be just as wrong. Our local newspaper, Newsday, reissued on January 1, 2000, an issue of its predecessor newspaper from January 1, 1900, with glowing predictions that the then-new technology coming “on line,” as we say, would transform New York City. That technology was compressed air! Extrapolating from the example of compressed air tubes that sped re- ceipts from the department store sales counter to the central office up- stairs for change, the paper’s futurist foresaw a time when compressed air would be the power for underground transportation whose speed and efficiency would displace the horribly smelly steam locomotives that showered sparks from the “El” onto pedestrians below, and reduce the

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need for the many horse-drawn vehicles that clogged and be-shat the streets of the City. Both transportation and the U.S. Mail service, which would also be sped by compressed air tubes, would be technologically modernized by this compressed air development. And there were at- tempts made to bring this technology “on line” to the extent that at least regional compressed air tubes were put in place for the U.S. Mail service. These long-abandoned nineteenth-century mail tubes were recently re- discovered and are now being considered as possible conduits for a fiber optic system, with the usual legal battles concerning who may exploit this “right-of-way.”

Now, for the nonce and for fun, take a quick look at a primary figure who combines the “functional contradiction” and “nostalgia” traps. I refer, of course, to Martin Heidegger, who is used as a dystopian prophet. Here is Heidegger on the hand and the typewriter:

Human beings “act” through the hand; for the hand is, like the word, a distinguishing characteristic of humans. Only a being, such as the human, that “has” the word can and must “have hands.” . . . [T]he human being does not “have” hands, but the hand contains the essence of the human being because the word, as the essential region of the hand, is the essential ground of being human. The word as something symbolically inscribed and as thus presented to vision is the written word, that is, script. As script, however, the word is handwriting.4

Now, enter technology: Note that writing technologies have changed, but remain technologies, since the pen, the quill, or the stylus for making cuneiform inscriptions, are also technologies. Rather, Heidegger hits upon a modern technology, the typewriter:

The typewriter snatches script from the essential realm of the hand—and this means the hand is removed from the essential realm of the word. The word becomes something “typed.” . . . Mechanized writing deprives the hand of dignity in the realm of the written word and degrades the word to a mere means for the traffic of communication. Besides, mechanized writing offers the advantage of covering up one’s handwriting and therewith one’s character. In mechanized writing all human beings look the same.5

Does Heidegger echo the previous “sameness” thought to be brought by the radio? But, consider two ironic phenomenological variations on this

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double trap. First, substitute a musical technology for the inscription tech- nology: must Heidegger prefer the lyre or harp over the piano? For one plucks the lyre or harp with the “hand” and if the player is expressive, the delicacy of the tones surely do the same for music as the pen for writing. How terrible, then, to have “mechanized” the playing by moving into the evolution of keyboards, from harpsichords to claviers to pianos! The pluck- ing is now “mechanical” and the fingers do not touch the strings. And there is historical evidence that precisely these objections were made with the introduction of the clavier. Yet, only one who is tone deaf would not be able to tell the vast distance between Horowitz or Ashkenazy and the beginner’s woodenly played “mechanical” piece. The analogy with writing is no different—if the “letters” look the same (as they do with keys), the result of a typewritten piece by Nietzsche or a Mark Twain (two of the first who composed by and loved the typewriter amongst writers) and the local high school student is just as vast. What is expressed musically or written comes through the technology, but virtuousity shows. They look the “same” only if not actually read, hence, they look the same only to a superficial view. The Heideggerian “cheap shot” aimed at technologies, whether type- writers or constructed earth shots simply ignores the need to critically listen, read, or interpret results.

Then, in a second variation, which addresses the “functional con- tradiction” or pull-the-plug trap, let us resurrect our Heidegger and make him professor of a Stony Brook seminar—he demands that all research and term papers be written by hand for the reasons he gives. My suspicion is that our laptop generation of graduate students would quickly revolt and equally quickly regard our vaunted master as an “inscription Luddite,” rather than the bold, Jeremiac prophet insightfully decrying technologies that they usually take him to be.

In the end, what the “functional contradiction” misplaces is the advantage which all materializations hold and which have been hinted at before. Plato, with his nostalgia about the verbal word and diatribe against writing—but who would not be remembered at all were it not for material manuscripts—may have been the first in our tradition to exemplify this functional contradiction. The same would apply to Heidegger, had he to have written each copy of each book of his by hand (and had he done so, might we have better known his character?). How limited his fame—again through the functional contradiction—were this to have been a requirement of dissemination.

I actually agree with Heidegger that one “acts” through the hand better, through one’s being a body. But the technologies that can ma- terialize expressiveness are many and varied. The sense of body-machine embodiment experienced through a word processor does not, in my

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estimation, “degrade” the hand. It merely embodies it differently than through the dip pen. These variations resist what I take as the extremes of both utopian and dystopian interpretations of what technologies imply.

These two traps are not the only ones that lie along the path to globalization, but they are at least symptomatic of forms of resistance that I believe to be spurious, but which appear over and over again. On the other hand, neither is some linear, deterministic outcome to be expected regarding the technologies that make globalization possible. Compressed air never attained its promise, and the fact that its material infrastructure is about to be “translated,” as Latour would say, into pathways for fibre optics shows that technologies, too, change along the way. There is always a certain unpredictability that accompanies all technological trajectories. And, just as the Heideggers get caught in nostalgia and contradiction traps, utopians and determinists get caught in “designer fallacies.”

Heidegger’s famous hammer indeed “withdraws” in use, becomes embodied by the user, and through it, in action, accomplishes some project in the world. But we don’t really know from his text if Heidegger’s hammer is cobbling shoes, shingling a house, or placing a nail in a wall to hang a picture. And, in spite of design differences between shoe cobbler’s hammers and carpenter’s claw hammers, each of these could also be paperweights, murder weapons, or objets d’ arte. The “same” artifact can belong to a multiplicity of contexts with all their assignments and no design can “determine” use. If this degree of polyvariance ad- heres to a simple tool, such as a hammer, the same and more adheres to a complex technology such as our aforementioned Internet.

Originally designed to facilitate communications—often encrypted— between elite military and university researchers in the heat of the cold war, today the same Internet allows pedophiles to cruise chat rooms, dot com scammers to con victims, advertisers to spam wider audiences, hack- ers to challenge and distribute thousands of varieties of viruses, trojans, and worms, and in an analogue to minitel such as Andy Feenberg has pointed out, rather than becoming a commercial enterprise, it has turned out to foster romantic connections, and been used for gossip, support groups, ad infinitum. And this same Internet allowed me to find the Heidegger quotation about the hand, which I had forgotten to bring along from Long Island to Vermont in my annual summer move. If the Internet was designed, it is design out of control. Put more strongly, it is impossible to design limited use into any technology. This suggests that the same applies to the phenomenon of globalization. And with this we return to the beginning implication of the title: we are already being globalized—over that we have no choice—but globalization is much

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squishier than claimed by, or intended by, either its detractors or its promoters. Its technologies hold forth both promises and unsuspected results and outcomes. Does that mean we can “choose” the kind of globalization we want?

Not quite. Both pulling the plug and designing the result belong to the same deterministic and rationalistic error. Just as the death of Cartesianism eliminates the ideal rational observer or Cartesian god, it also eliminates the god trick controller of destinies. What we need is a model of analysis that recognizes globalization as a change of texture in a lifeworld. Or, alternatively, to see these changes along the lines of a Latourean actor network which encompasses both the humans and non- humans, as a process in which we take up responsible non-innocence such as Donna Haraway suggests. Each of these approaches allows the prob- lems of globalization to remain recognizable: what is the relationship between “free market” or capitalistic economic interchange and repre- sentative democracies? Does globalization imply only third world to first world flows? Or is the opposite flow also possible? Does globalization imply a “standarization” of cultures? Or a pluralization of cultures? Does globalization lead to a system of postnationalistic justice? Or do political cultures remain autonomous? The answers to all these questions must be, I believe, ambiguous.

I suspect the dynamics of globalization are amplified echoes of some earlier human developments. Earlier historians and anthropologists usually describe the movements from earlier human communities into a “civilization,” as one which included domestication of plants and ani- mals, development of writing, cities, laws, trading practices, and the like. In this much earlier transformation of human communities, there can be seen a forecast concerning “standarization,” for example. Take domesti- cation: domesticated food sources clearly displayed a reductive move- ment from the vast number of grains harvested by hunter-gatherers (Australian Aborigines harvested more than thirty grains and made breads from each) to the few that were selected and bred, usually fewer than a half-dozen grains. And, even here, we recognize dominant grains such as wheat cultures (Middle East and Europe), rice cultures (Asia), corn cultures (the Americas), etc. I cannot here belabor both the losses and gains which this early “standarization” made, but in today’s world there can be and are countermoves that can be undertaken as well. American Land Grant agricultural universities are experimenting with hypertrophizing an ever-widening set of wild grains, partly to overcome the disease weak- nesses prevalent with monocultural grains, and partly to explore the variety of tastes and nutritional properties possible. The very same reduc- tion of animals domesticated—usually a half-dozen or so—compared

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to the variety of nondomesticated ones, occurred in antiquity and remained to contemporary times. (I cannot resist at least imagining a Mesopotamian Heidegger decrying the irrigation of the river valleys of five millenia ago!)

In the opening examples the growth of awareness of the perspec- tival notion of earth-as-planet was cited. Earth is now visually presented in gestalt fashion in space shots, shots from the moon, etc. Also, the globalization of alternate face/virtual communication and meetings made possible by contemporary communication and transportation technolo- gies was highlighted. In both cases the focus was upon the materiality of the technologies that enable these aspects of globalization. But what occurs in a focus is not all that occurs. Any technology, deployed, carries with it “side effects,” many of which are unpredictable, and which are often both positive and negative. Here are some examples of precisely these material side effects in the context of globalization history.

To continue with my penchant for irony, let me begin with one forefront set of debates that relate to globalization in its popular, media sense, that is, a debate that catches up internationalization, large corpo- rate multinationals, and futuristic technological developments—I refer here to “GM” biotechnologies. Genetically modified organisms result from the successful technological manipulation of microstructures of plants and animals made possible by the biotechnological techniques developed only in the last few decades. With such new techniques, GM products immediately fall under the aura of future fears and hopes already noted. “Frankenstein” technologies run amok, intruding into god-space-variants upon the dystopic descriptions of radio already noted, are matched by promises of overcoming all hunger, the perfectly cloned animal, perhaps the perfect child, and at the least, a pushing back of genetically related diseases such as Alzheimers, Parkinsons, and juvenile diabetes. These are bound to and already have come forth in patterns philosophers of tech- nology well recognize.

Admittedly, no one knows what effects genetically modified organ- isms will have—no more than did our ancestors know what the domes- tication of plants and animals would have upon their futures. And in both cases those who fear and those who utopianly hope will again fall into line with the old arguments we have already heard. I will return later to this problem of ignorance and unpredicability, but for the moment the concentration is upon an interesting result with respect to globaliza- tion disputes, which poses an interesting symptom for our dilemma about what globalization we want.

That we should have a serious discussion and consideration concern- ing genetic modification goes without saying. But why, how, and in which

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way we should have this critical consideration is also part of how we can incline toward desirable rather than undesirable globalization as well.

The GM fight is already on. From Pacific Northwest “eco-terrorism,” which burns crops and attacks trees, to the anarchism that burns SUVs and applies arson to new developments (some on Long Island), the attempt to stop certain directions of change makes for the usual juicy media news. But all of this leaves aside an extant, massive, expensive, and environment-threatening set of effects that receive at best background notice and which in terms of effects are already massively telling.

Edward Tennant, in a remarkable book, Why Things Bite Back, does a history of unintended side effects to technologies, including those that relate to agriculture and, potentially, biotechnology. Humans, probably as long as they have moved around upon the face of the globe, have often taken along with them a biological entourage—migrating peoples have taken their pack animals (horses, oxen, camels) and pets (dogs, cats, birds), and while the histories on these are dim, they have had massive effects upon the environments into which these beasts and plants have been introduced. Example: European colonists introduced (technically, reintroduced, since there were equine species in North America millions of years earlier) the horse to the Americas. The horse, subsequently domesticated by native North Americans, dramatically transformed what had been once been forest–edge dwelling peoples, who occasionally got a buffalo, into the Plains Indian tribes, which became migratory and followed the buffalo.

And, this penchant for taking the familiar with us stimulated our European ancestors to introduce the English sparrow, the European star- ling, domestic cats, and the like, along with Bulgarian wheat, milo soy- beans, and later kudzu and the like into the Americas with results we all know. “Sparrows rule!” Starlings have mostly pushed out the eastern blue- birds, kudzu fills the southern U.S.. And, in Australia, the domestic cat gone feral has spread into the hinterlands where no predator like it existed before and is systematically driving ground-nesting birds to extinction. All these examples are pre-twentieth-century globalization effects.

The very way in which these lists are compiled, however, can also bias the effect. I have listed above a set of pests, monocululture plants, and predators gone wild. I could have simply listed what we would likely consider to be so familiar and taken for granted, that we forget that the flora and fauna were likewise transported and introduced. What would we, or Europe, be without potatoes, tomatoes, beans, pumpkin and squash, and other foodstuffs that came from the Americas? Or, as a recent book has shown me, what is more “American” than apple pie, yet apples came from Kazakhstan, were crossbred and introduced to North

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America by the English—along with the domestic honey bees needed to pollinate the trees! In short, any new introductions, technological or biological, have mixed and ambiguous results.

More sinister are the effects of unintended biological infestations, which, I remind you, include HIV as an import, between species (mon- key to human) and continents. Or, take the now two-year-old phenom- enon of the West Nile Virus, becoming endemic and spreading, largely through crows, in the Northeastern United States, another probably airplane-borne infector from the Middle East. From the far Pacific, poi- sonous brown tree snakes, presumed hidden in the landing gear of air- craft originating from their indigenous areas, have made their way to the Hawaiian Islands and are, like the cats in Australia, decimating bird populations. The “globalization” of biological infectors, both plant and animal, such as zebra mussels clogging the drains of the northern streams and lakes, which followed the earlier lamprey eels, supplemented by Asian eels now spreading through the South, are all part of an exceed- ingly damaging and expensive set of new arrivals (most unintended hitch- hikers on contemporary transportation devices). Later on, the invaders may be restrained—the gypsy moth infestations are now recognized to occur in cycles, and introduced viruses that attach the larvae are usually successful. With all this, where are our demonstrators? Where are the anarchists now that we need them? Admittedly, in the current context, Monsanto may appear as a more easily attackable enemy than “nature” displaced, and given our pre-prepared images of the movie mad scientist, the genetic manipulator seems more easily locatable. Yet, in all this, we remain hopelessly anthropomorphic in our targeting practices and overly simplistic in terms of our pre-globalized lifeworld.

We must also allow the utopians to have their say against this set of eco-disasters just outlined. Who today fears the scourges of polio, cholera, diptheria, syphillis, or tuberculosis? For even where not elimi- nated, the battle so far remains in our modern favor. Are there not also more democracies today than five decades ago? And the glimmerings of an international, humanistic justice system may be appearing in the inter- nationalization of justice in which Pinochet and Milosevic, once heads of state, get caught for antihumanitarian crimes, dragged against their out- dated nationalist wills into an international forum. Even life expectancies and birth rates are respectively up and down, contrary to the neo-Malthusian predictions of only three decades ago. These, too, are side effects of glo- balization, paralleling those of the invasions noted previously.

Where does this leave matters? Pretty much at precisely the state of the opening problem of whole earth measurements. The phenomenon of globalization is obviously too complex, too ambiguous, and too much

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part of our lifeworld already to have one clear and distinct shape. Nor is it possible to deal with a complex global phenomenon on the basis of past “rational control” epistemologies. So, having dimly perceived the phenomenon, having begun to recognize that we are non-innocently part of it, what do we do about it? At this point I have to be daring, but in a rather pragmatic and fallibilist way. I shall suggest that in parallel to technologies, which also turn out to be complex, unpredictable and multivariant, and which—if one wants to change them—one has to con- ceive of as something like a culture, globalization must be similarly conceived. And, before taking up pragmatic, fallibilistic suggestions, just think for a moment how hard it is to change a culture. What follows are some heuristic suggestions for living in and non-innocently trying to incline facets of globalization toward the shape we want.

First, where should we position ourselves? My answer is that those who wish to nudge the direction globalization is going to take must position themselves at “Research and Development” junctures. This is a lesson I have learned with respect to the problems of ethics related to technologies. The usual—and even the societally expected—role for the ethician is usually, contrary to this suggestion, to be positioned at the end of a development process, after the technology is already in place. For example, in medical ethics, the early role of ethicians was that after a new technology was developed, then the ethician stepped in and helped with understanding and distributing results. This, however, is a sort of “band- aid” ethics, to put the bandage on after the wound is discovered. Rather, “R & D” positioned thinkers must think critically about processes in the making. Again, drawing from current debates, stem cell research is particu- larly interesting both as a problem and as an indicator of precisely a rising awareness about the importance of R & D positioning. I take it as a healthy indicator that both scientists and politicians are beginning to recognize the complexity and the promise of this line of research. The previous coalition of simplistic approaches—thou shalt not use any embryo stem cells, but maybe one can use bone and marrow adult stem cells because the former encourages abortion, whereas the latter may not—is rapidly breaking down. I take it this is a small sign that a tiny bit more understanding of possibilities and implications is becoming known. It is also a sign that the need to consider developmental problems prior to implementation is beginning to be considered. This argument at least occurs today at the beginnings of a research development, rather than at the end of one such as the introduction of kidney dialysis machines, which produced the first ethics committees in many university hospitals.

Second, to be positioned in a R & D position calls for much more awareness on the part of the critics of the intricacies of the process than

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mere layman’s knowledge. The R & D positioned person must be at least an informed amateur regarding the science involved. Unfortunately, the North American context for science and technology assessment is often structured precisely wrong for this critical hermeneutic role to be promi- nent. The agonistic juxtapositioning of scientist/lay public which too often characterizes our situation simply helps feed the extremism of positions such as those taken by eco-terrorists. Donna Haraway, Andrew Pickering, and I have all pointed out that the Northern European ap- proach to developmental assessment is much more congenial to produc- ing the possibilities for critical hermeneutic stances. (I refer to Dutch, German, and Scandinavian approaches primarily.) For example, in Hol- land the government has decided it is extremely urgent that there be a national consideration and discussion of GM foods. It has, following previous practices, identified and mandated that the various interest groups (consumers unions, agriculturalists, political groups, educators, etc.) be identified and in conjunction with the research community undertake mutually educational and political assessment discussions. As it turns out, a hermeneutically trained philosopher, Bart Gremmen, has been named the coordinator of this process.

(From my own indirect involvement with a previous problem of genetic manipulation, involving “Herman the Bull,” who was engineered to produce a strain of anti–lactose allergenic genes, the results can be surprising. It was a democratic decision not to let Herman have progeny, just as earlier in a similar decision in Germany, there was a determination that nuclear power would not be utilized for electricity generation. In each of these cases, some of the reasons might be culturally interesting to us: In Herman’s case, one reason was that “cowness,” a very impor- tant Dutch value, was not being properly respected; and in the nuclear case, one reason was that there was not a level playing field to make such a decision because not proportionately enough research money had gone into non-nuclear possibilities, and until such occurred there was not sufficient reason to support nuclear options.)

Third, wherever positioned, it is important that the methods, par- ticularly the ethical and political methods used to make the inclinations themselves, be of the highest standards. The question always remains the longer term one—what processes do we want to have used both before and after any direction is taken? It is here that I part company with any form of terrorism or violence-inducing politics, including eco-terrorism. The Black Bloc of the recent G-8 sessions use methods that are no different than than those used by the Pinochets and Milosevics, or, to put it starkely, eco-Milosevicism is equivalent to Milosevic-Milosevicism. This confrontational and destructive method has already led to loss of life

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and will lead to more, whether intended or not, whether caused by terrorists or the stopping of terrorism.

(I am reminded of my own earlier 1968 experiences in France in the midst of the “Days of May” strikes. I had been highly sympathetic to the student-worker movement, until the street conflicts got to the point that the rebels began to chainsaw the ancient sycamores along the boulevards to slow police movements, an action that made me begin to lose sympathy then, since the destruction of ancient trees seemed exces- sive, just as in a recent situation, one can detect little sympathy for the Taliban destruction of ancient Buddhas in Afghanistan.)

Fourth, and finally, in all this I suggest that none of us are wise enough to predict outcomes and all of us are going to be surprised by some outcomes, thus calling for a lot of humility regarding even our highest values, rather than arrogance. Here I find myself sympathetic to a kind of neo-Enlightenment set of values. For example, one of the inheritances from Enlightenment values is religious tolerance. Note how long it took for this to be written into modern secular states—after centuries of wars, after breakaway colonies such as our own, and most of all, after the changes within religions themselves, religious tolerance has become a rule of law. Today we are going through a similar process with respect to ethnicity and, at least to my mind and experience, the most successful locations where cultural tolerance takes place are precisely those countries where religious tolerance is most strongly fostered. But one must not forget, that for religious and cultural tolerance to work at all, the religions and cultures themselves have also to change, to drop at least the practices of absolutism and fundamentalism if not the subjective beliefs about absolutism as such.

There may be a hint in this earlier experience for what will happen to our senses of community and citizenship here, too. Many years ago a close friend, Harvey Cox, wrote a book called The Secular City. In it he noted that in terms of friendship, one is much more likely to be friends with those who have similar interests and tastes in a widely dis- tributed, rather than geographically close setting. That idea seemed, not only true but liberating. One does not usually have all, or maybe even many, of one’s friends in the same apartment house or village in the contemporary world. Rather, one may have widely dispersed friends, with whom one communicates and visits in another variation of virtual/ face-to-face occasions. This is much more a quasi-urban model than a “global village” model; it is a cosmopolitan model.

None of these suggestions can or should be taken as universal, normative rules, but as pragmatic, flexible, and open-to-change guide- lines. And all of these suggestions must be couched within a critical and

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somewhat skeptical attitude. Hype, wild linear extrapolations, both dystopian and utopian projections, usually turn out to be as relevant as the examples of compressed air and radio broadcasting I have used.

And, as for the question of whole earth measurements, here is part of the answer. The images used to display such measurements, a depicted global display with false color projections showing imaged data, are con- structs of millions of measurements taken from satellite passes, sea surface measurements, and laser measurements, producing a model that may be one of the most expensive “pictures” ever produced, costing literally mil- lions of dollars; and, as one can see through informed vision, ocean surface waters rose l.6 cm. between 1993 and 1994, according to Science.6

Then, with regard to the human scale, we are all familiar with published photos of people from every culture—I recall one showing a Masai warrior, carrying a spear and wearing a loincloth, holding and talking into a cell phone—taking up the technologies through which and with which we concretely experience globalization.

Notes

1. Don Ihde, Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 51–52.

2. Ibid., 57–58. 3. Asa Briggs, A History of Broacasting in the United Kingdom (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1961). 4. Martin Heidegger, “On the Hand,” cited in Michael Heim, Electric

Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 5. Ibid. 6. Science, 8 September 1995.

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Looking Backward, Looking Forward

Reflections on the Twentieth Century

Andrew Feenberg

In the year 1888, Edward Bellamy published a prophetic science fictionnovel entitled Looking Backward: 2000–1887. Bellamy’s hero is awealthy Bostonian who suffers from insomnia. He sleeps hypnotized in an underground chamber where he survives the fire that destroys his house. Undiscovered amidst the ruins, he dozes on in suspended anima- tion for more than a century, awakening finally in the year 2000 in a Boston transformed into a socialist utopia. Most of the book is taken up with his puzzled questions about his new surroundings and his hosts’ lucid explanations of the workings of an ideal society.

Bellamy’s book is now forgotten except by specialists but it quickly became one of the best-sellers of all times, read by millions of Americans from the closing years of the nineteenth century until World War II. It articulated the hope in a rational society for several generations of readers.

In 1932, less than fifty years after Bellamy’s famous book appeared, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, a kind of refutation of Looking Backward. In the exergue to Huxley’s book the Russian philosopher

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Berdiaeff regrets that “utopias appear to be far more realizable than used to be believed.” Berdiaeff goes on: “[A] new century is beginning, a century in which intellectuals and the cultivated classes will dream of the means of avoiding utopias and returning to a less ‘perfect’ and freer non- utopian society.” Unlike Looking Backward, Brave New World is still widely read. It is the model for many later “dystopias,” fictions of totally rationalized societies in which, as Marshall McLuhan once put it, we humans become the “sex organs of the machine world.”1

We can now literally “look backward” at the twentieth century and as we do so, the contrast between Bellamy’s utopia and Huxley’s dysto- pia is a useful one to stimulate reflection on what went wrong. And, clearly, something very important did go wrong to confound the reason- able hopes of men and women of the late nineteenth century. While they expected social progress to proceed in parallel with technical progress, in reality every advance has been accompanied by catastrophes that call into question the very survival of the human race.

What happened to dash those hopes? Of course we are well aware of the big events of the century such as the two world wars, the concentra- tion camps, the perversion of socialism in Russia, and more recently, the threats from genocidal hatreds, environmental pollution, and nuclear war that we carry with us from the last century into this one. But underlying these frightful events and prospects, there must be some deeper failure that blocked the bright path to utopia so neatly traced by Bellamy.

Could a spiritual flaw in human nature or in modernity be respon- sible for the triumph of greed and violence in the twentieth century? No doubt human nature and modernity are flawed, but this is old news. Bellamy and his contemporaries knew all about greed and violence, the insatiable appetites, the pride and hatred lurking in the hearts of men. They understood the battle between Eros and Thanatos as much or as little as we do. What has changed is not our evaluation of human nature or modernity but the technical environment that has disrupted the deli- cate balance between the instincts that still left Bellamy’s contemporaries room for hope, indeed for confident predictions of a better future.

We can begin to understand this technical shift by considering what is missing from Bellamy’s description of society in the year 2000. His world is completely industrialized, with machines doing all the hardest work; improved technology and economies of scale have raised produc- tivity to the point where there is enough of everything. Workers are drafted into an “industrial army” where a combination of expert com- mand and equal pay responds to the claims of technical necessity and morality. Although this is clearly an authoritarian conception, it is impor- tant to keep in mind that obedience is ethically motivated by the eco-

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nomic equivalent of military patriotism, rather than imposed through management techniques. Workers can freely choose their jobs after a brief period of manual labor at the end of regular schooling. Labor supply is matched voluntarily to demand by offering shorter workdays for less de- sirable jobs.2 Workers retire at forty-five and devote themselves to self- cultivation and to the duties of full citizenship, which begin at retirement.

Bellamy’s utopia is essentially collectivist, but, paradoxically, mem- bers of the society are depicted as highly differentiated individuals, each developing his or her own ideas, tastes, and talents in the generous allotment of leisure time made possible by technological advance. Indi- viduality flourishes around the free choice of hobbies, newspapers, music and art, religion, what we would call “continuing education,” and demo- cratic participation in government. Invention, too, appears as an expres- sion of individuality and a source of social dynamism.

None of these activities are organized by the industrial army be- cause there is no scientific-technical basis for any of them, hence no technology requiring expert administration, and no objective criteria of right and wrong, better or worse. The economies of scale that make industrial technology so productive in Bellamy’s account have no place in these activities, which depend on individual creativity.

Those who wish to act in the public sphere through journalism, religious propaganda, artistic production, or invention therefore with- draw from the industrial army as they accumulate sufficient “subscribers” to their services to justify the payment by the state of a regular worker’s wage. The state provides these cultural creators with basic resources such as newsprint without regard for the content of their activities.

How different this imaginary socialism is from the real thing as it was established in the Soviet Union only a generation after Bellamy published his book! His society is bipolar, half organized by scientific- technical reason and half devoted to Bildung, the reflectively rational pursuit of freedom and individuality. But this bipolarity is precisely what did not happen in the twentieth century under either socialism or capi- talism. Instead, total rationalization transformed the individuals into objects of technical control in every domain, and especially in everything touch- ing on lifestyle and politics.

It is interesting to see how close Bellamy came to anticipating mass society. At a time when phone hookups still numbered in the thousands, he imagined a telephone-based broadcasting network which, he pre- dicted, would disseminate preaching and musical performances. Each house would have a listening room and programs would be announced in a regular printed guide. Bellamy even understood that musical perfor- mance in the home would decline as broadcasts by professionals replaced

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it. So far his extrapolations are remarkably prescient, but nowhere did Bellamy anticipate the emergence of gigantic audiences subjected to commercial and political propaganda. Nor did he suspect that the small publications of his day, individual artistic production, and personal preach- ing would be so marginalized in the future that they would be unable to sustain the individuating process that was for him the ultimate goal of social life.

Higher culture, both religious and secular, had a moderating and civilizing effect in his century, so enlarging the space of its influence through a more generous provision of education and leisure promised social advance. This, and not wealth as such, was the reason for Bellamy’s optimism. In his vision standardization and control were confined to the struggle with nature. What Norbert Wiener called “the human use of human beings” was apparently unthinkable. But the creation of the mass audiences of the twentieth century continued the industrial pattern of efficiency through economies of scale in the application of technology. The twentieth century saw the displacement of higher culture in public consciousness by a mass culture dedicated to unrestrained acquisitiveness and violent political passions.

Brave New World, on the other hand, was written a decade after the first commercial radio broadcasts, which adumbrated a future of mass media manipulation. Huxley’s vision was simply extrapolated from the rise of modern advertising and popular dictatorships. In Brave New World, the radical overextension of rationalization makes human beings into willing servants of a mechanical order. The Marxist hope, which Bellamy shares, for human mastery of technology no longer makes sense once human beings have themselves become mere cogs in the machine. This same view underlies much twentieth-century thought, for example, pes- simistic social theories such as Max Weber’s and the various deterministic philosophies of technology influenced by Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger’s concept of enframing describes a state of affairs in which everything without exception has become an object of technique. Things are now defined by their place in a methodically planned and controlled action system. All being is raw materials in technical processes; nothing stands before being as the place of awareness. Complete mean- inglessness threatens where the unique status of human “Dasein,” as the being through which the world is revealed, is so completely denied.

Heidegger might be thought of as the philosopher of Brave New World, except that he would deny that what we have before us today is a “world” in the full sense of the term. Rather, we are surrounded by an “objectless” heap of fungible stuff that includes us. This deep pessimism and a certain moral insensitivity are reflected in his shocking statement

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to the effect that “[a]griculture is now the mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starvation of nations, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs.”3

After Heidegger, a number of other philosophers developed simi- larly pessimistic views of modern society. The Frankfurt School philoso- pher Herbert Marcuse was a student of Heidegger’s and his critique of “one-dimensional society” resembles his teacher’s thought in a Marxist guise. Heidegger distinguished between craft labor, which brings out the “truth” of its materials, and modern technology, which incorporates its objects into its mechanism under the domination of a will and a plan. In Marcuse this Heideggerian approach continues essentially unchanged as the distinction between the intrinsic potentialities of things, which might be brought out by an appropriate art or technique, and the extrinsic values to which they are subordinated as raw materials in modern pro- duction. And like Heidegger, Marcuse deplores the extension of the latter approach to human beings themselves.

But unlike Heidegger, Marcuse holds out the possibility in prin- ciple, if not much hope, of creating a new technology that respects the potentialities of human beings and nature. This “technology of libera- tion” would be a “product of a scientific imagination free to project and design the forms of a human universe without exploitation and toil.”4 This is still a worthy goal, although perhaps it should be described as a receding horizon: today we seem to be as far from achieving it as when Bellamy wrote.

These are what I call dystopian philosophies of technology. They had surprising influence in the 1960s and 1970s despite their notorious difficulty. Dystopian themes showed up not only in politics but in films and other popular media, discrediting liberalism and gradually infiltrating conservatism as distrust of “big government.” Contemporary politics is still strongly influenced by vulgarized versions of the dystopian sensibil- ity. These changes were accompanied by a dramatic shift in attitude toward technology. By the end of the 1960s technophobia had largely replaced enthusiasm for nuclear energy and the space program. No doubt the arrogance of the technocracy and the absurdity of the war in Vietnam played a major role in this change.

As dystopian consciousness spread, it was transformed. No longer a theoretical critique of modernity, it inspired a populist movement that rejected its own cultural elitism. The question of technology was now a political question. The New Left reformulated socialist ideology in a tense compromise between traditional Marxism and the protest against dystopia. In so doing, it opened a space for the new technical politics of

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recent decades, which engages in concrete struggles in domains such as computers, medicine, and the environment.

The French May Events was by far the most powerful New Left movement, the only one with massive working-class support. In the spring of 1968, France was paralyzed by a general strike inspired by a student protest. Some ten million workers walked off the job and closed down the entire economy and most of the government, threatening the capitalist system. The May Events was an antitechnocratic movement, as hostile to Soviet-style socialism as to advanced capitalism. The students and militant workers proposed self-management as an alternative to plan- ning and markets. Their position was summed up in a widely circulated leaflet: “Progress will be what we want it to be.”5

The movements of the ’60s undermined technological determin- ism, both in theory and practice. But they continued to employ a dystopian rhetoric in response to the technocratic threat. However, as the twenti- eth century came to a close dystopianism lost much of its authority. Journalists and science fiction writers devised new utopias inhabited by bioengineered superhumans networked in a universal mind or down- loaded to more durable hardware than the human body. Technology plays a central role for Bellamy and Huxley, but the advances they de- scribe are symbols of hopeful or disastrous social trends rather than specific technological forecasts. These contemporary utopias are presented as breathless frontline reports on the latest R and D. Determinism re- turns as social consequences are deduced from future technology. Serious thinkers perplexed by this upsurge of horrific speculation once again raise flimsy ethical barriers to “progress.” Dystopian humanism struggles to salvage spirit from the Satanic mills of advancing technology. But the whole contest begins to seem routine and not very credible.

Meanwhile, new trends have emerged among researchers who es- chew speculation and study technology as a social phenomenon. These researchers view the dystopian critique of modernity as nostalgic longing for a past that is forever lost and that was not so great in any case. According to this view, we belong wholly and completely to the techno- logical network and do not represent, nor should we await, a suppressed alternative in which “man” or “Dasein” would achieve recognition inde- pendent of his tools.

Non-modern or posthumanist thinkers such as Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway have put forward this revisionary approach with singular energy in books and essays with titles such as We Have Never Been Modern,6 and “The Cyborg Manifesto.” The very tone of these titles announces an agenda for the new millennium. According to the authors, we have passed through the experience of dystopia and come out on the other side. Our involvement with technology is now the unsurpassable

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horizon of our being. No longer opposed to technology, we join to- gether with it in a more or less undifferentiated “cyborg” self.7 It is time to cease rearguard resistance and, embracing technology once and for all, give its further development a benign direction.

The Internet supplies the essential social background to the wide interest in this posthumanist view. Of course the authors did not have to go online to develop their ideas, but the popular credibility of their inno- vative vision depends on the emergence of computer networking and the new function of subjectivity it institutes. Without the widespread experi- ence of computer interaction, it is unlikely that their influence would have spread beyond a narrow circle of researchers in science studies. However, given that experience, they articulate a fundamental shift in the relation of human beings to machines, from antagonism to collaboration.

What is it about networking that assuages dystopian consciousness? The fear of dystopia arises from the experience of large-scale social orga- nization which, under modern conditions, possesses an alienating appear- ance of rationality. The loss of individuality is exemplified in the relation of mass audiences to the new media of the twentieth century until com- puter networking breaks the pattern. Instead of the passivity associated with participation in a broadcast audience, the on-line subject is con- stantly solicited to “interact” either by making choices or responding to communications. This interactive relationship to the medium, and through it to other users, appears nonhierarchical and liberating. Like the auto- mobile, that fetish of modernity, the Internet opens rather than closes vistas. But unlike the automobile, the Internet does not merely transport individuals from one location to another; rather, it constitutes a “virtual” world in which the logic of action is participative and individual initiative supported rather than suppressed by technology. This explains the pro- liferation on the Internet of expressions with the pronoun “my,” as in “My Yahoo,” “My MP3,” and so on.

It is noteworthy that this evolution of the network owes more to users than to its original designers, who intended only to streamline the distribution of information. Refuting technological determinism in prac- tice, users “interacted” with the network to enhance its potential for interaction. This was the real “revolution” of the “Information Age” which transformed the Internet into a medium for personal communica- tion.8 As such it is a switched system like the telephone in which the corporate giants who manage the communication have little or no con- trol over what is communicated. Such systems, called “common carri- ers,” extend freedom of assembly and so are inherently liberating.

What is more, because computer networking supports group com- munication the Internet can host a wide variety of social activities, from work to education to exchanges about hobbies and the pursuit of dating

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partners. These social activities on the Internet take place in virtual worlds built with words. The “written world” of the Internet is indeed a place where humans and machines appear to be reconciled.9

At this point, a note of caution is in order. The enthusiastic dis- course of the information highway has become predictable and tedious. It awakens instant and to some extent justified skepticism. It is unlikely that the twenty-first century will realize the dream of a perfectly trans- parent, libertarian society in which everyone can work from their home, publish their own book, choose multiple identities and genders, find a life partner on-line, buy personalized goods at an electronic mall, and complete their college education in their spare time on their personal computer. It is reasonable to be suspicious of this vision. The dystopian critic finds here merely a more refined and disguised incorporation of the individual into the machine.

But both utopian and dystopian visions are exaggerated. The Internet will certainly have an impact on society, but it is ludicrous to compare it with the Industrial Revolution, which pulled nearly everyone off the farm and landed them in a radically different urban environment. My “migration” to cyberspace over the last twenty years can hardly be com- pared with my ancestors’ migration from Central European villages to New York. Worrisome though it may be, the “digital divide” is far more easily bridged than the divide between city and country in a society without telephones, televisions, and automobiles. Unless something far more innovative than the Internet comes along, the twenty-first century will be continuous with our world, not a radical and disruptive break. Its real significance lies not in the inauguration of a new era, but in the smaller social and technological changes it makes possible at the current level of advance.10

The political question is not whether the Internet will liberate or enslave us, as though a technology had that power, but rather the subtle change in the conditions of public organization and activity it promotes. This change had already begun before the rise of the new medium, but intermittently and laboriously.

The Internet promises to enhance the ability of the population to intervene in the technical decisions so vital in a society like ours. So long as citizenship is defined by traditional geographical districts, its influence on technical life is severely limited. What can a local community do about a technology that crosses all boundaries, for example, a new medicine or a new method for producing food? The “public,” which ought in principle to be able to comment on such changes and influence them democratically, is not locally defined. It is fragmented into subgroups that follow the lines of specific technical mediations. Thus, the “citizen”

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is more and more a factory or clerical worker, a student or teacher, a victim of a disease, a consumer of industrial food products, and so on.

Eventually, these technological citizens may find their needs and interests represented by traditional geographically based politics, but not before many struggles and protests have prepared the issue on the terrain of technically mediated subgroups. These struggles and protests first define the new issues and bring them to the attention of a larger audi- ence. But the task is unusually difficult. Technical publics are fragmented and the problems they confront unfamiliar. The creation of a technical public sphere is thus arduous and uncertain.

It is interesting to note that John Dewey had a better grasp of this situation in the 1920s than many contemporary political philosophers. He worried that traditional local community was losing its integrity in a mobile modern society. New forms of technically mediated community were needed to replace or supplement localism, but these were not easy to create. Dewey described the dilemma as follows:

Indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of con- joint and interacting behavior call a public into existence hav- ing a common interest in controlling these consequences. But the machine age has so enormously expanded, multiplied, intensified and complicated the scope of the indirect conse- quences, has formed such immense and consolidated unions in action, on an impersonal rather than a community basis, that the resultant public cannot identify and distinguish itself.11

What the Internet has done is to make it much easier for these publics to engage around the technical mediations by which they are shaped. To be sure, the Internet itself is not essential to this evolution and the mere existence of the technology does not guarantee any particular usage. Before computer networking took off, technical publics emerged around other issues such as nuclear power, environmental pollution, and the AIDS crisis. In these cases too, participants in one or another technical network linked up to achieve political and technical changes. But the very exceptional nature of these occasions, and the extraordinary difficulty of putting together the long chains of activists scattered over huge territories suggests the potential significance of the Internet.

New communication technology enables far more precise, detailed, and convenient coordination and control of business activities at a distance. Administrative and managerial elites can use the network to build dis- seminated organizations that evade local, indeed even national, restric- tions and power structures. Unless citizens can also coordinate and

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internationalize their movements, they risk becoming totally irrelevant. Imagine the consequences if corporations and governments alone had access to the network and ordinary people remained just as provincial and cut off from each other as in the past. The disproportionate power of large-scale organizations would be irreversibly enhanced. Today, democ- racy depends to a significant extent on public mastery of the network.

The first persuasive evidence of the unusual democratic potential of the Internet came from a surprising source: the Zapatista movement in impoverished Chiapas brought its struggle to world attention on the Internet, blocking a violent repression that might have suppressed resis- tance there for another generation. The anti-globalization demonstra- tions in Seattle, Washington, Prague, and Genoa have shown the power of the Internet in a more modern context. International protest now corresponds to international finance and trade. We can expect ever more of the same in fields such as medicine, education, and the environment. Let me reiterate: this is not a claim that the Internet will liberate us, but rather that it will make it considerably easier to address the problem that worried Dewey, the inability of geographically dispersed technical publics to articulate their concerns.

In conclusion, I would like to discuss briefly some philosophical approaches to understanding these new forms of struggle. As we have seen, the Internet supports a vision of harmonious coexistence between humans and their machines. But these political applications pinpoint something else that was well understood by dystopian thinkers. They argued that technology is a source of power over human beings and not merely an instrument for the satisfaction of human needs. Because that power is essentially impersonal, governed by technically rational proce- dures rather than whims or even interests in the usual sense of the term, it appears to lie beyond good and evil. This is its dystopian aspect.

What Marcuse called one-dimensionality results from the difficulty of criticizing the “system” in terms of traditional concepts of justice, freedom, equality, and so on. But we have seen that the exercise of technical power evokes resistances immanent to one-dimensional society. Technological advance unleashes social tensions whenever it slights hu- man and natural needs. The narrowness of its social and economic base ensures that such slights occur often. After all, the system is not a self- contained expression of pure technical rationality but emerged from two centuries of deskilling and abuse of the environment under the pressures of capitalist competition and bureaucratic socialism. Vocal technical pub- lics arise around the tensions caused by these limitations. Demands for change reflect aspects of human and natural being denied by the domi- nant structure of the technical system, what I have called its “technical

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code.”12 Here dystopia is overcome in a democratizing movement the full extent of which we cannot yet measure.

A modified version of the system/lifeworld distinction introduced by Habermas in his Theory of Communicative Action13 provides a framework for explaining this movement. Habermas analyzes markets and administra- tions as “systems” that coordinate social action objectively. The potentially conflicting intentions of the individuals are harmonized not by explicit agreements, but by an institutional framework and simple procedural rules. Buyers and sellers, for example, act together on the market for their own mutual benefit without the need for subjective agreement beyond recog- nition of the forms of exchange such as price, purchase, and sale. In contrast, the lifeworld consists of communicating subjects whose action is coordinated by mutual understanding of a wide variety of elaborate social codes and meanings. Production is organized primarily through the sys- tem, and social reproduction through the lifeworld. The dystopian critique of modernity can be reformulated on these terms as the growing predomi- nance of system over lifeworld, with potentially disastrous consequences for social cohesion and the survival of individuality.

Habermas’s schema has some limitations for our purposes. He leaves out technology, although it too coordinates action objectively. He treats his concept of system as a pure analytic category, without recognizing its functional role in actual social life. “Systems thinking” is not the exclu- sive prerogative of the social critic, but rather grows out of the actual experience of managing modern social organizations. Finally, he tends to hypostatize system and lifeworld as separate institutional spheres, which obscures their complex intertwining in actual social life. The lifeworld perspective is brought to bear on systems by those enrolled within them. This is not an analytic error but a reflection of the way in which alien- ation is lived and to some extent masked, reduced, and resisted by sub- ordinate technical actors.

Let me offer an example of this from the realm of technology. The telephone network is a system in Habermas’s sense, managed in accor- dance with administrative rationality and distributed on a market. Yet the activities the telephone network supports are essentially communicative and the telephone takes on, accordingly, a meaning and a series of con- notations in the lifeworld having to do with intimacy, human contact, security, and so on. The telephone is not merely instrumental to these lifeworldly ends, it belongs to the lifeworld itself as a richly signified artifact. This is more than a matter of subjective associations since it affects the evolution and design of the network, which cannot be under- stood on pure system terms. The intertwining of power and meaning exemplified by the telephone is general in modern societies.

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Michel de Certeau offers an interesting account of the tensions between systems and their subjects which is helpful in articulating this entanglement of apparent opposites.14 He contrasts the “strategies” of the managers of modern institutions with the “tactics” of their subordinates. The managers act out of a stable power base with a long time horizon, while ordinary people improvise micropolitical resistances within that frame- work. These two standpoints correspond roughly with system and lifeworld intertwined as I have suggested here. The strategic standpoint privileges control and efficiency while the tactical standpoint gives meaning to the flow of experience shaped by strategies. In the everyday lifeworld masses of individuals improvise and resist as they come up against the limitations of the technical systems in which they are enrolled. These resistances influence the future design of the systems and their products.

This approach to the relation of system and lifeworld, strategies and tactics goes beyond both dystopian condemnation and the posthumanist acceptance of technology. Dystopianism adopts the strategic standpoint on technology while condemning it. Technology is conceived exclusively as a system of control and its role in the lifeworld is overlooked. The introduction of a lifeworld perspective into the study of technological society completes the picture sketched by posthumanist analysis of tech- nical networks. The contradiction between technology as system and lifeworld that is part and parcel of a technologically advanced society explains the rise of struggles in the emerging technical public sphere.

The utopian and dystopian visions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were attempts to understand the fate of humanity in a radically new kind of society in which most social relations are techni- cally mediated. The hope that such mediation would enrich humanity while sparing human beings themselves was disappointed. The extension of technical control overtakes the controllers beyond a point we have long since reached. But the dystopians did not anticipate that once inside the machine, human beings would gain new powers they would use to change the system that dominates them. We can observe the faint begin- nings of such a politics of technology today. How far it will be able to develop is less a matter for prediction than for practice.

Notes

This chapter is a revised version of a contribution to the “International Symposium on The Twentieth Century: Dreams and Realities,” Hitotsubashi University, December 2, 2000.

1. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 46.

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2. This projection implies the application of a primitive notion of mar- ginal utility under conditions of income equality, which is not, be it noted, a Marxian desideratum. The varying preference for leisure remains as a basis for the rational allocation of labor. Unfortunately, this appears to create a vicious circle: the least popular jobs would have the shortest hours, requiring the recruitment of a large number of workers who would have to be offered still shorter hours at the margin, and so on ad infinitum. Still, it is a nice try for 1888!

3. Quoted in Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 241.

4. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 19. 5. Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman, When Poetry Ruled the Streets:

The French May Events of 1968 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 84.

6. Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes (Paris: La Découverte, 1991).

7. Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).

8. For a detailed case study of this transformation in the first successful domestic computer network, the French Minitel system, see Andrew Feenberg. Alternative Modernity (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press), chap. 7.

9. Andrew Feenberg, “The Written World,” in Mindweave: Communica- tion, Computers, and Distance Education, ed. A. Kaye and R. Mason (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989).

10. This is what is wrong with the many polemics against information age hype. When philosophers believe they need not discuss the reality of the tech- nologies they study, but merely respond to the silliest prophecies of enthusiasts, they fail us. As the straw men hit the ground bleeding, we are left wondering what, after all, is actually happening. For a more measured approach, see Maria Bakardjieva and Andrew Feenberg, “Community Technology and Democratic Rationalization,” in The Information Society (forthcoming 2002).

11. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press, 1980), 126.

12. Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revis- ited. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 74–80.

13. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984, 1987).

14. Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du Quotidien (Paris: UGE, 1980).

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Part Two

❖ ❖ ❖

Humanity

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The Problem with “The Problem of Technology”

Arthur M. Melzer

It is not an exaggeration to say that the question of technique has now become that of the destiny

of man and of his culture in general.

—Nicholas Berdyaev

Thinking is called into existence by problems. The thought not onlyof individuals but of whole eras thus tends to organize aroundsome prevailing conception of the deepest question. In our own age, this catalytic, crystallizing question seems, more and more, to be that of technology. All the great issues of morality and politics, formerly addressed on their own or in a religious context, are now placed in the larger context of technology, which suddenly seems the most powerful and pervasive force, the most ultimate phenomenon.

The clearest evidence for this change is the remarkable convergence that has occurred in the last generation between theorists of the radical Right and Left: both now regard technology not merely as problematic but as our deepest problem. On what may be called the romantic and

109Co py ri gh t © 2 00 4. S ta te U ni ve rs it y of N ew Y or k Pr es s. A ll r ig ht s re se rv ed . Ma y no t be r ep ro du ce d in a ny f or m wi th ou t pe rm is si on f ro m th e pu bl is he r, e xc ep t fa ir u se s

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existentialist Right, there has of course been a long tradition of hostility to machine technology as destructive of man’s higher, aesthetic and spiritual nature. But in the thought of Heidegger this tendency is deep- ened and placed at the center: technology, properly understood, is the most fundamental as well as most problematic characteristic of human existence in our age and, at least incipiently, of Western thought and Being since its Platonic origins.1

On the Left, the dominant, Marxist view—which arose by repudi- ating an earlier tradition opposed to industrialization as inherently ex- ploitative—attributed all exploitation to the mode rather than the means of production, to the bourgeois ownership of technology rather than to technology itself. By thus shifting all blame for injustice onto capitalism, Marx not only exculpated technology but was able to embrace it as the ultimate savior and liberator of mankind—a view that triumphed because it was more consistent with left-wing progressivism.2 But in the last sixty years the thought of the Frankfurt School and its spinoffs in the “New Left” have produced a veritable revolution on the Left, whereby what formerly was embraced as a savior has now been revealed as the devil itself. Today on the Left, no less than on the Right, technology or “instrumental rationality” is seen as the root phenomenon of modernity and as the true source of all our evils.3

The emergence of technology not only as a problem but as the organizing problem of our times can also be seen in other, less theoreti- cal phenomena. In contemporary popular culture, for example, what is the largest, weightiest, most “philosophical” question that it is possible to ask? Not if we will be saved; not if there will be a transfiguring, political revolution; but whether we will “destroy the planet.” Especially for the college-aged, that is the truly serious question, which quiets the unruly crowd and seems to place everything in its proper perspective.

To exaggerate only slightly, one could elaborate the apocalyptic claims implicit within this conception by speaking of “three ages of man.” In the first, metaphysical age, the question that organized human thinking was that of man’s relation to the divine or transcendent order. In the second, humanistic period, the issues of humanity’s this-worldly security and com- fort, and the problem of man’s exploitation of man (the “social question”) moved to the center. In our own age, the third, while these other prob- lems have not disappeared, the crucial issue has become humankind’s relation to the rest of nature, understood now not as transcendent but as something vulnerable and subject to our control, for which we must take responsibility. This is the age of the problem of technology.

Certain as it is, however, that the focus of human thinking has changed radically over time, that fact alone is obviously no proof that it

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ought so to change. The human diet has also varied over time, which does not prove that some foods do not nourish better than others. It is at least possible that the deepest questions of human existence are fixed— rooted in an unchanging “human condition”—however neglected or variously distorted they may be in different ages. Thus, in knowing ourselves to view the world from a new and altered perspective—that of the question of technology—it is still incumbent on us to wonder how this change came about and to raise the question of its value or legiti- macy. This is of course a monumental undertaking. What follows is merely an attempt to survey the terrain, some familiar and some new.

Our Uniquely Technological Age

It is an obvious fact that neither technology nor the question concerning its value is new to the modern period. Indeed, human life as such is so inseparable from technology that homo sapiens is commonly distinguished as “the tool-making animal,” just as the stages of human civilization are differentiated in terms of the tools men have actually made. The perva- sive effect of technology is visible even in the most primitive societies, especially if one considers not only simple tools and weapons, but also ritual art, body painting and surgery, fermented drinks, and so forth. And no recent technological innovation has been so momentous in its consequences as the agricultural revolution.

As for the awareness of technological change as a problem, one might point to the fierce resistance of hunters and nomads to agriculture, which easily rivals the more recent hatred of peasants, artisans, and in- tellectuals for the machine. On a more reflective level, the stories of Babel and Prometheus suffice to show that some kind of “problem of technology” has been on human minds for a very long time.

And yet clearly there is something distinctive about the modern period. We not only have more technologies, but somehow we are more technological. One senses that the phenomenon of human artifice, which is in some sense universal, has come into its own so radically and per- vades human existence so thoroughly, that it now seems to form the horizon within which everything else finds its place. If one could clearly spell out the ways in which this is true, one might see why the problem of technology has taken center stage today, as well as begin to evaluate whether it has a right to that place. Thus, we need to understand two interrelated things: how is modern technology unique and how is modernity uniquely technological?

I will begin with a brief survey of more or less familiar character- izations of technology and of its role in the modern age before turning

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to the two factors that seem to me at once most important and least adequately understood—the modern belief in progress and disbelief in happiness.4

THE GREATER EXTENT OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY

The most obvious characteristic distinguishing modern technology from its earlier forms is simply that there is such a great deal more of it. Of all the objects with which one routinely comes into contact today, a remarkably high and growing percentage are artificial. These technologi- cal objects, of which there are more, are also more technological—being artifacts not merely in form, such as an earthenware pot, but also in their very matter. “Plastic” denotes a new level of artificiality. Furthermore, they are machines and not merely tools, for even their motion or power is artificial.5 And increasingly they are “smart” machines, which replace the power of the human mind as well as of the body.

They are further distinguished by the involvement of new, unantici- pated physical forces or effects, such as nuclear energy or laser optics, which are wholly alien to our natural experience of the world. They stand at a greater remove also from our natural productive faculties, being the product not of human hands directly but of machines that are the prod- uct of still other machines, and so forth. Finally, they are technological not merely as means for the provision of natural or at least accustomed goods, but exist for the service of ever more artificial ends. The purpose of a television set, for example, cannot be fully understood except in terms of a world of needs as artificial as the television itself.

It is not mere artificiality, however, that distinguishes the products of modern technology, but also ever increasing automaticity, uniformity, and disposability. These are the qualities that give rise to the unique sense of sterility, the existential disengagement and alienation from the world of objects, that seems to be a hallmark of modern experience.6

NEW RELATIONS OF DEPENDENCE

Two further characteristics of the modern world follow directly from the great extent of technological development. Our age lives in a condition of utter and unprecedented dependence upon its technology. In the absence of the artificial world we have created for ourselves, very little of modern life—of what we have and do and are—would remain. For ex- ample, the prosperity that has made possible mass education and thus mass democracy would disappear. Indeed, perhaps 85 percent of the

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world’s present population, which has increased almost eightfold since the start of the Industrial Revolution, would be insupportable.7

Just as striking, however, is the degree to which the rest of nature has become dependent on us. Due to the vast scale of technological development, it is now up to us whether other species will survive or disappear, whether the atmosphere and climate will continue unchanged, whether the planet will remain supportive of human and other forms of life. In all past ages, it was believed that, however great man’s evil and foolishness, his sins only fall back on himself, leaving the larger order of nature to go its way serenely unchanged, a palpable symbol of man’s pettiness and his need to conform to the order that transcends him. In fact, it still remains true, if no longer so palpable, that man has no power over the basic laws of nature or over the ultimate finitude of human life and the cosmic conditions that support it. Nevertheless, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that something of a revolution has occurred in the structure of the human condition as a result of modern technology. All future thinking about morality and the human good must include the new fact that men have largely succeeded in becoming the “masters and owners of nature,” as Descartes had urged, and that this ownership brings with it new responsibilities. The classical virtue of moderation is as crucial today as it was in the past, but henceforth it will be grounded less on nature’s overawing permanence than on its vulnerability, less on man’s smallness than on his excessive and dangerous technological power.8

THE GREATER SCOPE OF MODERN TECHNOLOGY

It is not only the extensive material development of the modern world that makes it uniquely “technological,” but also the spread of this phe- nomenon to other areas of life formerly untouched by it. Beyond physi- cal instruments and machines, there is something that may be called the technological “attitude,” or “way of thinking,” or even “posture toward Being”: a nonspecific, but generally utilitarian understanding of ends, a primary focus on means and power, the restriction of reason to instru- mental rationality—the methodical pursuit of the one, maximally efficient way of doing each thing—the faith in human self-reliance and control, the belief in the superiority of the artificial to the natural and of the mechanical to the human, and the view that everything man encounters in nature or history is only raw material which he is free to transform for his own purposes. As has been shown with particular force in the work of Jacques Ellul, this attitude, which used to be found only in a few, narrowly circumscribed areas of life, now seems to dominate virtually all.9

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The whole idea of “revolution,” for example, which stands behind most modern political thinking, imitates man’s conquest of physical nature. As Robespierre urges, “Everything has changed in the physical order; everything must change in the moral and political order. Half the revo- lution of the world is already accomplished; the other half must be achieved.”10 All liberal political systems in particular are decisively tech- nological in their theory and practice. In such thinkers as Locke, Montesquieu, and the American Founders, the state is seen as an artificial human invention, needed to correct the gross defects of nature, and as something fundamentally instrumental, a mere means for the provision of private ends. The citizens, as well, are conceived as “individuals,” that is, independent human atoms subject to internal drives and external manipulation. The machine of state that organizes them is to be con- structed, not in imitation of some natural or divine pattern, but in the most effective and efficient way. Thus, great reliance is placed on consti- tutional mechanisms and techniques—separation of powers, checks and balances, representation, party government, federalism, extending the sphere of the free market—rather than on human qualities such as states- manship or moderation or justice. As stated (perhaps overstated) in the title of a recent book on the American Constitution, the goal was to build “A Machine That Would Go of Itself.”11

Similarly, in the sub-political realm of work and economics, we have created an instrumentally rationalized world of bureaucracies and assembly lines, of specialized men and standardized products. Even on the level of leisure and amusement, one sees a similar tendency, perhaps less planned but no less obvious, toward the triumph of technique. In- deed, it is difficult to think of any human activity, grand or trivial, for which there does not now exist a specialized method, therapy, or system, whether for eating or fighting, for dating or proselytizing, for relaxing or motivating, for making cars or making love. Time itself has been cap- tured by clocks and schedules, space by urban grids and highways, value by dollars and cents. Gradually, all alternative principles of experience and choice—piety, morality, aesthetics, custom, instinct—have been, to paraphrase Marx, drowned in the icy waters of technical calculation.

THE NEW SCIENTIFIC BASIS

A still more distinctive and profound characteristic of contemporary tech- nology is its intimate connection with modern, theoretical science. In prior ages, each of the different arts was based on a relatively separate and self-contained body of practical “know-how” or crafts-knowledge, acquired through trial and error and transmitted through tradition. In-

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deed, the practical arts were necessarily separate from “science” or “theory” owing both to the latter’s motive—the idle, disinterested contemplation of what is—and to its object—the realm of changeless, eternal beings that cannot be other than they are. A revolution in human thinking was required to produce the situation that today we take for granted: the derivation of the crafts from natural philosophy.

This revolution has had, as its most obvious consequence, the pro- duction of remarkable new craft-objects, which are able to harness forces of nature unsuspected by the prescientific, artisanal world. A deeper if less visible consequence, however, is the fundamental transformation of our attitude toward these practical objects, which also now carry with them all the splendor and dignity of “theory.” Modern science consti- tutes the dominant theory of reality, the highest intellectual authority of our age, much as the Bible did in former times. Today, technological objects have therefore taken on something of the character of sacred objects or divine gifts. They are seen no longer as merely the fruit of some particular craft or artisan but as a remarkable demonstration and consequence of our successful contact with the deepest ground of reality, a sort of message or gift from on high. In other words, prior to our own, there had never been a world in which the most ordinary, mundane ob- jects were so directly and convincingly linked to the most ultimate prin- ciples. The great veneration we pay to high technology, and its peculiar prestige in the world—its use, for instance, as the dominant measure of a society’s degree of civilization—would seem to derive less from the mate- rial comforts it provides than from this: that it constitutes an indubitable revelation and local incarnation of the deepest forces of the universe.

The modern convergence of the arts and natural philosophy, how- ever, involves the transformation of the latter no less than the former; and this change is responsible, on a still deeper level, for the uniquely technological character of our age. At the dawn of the modern era, natural philosophy was transformed into “modern science,” which is, in itself, even prior to all practical applications, essentially technological. The whole possibility of “applied science” is implicit from the very start in the structure of “theoretical” modern science. The latter is a funda- mentally technological way of knowing.

One sees this, in the first place, in the transformation of the motive or end of philosophy, both natural and moral, enunciated by such think- ers as Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes. The explicit purpose of “theory” is no longer disinterested contemplation but power. Speculative meta- physics falls into disrepute as the goal shifts from understanding and admiring the world to controlling it.12 The fact that it was really not until the nineteenth century that theoretical science actually began to yield

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practical fruits only makes more impressive these early declarations of technological intent.

In its method, as well as its motive, the new science was inherently technological. This is visible, to begin with, in the very idea of “method,” which now comes to the fore—the idea that the natural workings of the human mind are not to be trusted and must be replaced with a special- ized, artificial technique for reasoning. Modern science does not, like earlier philosophy, grow out of and perfect common sense, raising it to “wisdom,” but rather starts afresh, building a separate edifice of techni- cal, “scientific” knowledge, which sits alongside and in permanent ten- sion with our natural way of knowing. Methodological science is a new thought technology.

The content of modern method, no less than its form, is also technological. Whether because of their new, practical motive, or a change in metaphysics, or their new epistemology (this controversy need not be settled here), the very questions that such thinkers as Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes were asking, their whole conception of what would count as “understanding” nature, predisposed their thinking in a technological direction. Prior to all investigation, they tended to dismiss the older questions of “Why” and “What” for the problem of “How.” Henceforth, to understand nature would mean to know how it worked.

The precise method to be used in such research—which emerged not so much in any one of these thinkers as from their combined effect— had three central characteristics, each in its own way technological: it was analytical, mathematical, and experimental. By proceeding through “analy- sis,” by resolving every problem or phenomenon into (purportedly) more fundamental independent parts, scientific investigation rejected from the start—in its very method—the possibility that things must be understood as integral wholes (essences, formal causes, organisms) or understood in terms of some larger, overarching order or purpose (final causes). These excluded possibilities—that the world naturally tends toward the realiza- tion of certain structures or certain ends—would have placed a limit on both the legitimacy and possibility of the human manipulation of nature. Thus, modern science’s analytical or reductionist method, by denying the integrity of natural wholes, by requiring us to break nature down (at least in thought) in order to understand it, is inherently technological.

This point can be strengthened by considering an obvious objec- tion. The ancient Epicureans, with their metaphysical materialism, also rejected formal and final causes, and yet did not favor conquering nature but rather living in accordance with it. The difference derives not only from Epicurean moral doctrine but also from their belief in the irreduc- ible heterogeneity of qualitatively distinct atoms, which puts strict limits

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on the malleability of nature. By contrast, the modern discovery of con- sciousness, or of “subjectivity,” or of the primary/secondary distinction placed man outside of nature, at least to the extent of being the reposi- tory of all secondary qualities; it thus drained external reality not only of noetic but of all qualitative or sensuous heterogeneity, leaving only an abstract and purely quantitative world of homogeneous matter. Conse- quently, whereas Lucretius explained the different qualities of things in terms of the inherent properties of their atoms, modern science sought to explain everything in terms of the different configurations or combi- nations of uniform matter. And since these configurations, once under- stood, might be recreated or transformed by man, this more radical reductionism or “analysis” opened a whole new vista on the manipula- tion of nature.

In breaking completely with the “qualitative” world and reducing everything to quantity and relation, modern science in fact went beyond mere analysis to a unique mathematicization of physics. Again, it is true that Pythagoras and, on some interpretations, Plato also saw mathematics as the key to the universe, but by this they meant that the cosmic whole had a permanent, static structure or form based on certain mathematical relationships. Modern science, by contrast, holds that the universe nei- ther possesses nor tends toward fixed structures of any kind, but is in constant, aimless flux. It is to the laws of this flux, and not to any static order, that modern science applies its mathematics. And whereas “math- ematical physics” in the Pythagorean sense is clearly antitechnological and harmonistic, in the modern sense it is the very opposite. It means that, on the one hand, the world is vastly more changeable or malleable than at first it appears to be, and yet, on the other, that its constant change is not some incomprehensible, Heraclitean flux but rather a pre- cise, determinate, lawful sequence of cause and effect, susceptible of mathematical prediction and thus human control.

As analytical and mathematical, scientific method grounds the pos- sibility of controlling nature; as “experimental” it proclaims the neces- sity for it. Modern science is built not on idle, speculative reason, nor even on empirical observation as such, but on the active manipulation of nature. The assumption is that nature, which is not ordered so as to serve man’s basic needs, is also not organized to serve his need to know. There is nothing privileged about nature’s spontaneous self- presentation, nothing “more natural” about the forms it happens to assume in our particular environment. To extract its secrets, therefore, it is necessary to abandon contemplative detachment and passivity, to dissect, probe, and transform nature, breaking it down through a kind of “analysis in action,” in order to isolate its component parts for

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observation and measurement. In modern method, knowing is strictly inseparable from acting and manipulating.

As our knowledge has progressed, the reliance of theory on action has grown ever greater. It was not very obtrusive when all that science required was an inclined plane or simple telescope, but today when vast feats of invention and engineering are needed—such as huge accelerators and interplanetary probes—one is struck by the utter dependence of theoretical knowledge on technological mastery. Modern science lives by the principle: one cannot understand the world without changing it.

In sum, the whole possibility of “applied science” and of the technological mastery of nature did not just happen to turn up as an innocent finding of theoretical science, an unanticipated discovery. It is not at all posterior to or separate from theoretical science, but rather implicit from the very start in the latter’s conception of “un- derstanding” and of the proper method—analytical, mathematical, and experimental—needed to pursue it. Modern science is intrinsically— intentionally and methodologically—technological.13

The modern convergence of the crafts and natural philosophy, then, does indeed involve the transformation of the latter no less than the former. And to the extent that modern science has become the reigning theoretical authority and the model for all genuine knowledge, it is possible to say that we are all prisoners of a “technological conscious- ness.” In its every dealing with the world, the modern mind tends to a kind of thinking that is technological in form, content, and motive.

TECHNOLOGY BOUND AND UNBOUND: THE IDEA OF TRADITION AND THE IDEA OF PROGRESS

Modern technology is unique, we have seen, by virtue of its more inten- sive and extensive development, its spread to every realm and aspect of life, its creation of a new dependence of man on technology and of nature on man, and its intimate, reciprocal relation to natural philosophy. Yet, to understand the full meaning of technology and especially its constitutive role in the moral-psychology of modern life, it is necessary to go beyond the more or less familiar themes just discussed to two further points, perhaps no less familiar, but less adequately understood. These are the modern belief in progress and disbelief in happiness; or, in terms less misleading in their simplicity, the “futurity” and “negative orientation” of modern life.

In the first place, what we mean by “technology” is ultimately unintelligible without a proper conception of its link to that larger movement of which modern science is still only a part: the faith in

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progress, the commitment to humanity’s gradual self-liberation through its progressive appropriation of the natural and historical worlds. In the premodern era, after all, the various arts were in no sense conceived as a single historical force engaged in a long-term battle for the human conquest of nature. But this thought stands at the very core of the modern concept of “technology.”

Prior to the “age of progress,” the arts were not seen as part of some great journey of mankind—a historical “project” or “movement”— but simply as individual crafts addressed to specific and limited needs, and as essentially set in their ways, even if susceptible of gradual improve- ment. Moreover, far from glorifying man’s freedom and power, the arts anxiously endeavored—for reasons to be considered momentarily—to obscure this as much as possible, attributing their origins to the gods, taking their models from nature, hedging themselves in with a hundred arbitrary rules and traditions, and embedding their practices in religious ritual and elaborate social structures (trade secrets, apprenticeships, guilds, and so forth). In short, in premodern or traditional society, the arts tread quietly, outside the circle of men’s deepest cares and loyalties, and indeed in bondage to them. This was the age of technology bound.

All of this changed with the rise of humanism and the idea of progress. All external and limiting conditions on the arts were gradually cast off, man became a conscious creator, “method” came to the fore as an art of discovery, “inventor” became a job, research and development were institutionalized, and the advance of human control became a de- liberate, universal, open-ended project. It is only this revolutionary change that gave birth to “technology” properly so-called, in which every par- ticular art is experienced as part of the larger movement of all humanity toward freedom and mastery.

This great historical transformation is of course familiar enough, but its full significance for the uniqueness of modern technology cannot be seen if it is understood in the conventional way, as a triumph over the simple cowardice and superstition of the past by the sapere aude of the Enlightenment. The fact is that all premodern societies tend to be deeply suspicious of technological innovation and of science; and while this tendency may stem in part from mere fear, prejudice, and ignorance, it is also a necessary concomitant of the whole structure and life orientation of such societies—of their rootedness in tradition. Only through the wholesale reordering of this comprehensive moral-political foundation could the ideal of progress emerge and, with it, technology properly so- called. Thus, this is the change we need to understand.

In all societies untouched by “modernization” or “Westernization,” the foundation of the social world—the legitimacy of the government,

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the respectability of the social hierarchy, the authority of prevailing mores— is rooted in ancestral custom or tradition. They are “traditional societ- ies.” But how does such a society work? What is the source of the power of tradition over human minds and hearts? This power may be said to rest, I believe, on three distinct forces—each of which will turn out to be in necessary tension with technological innovation.

The force of tradition derives, in the first place, from that of habit: we naturally develop a loyalty, fondness, and inclination for that to which, over a long period of time, we have become “accustomed.” But the importance of habituation leads to an essential tension between custom or law and the arts, as Aristotle states in his classic discussion of whether laws should be as changeable as the arts: “The argument from the ex- ample of the arts is false. Change in an art is not like change in law; for law has no strength with respect to obedience apart from habit, and this is not created except over a period of time. Hence the easy alteration of existing laws in favor of new and different ones weakens the power of law itself ” (Politics, 1269a19–24). Since habituation requires changelessness, a healthy traditional society must be relatively static; and therefore, it must necessarily be suspicious of the example and influence of the arts, with their reformist and innovative tendencies.

The second source of the power of custom is the communal con- sensus or public opinion in which it is embedded. The widespread judg- ment of society, and especially of its oldest members, carries—not unreasonably—a great authority, which the individual naturally tends to trust and respect in preference to his own limited powers of discernment. This rational deference to consensus is further supported and strength- ened by the censorious pressure of public opinion, which rewards agree- ment and harshly punishes dissent. Custom, in other words, draws upon a certain natural inclination within groups toward intolerance, closed- mindedness, and conformity—an inclination that modern culture de- plores as senseless, but which would seem to be essential (within measure) to the self-preservation of a traditional society, since its authority and world-view are supported, not by rational demonstration, but only by the brute fact of actual agreement. Outside the communal consensus lies an abyss; and sensing this, people naturally hate what is strange. It is perhaps not impossible for such a society to maintain its self-certainty in the face of fundamental dissent or diversity, but it is always an ordeal. Consequently, reason and the arts, while certainly necessary to such societies, must always remain essentially suspect owing to their tenden- cies to skepticism and innovation, and their epistemological stance out- side of consensual authority.

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Finally, tradition exercises its power over the minds of men be- cause it is old or ancestral. Things very old, as those very large, natu- rally inspire awe, since they dwarf our own limited extension in time and space. We also revere ancient customs because they represent the consensus of long generations of men, as well as the product of a searching test of time.

Without further support, however, these considerations could not hold out against the debunking of tradition contained in the following reflection: “The first [human beings], whether they were earthborn or preserved from a cataclysm, are likely to have been similar to average or even simpleminded persons [today] . . . so it would be odd to abide by the opinions they hold” (Politics, 1269a3–8).

What truly vindicates the reverence for tradition, then, and consti- tutes its deepest ground, is the belief—essentially religious—that our ancestors were vastly superior to ourselves. There is a logic to such a view. Just as parents are stronger and wiser than children (who also owe an infinite debt to their progenitors), so our ancestors were greater than we. What comes earlier must be superior to what comes later, since the former has created or begotten the latter. Indeed, thinking one’s way back to the very beginning, one realizes that the divine beings of the first age, who, without being the children of any earlier generation, generated the world itself, must have been absolutely the most powerful. In our own, late, and feeble age, this power has either diminished or withdrawn from the world, since changes of such magnitude no longer occur. But our earliest ancestors were close to this power, at the high-water mark of the world, a golden age when heroes strode the earth and men conversed with gods. The ancient traditions, then, handed down to us from our ancestors are to be cherished and revered. They come from a god-like source far greater and wiser than ourselves.

This foundational belief in the inherent superiority of the past to the present represents the third and greatest source of inescapable ten- sion between the arts and traditional society. Technological innovation threatens not only the fixity needed both for habituation and for com- munal consensus, but also the indispensable attitude of reverence for the ancestral. In other words, what it means, on the deepest level, for a society to be “traditional” is not merely that its subjects happen to follow old customs, but that, on some level, they understand themselves to be fallen from the originary fullness of the world; that they live in remem- brance, repentance, and hunger for the past; and that they cleave to tradition as their sole, tenuous link to the ever-receding, life-giving, ancestral source. In this light, the arts must appear deeply suspect, for

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novelty is essentially betrayal. And our familiar idea of progress, could it arise, would seem altogether reckless, unholy, and insane.

In sum, in a society constituted on the basis of tradition, the oppo- sition to reason and the arts does not derive from mere timidity or igno- rance but reflects a permanent structural conflict between this open, dynamic, progressive aspect of human nature and the, as it were, ontological rootedness of communal life in the ancestral past. To employ a Nietzschean idiom, there exists here a fundamental tension between thought and life. This is not to say, obviously, that the arts cannot exist in a traditional society, but rather that they do so precariously and only by virtue of the elaborate accommodations described above.14 They are eternally gnawed upon by anxiety and guilt, as Prometheus would discover.

It follows, conversely, that in order for technology finally to be unbound, as in the modern era—in order for life actually to embrace reason, and humanity the ideal of progress—it is first necessary to supply an entirely new foundation for morality and politics. That foundation therefore constitutes the indispensable—but long-forgotten—ground of the modern turn to technology.

It was with this thought in mind that the Enlightenment con- sciously endeavored to subvert traditional society, to liberate men from all customary and religious authority, and to reconstitute the state on the basis of the free consent and enlightened self-interest of the resulting autonomous, rationalistic, and future-directed individual. In this new world, obedience would result not from the static structure of habit, consensus, and reverence for the past, but from the dynamics of the desire to get ahead—not from changelessness but precisely from the collective pursuit of change. Similarly, the legitimacy of the political hi- erarchy would no longer be based on some delicate communal consensus regarding ethics and religion but on the morally neutral principle of contract or consent. In such a society, which thrives on innovation, diversity, skepticism, and materialism—on everything most lethal to a traditional community—the technological impulse could at last be fully unbound. For the first time in history, it would no longer exist in fun- damental tension with man’s primary loyalties.

Indeed, technology now becomes not only permissible but, in the same moment, necessary. For, the social bond of enlightened self-inter- est—which, replacing that of tradition, permits the unleashing of technol- ogy—is not in fact a bond at all, rather than a source of conflict only insofar as the economy expands over the long run. And, in the absence of imperialism, the economy can expand steadily only if there are continual gains in productivity stemming from the advance of technology. In other words, in the modern, liberal-democratic, mass nation-state—the ultimate

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result of the Enlightenment’s assault on traditional society—the diverse, deracinated, self-interested individuals, sharing no bond of “race, creed, or national origin,” can live in harmony only through a certain hostility toward nature. We liberated men and women of the free society are united only by sharing the spoils of our common technological imperialism.

But there is still more. In the reconstitution of life engineered by the Enlightenment, technology becomes not merely released from its age-old bondage to tradition, and not merely an indispensable economic condition of the system that releases it: it is moved from the periphery to the very heart of what people live for. As the primary vehicle or expression of progress, it replaces tradition as the moral center of men’s lives.

In this new society based on self-interest, after all, there is still idealism and morality. The idealistic citizen lives for the “getting ahead” not only of himself but also of larger communities. In the first place, this means his family—that is, the new, future-oriented, child-centered family. He lives, not for his ancestors, but his children, whom he considers in some sense his superiors. Beyond that, he seeks to “be useful” and to “make a contribution”—but to what? Again, not to the ancestors and not even primarily to the present community, but to the future. He feels the need to have “a cause”; he wants to “help build a better world.” This is now what it means to be “idealistic.” As always, it means devotion to a larger whole, but the whole is now not something extending back in time but forward—no longer a fatherland but a “movement.”

The moral life necessarily takes the form of membership in a move- ment, and that means it is rooted in the future and in the idea of progress. For the idealistic modern citizen, who he is is, where he is going—and not where he has come from. He lives, not in remembrance, but in activist expectation, and understands himself, not as fallen from some golden age of primordial fullness, but as part of the progressive march of civilization beyond the barbaric past (the “state of nature”) and toward a better future for all. To be sure, powerful vestiges of tradition remain, as of course do obligations to the present community. But these ties must always justify themselves as forces for progress. Modern patrio- tism loses legitimacy if one’s nation is shown to be on the wrong side of history. In a manner unintelligible to the traditional citizen, the future of humanity now constitutes the highest good and the ultimate home- land of men’s hopes and loyalties.

In other words, the replacement of the idea of tradition with that of progress means far more than that people now tend to the belief that things will improve. It is a fundamental reversal of life orientation, in which the source or fullness of being is relocated from past to future. Human lives now derive their meaning and weight not by rootedness in

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the ancestral but by being the wave of the future. Modern man is a forward-looking, upwardly mobile, futural being whose profoundest suffering is no longer the guilty sense of fallenness or estrangement from the ancestral source, but rather the fear of failure and the terror of being left out or behind.

In this transformed world, technology inevitably becomes the guid- ing and inspiriting force. We derive our sense of right from feeling that we are in touch with the future; and the most palpable sign of that contact is technology, which is, as it were, the most futural thing. It offers the surest proof that there has been progress and that there will be more; it is the clearest candidate for a world-historical force. Indeed, today, when one tries to form a picture of the distant future, one feels unsure about political and economic arrangements, but one always imag- ines it more technologically advanced. In our dynamic world, that is our one certainty: the future belongs to technology. That is why nothing is more deeply demoralizing and subversive in the present age than shoddy and outdated technology, as the experiences of Eastern Europe would seem to show. The good is the “advanced.” In sum, in this new, future- directed world, it is now tradition that is fundamentally suspect and in tension with “life”; and conversely, it is human art, reconceived as “tech- nology”—a unitary, ever-advancing movement for human mastery—that stands at the center of life, the true spring of human vitality.

There is a common tendency to think of technology as a morally neutral and universal phenomenon whose modern development simply resulted from the “advance of civilization”—the gradual accumulation of discoveries, spurred on by curiosity and material need, while resisted by human timidity and superstition. But the true character of technology, as indeed of modernity itself, cannot be grasped unless one sees that the technological turn was rather a culturally singular event made possible only by a unique moral, political, and, as it were, existential revolution that, overturning the entire traditional order, released the arts from their heretofore necessary bondage and, what is more, placed them at the heart, not only of the political-economic system, but of the whole purposive structure of modern life.

THE REJECTION OF HAPPINESS AND THE “NEGATIVE ORIENTATION” IN LIFE

Closely connected to the progressive, futural, movement-oriented char- acter of contemporary existence is our typically modern skepticism con- cerning the possibility of rest, happiness, or a summum bonum. This skepticism together with its result—the turn to a “negative orientation” in life, which seeks the avoidance of evil rather than the attainment of

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good—constitutes a second crucial, but neglected element in the rise of modern technology.

One can see this most clearly as follows. In the foregoing discussion of the transition from traditional to progressive society, a middle term could be said to have been left out. Human life may be anchored in the ancestral past or eschatological future, but also in that which is timelessly present: a rational, natural standard of the human good—of happiness or the summum bonum—as elaborated, for example, by Aristotle in the Eth- ics, and indeed by virtually all the competing sects of classical philosophy.

If one evaluates technology from this alternative standpoint—nei- ther tradition nor progress, but the natural human good—one comes across the remarkable fact that virtually all of the ancient schools— Platonists as well as Aristotelians, Stoics no less than Epicureans—agreed in opposing the unregulated development of the arts, the endless pursuit of mastery, and unlimited acquisitiveness. Indeed, two millennia before Rousseau, most of them entertained a “primitivist” skepticism about the real value of civilization and its “progress.”15

To some extent these attitudes simply reflected an acknowledgment of the requirements of traditional society which we have just considered; for the “Greek enlightenment,” in contrast to that of the eighteenth century, never envisaged the wholesale replacement of such a society with one based on reason. But, this aside, their reasoned conception of the good was itself also antitechnological. It was argued that knowl- edge—the perfection of the mind—must surely have a worthier and more satisfying purpose than finding comforts for the body. Indeed, the intrinsic joys of contemplation soon disgust one with all such vulgar utilitarianism. Even the greatest ancient technologist, Archimedes, held to this view (as reported by Plutarch): “He would not deign to leave behind him any commentary or writing on such subjects; but, repudiat- ing as sordid and ignoble the whole trade of engineering, and every sort of art that lends itself to mere use and profit, he placed his whole affection and ambition in those purer speculations where there can be no reference to the vulgar needs of life.”16

Even the Epicureans such as Lucretius, who rejected the life of contemplation and identified the good with pleasure, shared this con- tempt for the arts and acquisition. What, after all, can technology really do for us? The true needs of nature are very few and easily satisfied. Pleasure, like all things, has its natural limits; beyond that, all is vanity and illusion. If one chases after power and possessions in the hope of satisfying all of one’s desires, one will only succeed in increasing toil, strife, and the dependence on men and fortune, but not one’s content- ment; for such desires are infinite and always run ahead of our power to

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satisfy them. It is better, then, to put desire and power in harmony, not by extending the latter, but by limiting the former—by moderation, the classical virtue.17

Of course, the same conclusion is reached if, like the Stoics and others, one identifies the good with moral virtue. In fact, so long as one has any conception of the good or final end, regardless of its content, one will reject as utterly senseless the endless pursuit of means.

It is crucial to note, therefore, that modern thought begins pre- cisely with the rejection of the possibility of happiness or a summum bonum. As Hobbes proclaims in a famous passage:

The felicity of this life, consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such finis ultimus, utmost aim, nor summum bonum, greatest good, as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. . . . Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another; the attain- ing of the former, being still but the way to the latter.18

There is nothing the possession of which brings satisfaction. Hence, there is “felicity,” the pleasure attending the ceaseless motion from one temporary goal to another, but no happiness—no contentment, comple- tion, and repose. Life is endless wanting and striving.

But, then, striving for what? If there is nothing that brings satisfac- tion or happiness, then for what purpose and with what hope do we make something the goal of our striving? According to Hobbes, there can be no positive goal of human striving but only a negative one: the avoidance of evil and especially of the greatest and most comprehensive evil, death. His radical “noneudemonism” entails a fundamental reversal of life orientation: the pursuit of good is replaced with the overcoming of evil, the summum bonum of happiness with the “summum malum” of death.

But the avoidance of death or the attainment of security is an unfinishable task, and therefore the proper and inevitable character of human desire is this: “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”19 In this way, the pursuit of means and power was liberated from all concrete ends. Through this momen- tous revolution, technology, already unbound from the fetters of tradi- tion, was cut loose from those of the human good as well—set free to become, for the first time, an independent goal and indeed the central object of philosophy, society, and progress.

What Hobbes wrought has not yet been undone. The negative ori- entation toward life—founded on the dismissal of happiness—continues to dominate modern culture, which does not hold up for emulation any

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image of the completed or perfected life. We believe in goods, to be sure, in various pleasures and comforts, but not in a complete good or ultimate purpose that might structure a way of life. In the absence of such a comprehensive positive goal, the lives of individuals and of nations tend to be organized negatively, by the avoidance of death and the derivative evils of war, hunger, poverty, disease, oppression, intolerance, and superstition. These evils, and not some vague talk about happiness, are what we really believe in. We define progress in terms of the distance traveled away from them (or from the “state of nature,” “barbarism,” the middle ages, the “old country”). Lacking positive goals, knowing what we are against but not what we are for, we tend to cherish opportunity over accomplishment, rights over goods, liberation over consummation, youth over maturity, hope over fulfillment, and, above all, means over ends. Consequently, we embrace technology with an abandon that would not be possible were there clarity regarding the ultimate end. What might be called the “forget- fulness of happiness” thus lies at the core of the technological turn.

Some Problems of Technology

Having examined the character of modern technology and the techno- logical character of modernity—with special emphasis on the futurity and negative orientation of modern life—we are in a position to assess some of the more prominent formulations of technology’s “problem.” Our foremost concern is to know whether this problem deserves the position it has recently assumed as the central or most fundamental philosophical issue.

THE IRONY OF TECHNOLOGY

All serious conceptions of the problem presuppose some form of the thesis that technology—which seems to be a mere means and thus a derivative phenomenon, subordinate to human choice—has become in fact an independent force that rules its putative master. The seductive irony of this thought has encouraged exaggeration, but it is difficult to deny that there is much truth to it.

First, there is the fact that as soon as one chooses a means, one begins to obey it—to do the myriad things necessary for its acquisition, maintenance, and employment. Think of all the ways we are ruled, for example, by our use of oil as a means. To put it in Marxist terminology, the “means of production” determine the “relations of production”; or, as Rousseau insisted, nothing is more enslaving than the pursuit of power, for, to control one must obey.

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Second, every choice of means usually ends up subjecting us to important “unintended consequences” that we did not and would not choose, such as pollution or global warming. One might of course reply to this point, as to the first, that we still remain free in that we can choose or reject the whole package of a given means taken together with all of its requirements and its consequences. But in practice, we seldom learn the full contents of this package for a very long time, and by then the means may be so built in to our world that we hardly remain free to reject it. When the automobile was invented, we had the power but not the knowledge to rule it; later, we acquired the knowledge but lost the power. And that is how it must be with technological progress, which brings a constant stream of new, unknown forces.

Third, we lose our freedom to control a given means not only be- cause it integrates itself into the world but also into ourselves. Objects we first choose as luxuries soon become needs. Similarly, things such as tele- vision do not remain outside us, where we are free to judge them, but gradually alter our very tastes and perceptions. In general, as the world becomes more technological, we become more technological—in our sen- sibilities, our modes of thinking, perhaps in our very posture toward Be- ing. Our judgment is transformed by the very thing we are trying to judge. Thus, toward so pervasive and transforming a force as technology, we are unable to maintain a truly external and free relationship.

Finally, choices regarding technology are not made by single agents in isolation, but in a system with other, competing players. Frequently, we must either develop and adopt new technologies or lose all—militarily or economically—to others who do. It is often the case that no one would choose a given technique for its own sake—dangerous and expen- sive weaponry or an efficient but environmentally harmful manufacturing process—and yet the system forces all to do so. In a competitive system, inventions rule their makers.

In sum, technology appears to be more than a mere collection of means, subordinate to human choice, but an independent force, with its own logic or destiny to which humanity is compelled to submit. This claim forms the starting point for all conceptions of technology as the most determinative or fundamental phenomenon.

While there is clearly an element of truth to this claim, evident from the sorts of general arguments outlined above, we are perhaps too inclined to think that the issue can be settled on the level of these kinds of arguments. In fact, it would be an enormously complex philosophical- sociological-historical undertaking to try to establish just how indepen- dent and controlling a force technology is in practice. Without entering into this question further here, I would simply observe that no one has

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yet succeeded in answering it convincingly or even in showing how one should go about answering it.20

A related question, which remains on our more general level, is what the inner logic or destiny of this more or less independent force might be and how it renders technology the central problem. Returning to the rough typology employed at the beginning, we can distinguish three prevalent answers: a popular or commonsense view, and those of the radical Left and Right.21

THE “POPULAR” PROBLEM OF TECHNOLOGY

In the public mind today, technology is seen as a relatively independent force, having as its primary “logic” a simple tendency toward expansion: over time, technology multiplies the kinds and magnitude of human inter- ference with nature. And this is seen to be a problem owing primarily to the corresponding growth of “unintended consequences”—ozone deple- tion, deforestation, contamination of food, air, and water, and so forth.

But practical dangers of this kind, however urgent they may be, do not lead to the raising of serious theoretical questions about technology as such. There may be some general hand wringing of a philosophical nature, but when people finally set themselves to the task of finding a solution, their primary hopes soon turn back in the direction of new technology (e.g., solar energy). Indeed, for this reason the problem of unintended consequences, so far from undermining the technological project, actually strengthens it, giving people the sense that it is no longer really an option to stop, that now more than ever we need the enlightened technology of tomorrow—in order to save us from the dangers of today’s.

Even in their motivation, people who react to problems of this kind remain essentially technological. Now that everyone sees technology as an “independent force” able to do us harm—indeed, a force more alien and harmful than nature itself, which now seems our friend—it inevitably occurs to them to bring it too under human direction and control. No one proposes that we should submit to such historical forces with resignation and acceptance. We must master them. The mainstream movements of environmentalism, antinuclearism, and so forth are simply the modern technological attitude now extended to the force of technology itself.

THE PROBLEM OF TECHNOLOGY ON THE LEFT

On the popular or commonsense level, the problem of technology re- mains a technological problem. It becomes a political and philosophical

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one only on the basis of more determinate views of the destiny of tech- nology, especially as it relates to prevailing political forms. The Left argues that it is quite impossible to meet the above dangers of unin- tended consequences within the confines of a capitalist, pluralist, repre- sentative, liberal democracy.

First, capitalism is so utterly dependant on technology, the sine qua non of continued growth, and so immersed in its ethos, that it is incapable of recognizing its dangers, let alone dealing with them effectively. Second, in a pluralist society, given over to competing material interests, there is no institution that looks to the good of the whole, nor any interest group or lobby for the future; in a representative democracy, unborn generations have no vote.22 In such a system, where could the political force come from that would protect the environment or preserve resources for the future? Thus, only a socialist society—planned, humanistic, and wary of growth—possesses the ability to tame technology.

But, third, if we do not succeed in thus taming it and freeing our minds from its mode of thought—instrumental rationality—then we will be led by its irresistible logic to the ever greater “rationalization” and organization of society, the transformation of men into tools and cogs, the loss of all individuality and spontaneity, the rise of technocratic elit- ism, the strengthening of the state through new technologies of military force, surveillance, information processing, mass media, and propaganda, and in sum, the creation of a dehumanized technological despotism.23

While for many years it seemed almost axiomatic that capitalism was in thrall to technology and that the latter was a force hostile to liberty, recently these views have come to sound strangely old-fashioned and out of touch. The third argument, in particular, seems difficult to sustain in light of the undeniable trend in the world toward democracy and, what is more, the important contributions to this trend made precisely by the new information and communication technologies. More generally, today the logic of events seems to be pushing away from social regimentation or mechanization and toward individual initiative as the source of cooperation and energy; away from central planning and toward local responsibility and experimentation; thus also away from socialism—which suddenly seems the more narrowly technological of the two—and toward free-market spontaneity. The great temptation today is actually to invert the old left- wing view and argue that the inner logic of technology leads to democracy and capitalism. But from this striking shift of perspective a more reasonable conclusion would be that there is probably no such logic at all, and that, over the long term, the social and political effect of technology will con- tinue to change in unknowable ways.24

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The first two arguments also seem to have been refuted by events. It is undeniable that the contemporary environmental movement first arose in the United States and other Western democracies and every year becomes more widespread and powerful. There is a nontrivial sense in which almost everyone today in the United States is an environmentalist, albeit with varying degrees of fervor and influence. So how is this pos- sible in the land of interest group politics and the capitalist ethos? Where is the flaw in the left-wing critique? What resources could exist within liberal capitalist culture for taming technology? Some answers emerge on the basis of the particular characterization of modernity and technology developed above.

It is a great, if common, mistake to assume, as the left-wing critique does, that in a pluralist liberal democracy all interest groups must be concerned with immediate, selfish goods. On the contrary, in modern societies, where life is grounded on the idea of progress, a concern for the future forms some part of everyone’s thinking, and future-directed, ideological interest groups tend rather to proliferate. Certainly there is no structural reason, then, why an environmental movement could not arise in a liberal society. To see why it became in fact the ideological growth stock of the eighties and beyond, one might look at some further factors.

As we have seen, when technology comes to be viewed as an in- dependent and dangerous force, the will to control it inevitably emerges from out of the technological attitude itself. Technology is, as it were, a self-regulating movement. And the fear of technology, once thus be- gun, actually fits perfectly into the liberal capitalist world-view, strange as that may seem. Skeptical regarding the good and happiness, liberal so- cieties tend to measure progress negatively, in terms of the triumph over evil—over the barbarism and backwardness of the state of nature. But the “negative orientation” of the liberal mind has one inevitable shortcom- ing: due to the very progress of society, these natural evils gradually recede, losing their power to ground and orient our lives. New evils must be found to take their place. That is, I believe, the psychological and existential meaning of liberal environmentalism. Ecological disaster has taken the place of the state of nature. The middle classes of the advanced industrialized nations, who can no longer feel the old, bourgeois sense of pride in the triumph of civilization over barbarism (and who have seen the demise of fascism and communism), have redefined progressivism in terms of saving the planet.

Yet it still seems, from the perspective of left-wing common sense, that this should not be possible. Liberal capitalism embraces a world of

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competition and strife, not of harmony with nature. Wholly committed to growth, technology, and the unbridled exploitation of nature, it con- tains no countervailing principle that might rein humanity in. It simply lacks the resources to check the human quest for power.25

The error here is to assume that liberalism’s hostility toward nature entails an unlimited trust in humanity. Liberalism’s deepest root is pre- cisely a fear of man: we are not by nature sociable or good for each other; our original condition is a state of war; government has been invented to rein humanity in; and this invention itself must be carefully restrained through popular representation, separation of powers, consti- tutionally grounded rights, and so forth. In the economic realm, as well, there must be no monopoly, whether public or private, but rather free competition and mutual checking. The core of liberalism, in short, is a distrust of all unchecked human power. (This in contrast to the socialist tradition, with its greater trust in the goodness of man and of human power, so long as the latter is centralized and public). Thus, it is not unintelligible or even surprising that our traditional ethos of “limited government” should have expanded in recent decades to include the need for “limited technology.”26 As shocking as it may be to long- accepted ideas, the liberal capitalist psyche turns out to be uniquely fertile soil for the growth of a certain kind of environmentalism—that based on the “negative idealism” of triumphing over disaster, on the deep suspicion of human power, and on the will to control technology resulting dialectically from the technological impulse itself.

The foregoing arguments are not meant to prove, however, that technology necessarily leads to liberal democratic capitalism or that the latter must inevitably succeed in taming the former. They only seek to call into question the long-prevalent theory that these outcomes are essentially impossible. They do further suggest, however, that whether freedom or despotism shall ultimately triumph, or unintended conse- quences be controlled, will be determined by the fortuities of moral and political life and not by the automatic unfolding of technology’s sup- posed inner logic.

THE PROBLEM OF TECHNOLOGY ON THE RIGHT

There is a further set of problems, however, that seems more strictly tied to the phenomenon and fate of technology as such. Cultural conserva- tives, rooted in both the religious and the romantic-existentialist Right, have long opposed technology as inevitably leading to aesthetic, moral, and spiritual degradation (themes also picked up, of course, by the Left and especially the New Left).

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Even if environmental disaster is avoided and every trace of oppres- sion eliminated, the argument goes, the unhindered success of technol- ogy necessarily leads to the expansion of the material world, the deepening spread of consumerism, the endless production of new goods and needs; and all of this distracts and seduces man from his higher vocation, threat- ening the permanent atrophy of his nobler faculties. Universal affluence and ease will cause men to become spoiled and decadent, robbing hu- manity of the indispensable lessons of adversity, and fostering a world of lethargic and undisciplined mass men. At the same time, all the beauties of external nature and all the living artifacts of traditional culture will be razed to make room for new factories, condos, and shopping malls—a sterile landscape to accompany an empty heart.27

Still more deadly to the soul than these material effects of technol- ogy, however, is the thought or attitude that lies behind it. Amidst even the greatest natural splendors, the mind feels little if it sees only the inanimate world of modern physics. What true belief can there be in romantic love or political greatness on the basis of our reductionist psy- chology; what notion of human freedom and dignity given our deter- minist natural and social science? No lofty human possibility can flourish in the disenchanted, leveled, homogeneous, quantitative world of mod- ern scientific rationalism. And yet, the argument continues, this life- destroying rationalism is not imposed on us by the nature of reality itself but is rather something we impose on ourselves through our will to technological mastery. We ourselves will this nihilistic world without quality, form, or hierarchy—for such the world must be if we are to place it entirely at our disposal. Thus, in the end, it is the technological atti- tude that has stifled our souls by expelling from the world every possible experience of beauty, wonder, and reverence.

These two general views may be said to represent, respectively, the materialist and idealist accounts of the emergence of the soulless “mass man.” Since the rise of European fascism, political theorists have not pushed such arguments with the old passion (except on the Left), but there is still a good deal of common sense and popular opinion on this side. Certainly among third world and other external observers, it is almost axiomatic that wealth and materialism have made the West spoiled, soft, shallow, and decadent. And we ourselves seem fairly obsessed by the thought that our brave new world is creating a rebarbarized population of yuppies, couch potatoes, and valley girls.

Yet the question that needs to be raised here is, as above, not whether these evils are a danger, but only whether they follow inevitably from technological progress, so that the “problem of technology” may be declared the crucial, underlying political and philosophical issue.

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As to the first, “materialistic” theory of mass man, most would concede that—like the left-wing critique—it has not, as yet, been borne out by the facts. Despite several generations now of historic levels of affluence, the Western democracies continue to show some strength of character and have thus far been able to meet the challenges of all those presuming upon their irreversible decadence.28 One possible explanation for this, which meets the materialist argument on its own terms, is that the rapid advance of technology brings in its train a great deal of social and economic disruption, so that it inevitably produces almost as much “adversity” as it removes. Thus, if modern man has not yet sunk into the bovine happiness of the herd—disappointing long-standing expectations— that may be because, with the concomitant erosion of neighborhoods and families, the rise of crime and divorce, and the constant threat of economic obsolescence, he does not yet feel terribly spoiled. One might also argue, on a somewhat brighter note, that capitalism, with its much- decried tendency to engender competition, has for this reason proven remarkably resourceful in spurring energetic activity and accomplishment (not to say workaholism) in the very midst of prosperity. At least so far.

Looking to the longer term, one could of course point to the fact that, in the past, leisure classes have existed that were not corrupted, but rather liberated and ennobled, by great affluence. To be sure, this re- quired the existence of a strenuous, uniform, socially enforced, and usu- ally aristocratic moral code, which is unlikely to return in our liberal, pluralistic, egalitarian, materialist culture. But the laws of the human spirit are still so unknown that no one can say with confidence that some new basis—perhaps religious or mystical—cannot emerge for the en- noblement of leisure.29 In every age, moreover, there have always been at least isolated individuals who, owing perhaps to a certain innate strength of mind or character, were able to rise above their circumstances and answer the call of their highest possibilities. And it is not unlikely that technological progress will someday give us the power—through drugs or genetic engineering—to produce that innate strength and so to lib- erate humanity from the influence of the otherwise stunting cultural conditions that such material progress also brings.30

As for the second account of mass man, which puts the blame on scientific rationalism stemming from technology, could one not respond with a point similar to that made above regarding liberal environmental- ism: this romantic-existentialist critique of technology is in fact a dialec- tical expression of the technological attitude itself. Consider its origins.

Enlightenment rationalism and modern science, which arose with the hope of controlling nature for the sake of man’s physical well-being,

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had the “unintended consequence” of undermining his psychic or emo- tional well-being. He felt homeless and estranged, his spirit could not breathe in the depleted metaphysical environment created by modern physics. But to this predicament, a number of responses would have been possible. One could have accepted this bleak world with resignation and with the renunciation of human mastery—either on the model of Pascal, for example, or of Lucretius, who found a new, austere happiness by adjusting his soul to the harsh truths of ancient atomism.

Instead, however, the problems of modern science were addressed in the modern spirit of indignation and rebellion, as if humanity had a right to a cosmos that supported its noblest passions. Our whole under- standing of the “problem of technology” was itself formulated from the standpoint of man’s quest to master all the conditions of his existence. And consequently its solution was sought through a further recourse to technology. In Romantic thought, the artistic side of human nature was elevated above the rational: man’s essence was relocated in “creativity.” It is within man’s power and right, it was argued, to engineer a new interpretation of nature and reason that would answer to the needs of the heart just as the old paradigm had to those of the body. Thus, when the Romantics objected to the scientific-utilitarian exploitation of nature, ultimately that was only because this spoiled it for their own use—as a vehicle for aesthetic experience, a neutral “other” on which to project and unfold the inner self. The scientist sees nature as matter, the Roman- tic as subject-matter. Both equally seek control, the one over the physical world of objects, the other over the subjective world of perceptions and feelings. Similarly, Nietzsche and the existentialists assert man’s capacity to create himself, to legislate values, and to interpret the world in the service of human needs and aspirations.31 In short, the problem of science and of the mass-man is solved by extending technological control into the realm of what we now call “belief-systems.”32

If this solution is correct, however, then the problem of mass-man derives not from technology as such but only from its incomplete applica- tion. Technology comes to light once again as a self-correcting phenom- enon—hence not as the central political and philosophical problem.

On the other hand, one may question the adequacy of this solu- tion. If we follow it and free our minds from the seemingly stifling constraints of scientific rationalism, perhaps a more elevated and authen- tic culture will come to flower; but perhaps mass culture will only tri- umph all the more fully. The tribunal of reason may hold us back, but it also holds us up. And the mass-man, who chafes under every form of authority and discipline, may celebrate the demise of “Truth” by sinking

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still farther into bovine self-satisfaction. Liberated from bondage to rea- son, he is now free to believe whatever he wants—whatever makes him feel good about himself—because, as the ultimate expression of modern technology, he has placed his own beliefs at his disposal.

I am not arguing, of course, that either of these two scenarios is inevitable, but only that both are possible. Once more, it seems that the inner logic and future consequences of technology are far more indeterminate than its critics tend to suppose, and that independent moral and intellectual forces will continue to play a crucial role in shaping human destiny.

Conclusion

From this overview of the characteristics and problems of modern tech- nology one cannot formulate firm conclusions; but it will not be inap- propriate to suggest some general lessons and directions for thought.

We have seen that modern technology is indeed highly problem- atic; but it poses many different problems, some of them mutually exclu- sive, and it seems impossible to say which will loom largest in the future. Paradoxically, the more one surveys the large and fairly booming field of technology criticism, the more one is driven to conclude that the mean- ing and destiny of technology is indeterminate. And if this conclusion is correct, then there simply is no single issue that can be identified—and placed ceremoniously at the center of our thought—as the essential “problem of technology.”

This is not to deny that technology is probably the most character- istic and imposing feature of our age; but just for that reason we are probably too inclined to attribute to it a specific, coherent, and all- determining significance. We should be more on our guard. If it is the true task of philosophy to liberate itself from the prejudices of the age, then perhaps our specific duty is to free ourselves from technology—not only from the deification but also the demonization of it (the true idée fixe of our time).33

In addition to being theoretically questionable, moreover, this demonization—the excessive emphasis on the “problem of technology”— brings a specific problem of its own. When technology is viewed as the central and defining philosophical issue, elementary moral and political distinctions tend to lose their clarity and force. Liberal democracy, com- munism, and fascism, for example, appear fundamentally equivalent, since they are equally technological. Furthermore, to the extent that we view ourselves as helpless pawns of an overarching and immovable force, we may renounce the moral and political responsibility that, in fact, is crucial

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for the good exercise of what power over technology we do possess. Thus, an exaggerated philosophical concern with “the problem of tech- nology” hinders the effective management of the various real problems of technology.

At or near the heart of the modern technological turn, I have suggested, are two things: the idea of progress and the radical subordi- nation of ends to means resulting from the dismissal of the idea of a summum bonum. We might begin to distance ourselves from technology, then, by questioning these two things—first, by attempting to overcome our “forgetfulness” of happiness and the human good; and second, by adopting—as part of this very attempt—a more humble attitude toward the past, especially the pretechnological past, both Eastern and Western. For, in such earlier thinkers as, say, Confucius and Aristotle one finds a comprehensive theory of happiness formulated in serene detachment not only from the turbulent hopes of modern technology but, just as impor- tantly, from the angry rebellion against it. With their help, we might perhaps begin to free our minds from Western modernity and, at the same moment, from modern self-loathing, of which “the problem of technology” is the greatest manifestation.

The same conclusion also emerges as follows. It is often said that early modern philosophy was “polemical” in that it arose, not from a direct encounter with life, but from a reaction against existing ideas—against “the kingdom of darkness from vain philosophy [i.e., Aristotle] and fabu- lous traditions [Christianity]” (in Hobbes’s famous phrase). This reaction, moreover, concerned not only the falseness of the prevailing ideology but especially its practical consequences, its use as a tool of exploitation. Most of later modern thought has remained polemical—and indeed technologi- cal—in this sense: it grows, not from a naive pursuit of truth, but from our famous posture of alienation—a rebellion against the consequences of prevailing ideas, and an activist determination to control and overcome them. Thus we speak of the “counter-Enlightenment,” the “Romantic reaction,” and so forth. And certainly most of contemporary philosophy— especially all variants of postmodernism—self-consciously derive from a political, moral, or aesthetic reaction against the consequences of instru- mental rationalism—against “the problem of technology.” But the more we rail against technology, the more we remain in its grip.

What seems to be needed is rather a nonpolemical form of thinking that takes its start, not from a settled opinion regarding the danger of prevailing beliefs, but from a more naive, honest, and direct encounter with life—an encounter that, following the model of an earlier, pretechnological mode of thought, draws upon the elemental and per- manent human concern for happiness. Doubtless, there are problems

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with technology, but we will never adequately comprehend or respond to them if we do not begin by looking away from them to questions that are currently less urgent and imposing but are perhaps more hon- est and fundamental.

Notes

1. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) and Nietzsche, vol. 4: “Nihilism,” trans. David Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987).

2. Consider, for instance, Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, trans. Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1935).

3. See, for example, Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury, 1974) and Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964).

4. For a very useful survey of views on the phenomenon and problem of technology from a different point of view see Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology (New York: the Free Press, 1972), 1–30.

5. Hannah Arendt puts particular emphasis on this factor since it forces the worker for the first time to submit to the alien motion and rhythm of the machine. See The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 144–53.

6. On this last point, see especially Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

7. See Jose Ortega y Gasset, “Man the Technician,” in Toward a Philoso- phy of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1941) and Revolt of the Masses, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985).

8. On this theme see the beautiful discussion by Hans Jonas in Philosophi- cal Essays (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 3–20. See Also Andrew Goudie, The Human Impact on the Natural Environment (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revo- lution (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), and William McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989). Although long oblivious of these threats, today we often seem to be in danger of overestimating the fragility of the earth.

9. See Jacques Ellul, “The Technological Order,” in The Technological Order, ed. Carl Stover (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963) and The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Knopf, 1964); see also Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in the Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 47–54.

10. Maximilien Robespierre, “Report on Religious and Moral Ideas and on the National Festivals,” in Oeuvres Complètes, 10 vols.(Paris: E. Leroux, 1910– 67) vol. X, 444.

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11. Michael G. Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Consti- tution in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1986).

12. See Bacon, The Great Instauration, vol. 4, 24, and The Wisdom of the Ancients, vol. 6, 721, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding, Ellis, and Heath, 14 vols. (London: Longman etc., 1857–74); Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), 435; Descartes, Oeuvres et Lettres, ed. A. Bridoux (Paris: Pleiade, 1952), 168.

13. See Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biol- ogy (New York: Dell, 1966), 92–95, 200–207; and Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957). Consider also Heidegger “Science and Reflection,” in The Question Con- cerning Technology. For the opposite view see Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Architecture of Matter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 39: “If, during the last few decades, scientists have at last been able to supplement, and even to revolutionize, the age-old craft traditions, this has been an incidental— and largely uncovenanted—fruit of scientific success.”

14. On these general themes, see Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1959); Myth and Reality, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1963); Leo Strauss, “Progress and Return,” in The Rebirth of Classical Rational- ism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss, ed. Thomas Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). See also Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Tra- ditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1958); and Kranzberg and Pursell, eds., Technology in Western Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), vol. I, part I.

15. On the subject of ancient “primitivism,” see Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935). See also Arthur Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1990), 55–57.

16. Plutarch, “Life of Marcellus,” in The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. John Dryden and rev. Arthur Clough (New York: Modern Li- brary, 1932), 378.

17. See James H. Nichols Jr., Epicurean Political Philosophy: The De rerum natura of Lucretius (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 101–78.

18. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Form, and Power of a Com- monwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), 80.

19. Ibid. 20. See Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control

as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977) for a good discussion.

21. The distinction between “Left” and “Right,” never very clear, be- comes less so with each passing year. It is employed here because it remains more useful than any equally simple distinction that could be put in its place.

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22. Jonas, Philosophical Essays, 18–19. Robert Paul Wolfe, “Beyond Toler- ance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon, 1970), 49–52.

23. See especially Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Hu- manized Technology (New York: Harper and Row, 1968); Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1967–70); Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964); Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youth- ful Opposition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969); Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947).

24. On this practical level, one must also question the too easy equation of technology and science. Is there not truth to the older, Enlightenment view that, whatever effect technology may have at the moment, the underlying scientific enterprise requires and fosters certain moral habits that are favorable to individual liberty and democracy, such as skepticism, dissent, tolerance, creativity, open debate, objectivity, and love of truth? See the classic statement by Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). See also Paul Goldstene, The Collapse of Liberal Empire: Science and Revolution in the Twenti- eth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 91–127; and Yaron Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

25. See Roszak, Making of a Counter Culture and Merchant, The Death of Nature.

26. This argument, of course, makes no sense on the left-wing interpre- tation of liberalism, according to which the principle of limited government was never anything but a secret means for removing limits from economic power. It is true that liberalism prefers to regulate economic activity through market rather than governmental mechanisms and that it regards economic power as less dan- gerous than political, but that does not mean that liberals are insincere in their distrust of human power as such.

27. See, for example, Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses; Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (New York: Henry Holt, 1935), 298, 302–309. See also Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democ- racy In America, trans. J. P. Mayer (New York: Doubleday, 1966), Pt. II, Bk. 2, chaps. 10, 11, 16, 17; Bk. 3, chaps. 17, 19, Bk. 4, chap. 6.

28. In The Present Age, Kierkegaard writes that his generation has lapsed “into complete indolence. Its condition is that of a man who has only fallen asleep towards morning: first of all come great dreams, then a feeling of laziness, and finally a witty or clever excuse for remaining in bed. . . . In the present age a rebellion is, of all things, the most unthinkable. Such an expression of strength would seem ridiculous to the calculating intelligence of our times . . .” trans. Alexander Dru. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 35. This was written two years before 1848. See also Solzhenitsyn’s predictions for the outcome of the cold war in his “Harvard speech,” A World Split Apart (New York: Harper, 1978).

29. See Bergson who argues precisely that technology will lead to mysti- cism (Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 300–303, 308–17).

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141The Problem with “The Problem of Technology”

30. “The mind depends so much on the temperament and on the dispo- sition of the organs of the body that if it is possible to find some means which generally renders men wiser and more skillful than they have been hitherto, I believe that it is in medicine that one must search” (Descartes, Oeuvres, 168–69).

31. This, of course, is where Heidegger turns away from and against Nietzsche and existentialism. Without trying to judge whether Heidegger himself is successful in his attempt to free himself from technology, I would suggest that most of those today who attack technology in his name in fact remain closer to Nietzsche.

32. See Carl Schmitt’s Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cam- bridge: MIT Press, 1986). For a discussion of related ideas see Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 1–17, 109–29.

33. It will of course be objected that it is impossible to escape the ideas of one’s time; but this familiar thesis has never been proved conclusively and probably cannot be. Thus, given our necessary uncertainty on this score, it seems best to act as if we were capable of freedom and see what develops, since to assume the opposite is to make the thesis self-fulfilling through a preemptive surrender to prevailing beliefs.

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Global Technology and the Promise of Control

Trish Glazebrook

Technology theorists are remarkably silent on the topic of globaliza-tion. Although philosophy of technology is burgeoning as a disci-pline, its proponents have little to say about technology transfer to developing nations, and the impact on the global human condition of technology outside the West, or, as it is also called, the North. There are exceptions, of course, most notably Sandra Harding, whose work on post-Enlightenment, postcolonial science and technology is extensive.1

Likewise, much has been done in social geography focusing primarily on communications technology. The lack of assessment of the global impli- cations of technology in science studies, cultural studies, and technology studies gives pause for thought. Are contemporary philosophers of tech- nology simply reproducing the ethnocentrism evident in science and technology themselves? Or does the globalization of technology call for new ways of thinking about traditional philosophical questions, for ex- ample, the political consequences of the metaphysics and epistemology that underwrite modern technology, that philosophers are only now beginning to envision? I will argue that the answer to the second ques- tion is yes, and I will show that the task such innovative thinking entails presses urgently if the answer to the first question is not to remain, yes. For without careful reflection on the ideology that is and informs modern

143Co py ri gh t © 2 00 4. S ta te U ni ve rs it y of N ew Y or k Pr es s. A ll r ig ht s re se rv ed . Ma y no t be r ep ro du ce d in a ny f or m wi th ou t pe rm is si on f ro m th e pu bl is he r, e xc ep t fa ir u se s

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technology, the technological dream of controlling nature spills over into political and social practices of exploitation.

I make my argument in four parts. First, I show how technology has figured in traditional philosophical treatments of the question of what it means to be human. Second, I argue that the distinction between science and technology, so clear for Aristotle, is blurred in modernity, and that the modern techno-scientific project is underwritten by a logic of domination and control. Thirdly, I situate technology in ethical, po- litical, and cross-cultural practices. I show how forestation programs in India were disastrously destructive because of their failure to respect local knowledge, and I use the Bantu education policy in South Africa to demonstrate that the introduction of science and technology to non- Western cultures has been and potentially remains a process not of demo- cratic access, but of cultural subjugation. Finally, I look at the collapse of the dream of control in two contexts. The nuclear power industry in the West shows that the cooperation of national and techno-scientific, corporate interests is a dangerous complicity that promotes an illusion of control. Yet the French experience with videotex stands as an example of the human ability to transcend federally directed initiatives and to appro- priate technology democratically, as the experience of AIDS patients demonstrates the ability of an informed public to intervene in the insti- tutions of technology. In conclusion, I suggest that the globalization of technology can serve to perpetuate ideological and practical control of both nature and human beings, but offer the optimistic possibility that this need not be a foregone conclusion.

Global technology is not novel but rather is an entrenched practice, and the ethical and political task at hand in the present is to integrate local concerns within globalized culture. Global technology has a sub- stantial role to play in determining the human experience, and therefore its ethical, social and political implications demand ongoing philosophical analysis and dialogue, lest a definitive function of human being remain a global mechanism for reinforcing privilege and hegemony over the values of community and democratic empowerment.

Knowledge as the Human Project

Aristotle begins his Metaphysics with the claim that “[a]ll humans by nature desire to know.”2 Likewise, when Descartes asks, “What am I?” in the second of his Meditations, he concludes, “A thing that thinks.”3

The capacity for knowledge, our ability to think, has been definitive of human being in the tradition of Western philosophy since its very begin- ning, and remains so in modernity. If we are what we eat, then human

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being continues to demonstrate an inexhaustible appetite for knowledge. For many in the West/North, our day has the consumption of informa- tion built right into it. We read the paper, watch the Nature or History Channel, and spend both work and leisure time cruising the information superhighway on the Net. That such knowledge is not just a human function among others, or a specialty of us moderns, is evident in the Christian ideology of sexuality: Eden was lost through carnal knowledge, and we still talk of knowing in the biblical sense. Nor are we Westerners/ Northerners alone in constructing ourselves socially as knowers. Around the world, peoples define themselves on the basis of their cultural store- house of knowledge, and build their practices and calendars on the basis of preserving and disseminating knowledge through ritual.

What is knowledge, however? This is a broad question, and even if it could be articulated thoroughly, no final answer would then have been given, since knowledge is a process that evolves with culture and history. My task is precisely to trace the evolution of technology as an ideology and practice of knowledge in order to place into relief a tension between Western/Northern technology and global interests of politics and ethics. Hence, I confine myself to an analysis of the place of technology in knowledge, and the history I tell begins with Aristotle. He was quite clear about what knowledge is, and drew the original distinction between science and technology that is fundamental to Western intellectual his- tory. In the Topics and the Metaphysics, he divides knowledge into three kinds: theoretical, practical, and technical.4 He differentiates them on the basis that each has a different end. The end of theory is simply knowl- edge itself. This is what one knows just for the sake of knowing it, and herein Aristotle includes metaphysics, mathematics, and natural science.5

The end of praxis, which includes ethics and politics, is action. And the end of technical knowledge, production, is the thing that is made. Car- pentry, for example, has as its end the house that is built, and likewise medicine is directed at and for the sake of health. Aristotle’s word for “nature” is physis and his word for “production” is technê. Hence, the etymological origins of physics and technology are evident in Aristotle’s taxonomy. In the next section, I will argue that the Aristotelian differ- ence between theoretical science and technology is blurred in modernity, but first I make clear here the implications of his distinction.

The first thing that must be noted is that technê is an ambiguous term. It means both the things that are made in production, and the knowledge by which they are made. Hence, it can have ontological or epistemological force. I am very much persuaded by Heidegger’s in- sight that technology is not just a collection of equipment, but “a way of revealing.”6 In fact, this is the basis for my analysis that technology

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is and can remain a global mechanism for reinforcing privilege and hegemony over democratic empowerment. Hence, when I speak of technology, I do not mean particular items of technological equipment, but rather the ideology that permeates the production and use of such equipment.

Nonetheless, I work within Aristotle’s ambiguity in that I begin with a question of ontology: how are artifacts different from natural things? A debate is currently underway in philosophy concerning this question,7 but it is centered on restoration ethics8 rather than Aristotle’s ontological distinction. Aristotle argues at Physics 2.1 that what is definitive of natural things is that “they have within themselves a principle of movement (or change) and rest.”9 He goes on at 2.8 that nature is therefore teleological in that, rather than natural things developing by chance, they grow toward some end. Together these claims say that, for example, an acorn moves itself toward its final cause, which is an oak tree. Artifacts, however, have no such internal principle of growth. Production begins with the artist’s conception of what is to be made.10 Aristotle draws the odd conclusion that an artist chooses material “with a view to the function, whereas in the products of nature the matter is there all along.”11

What he means is that the relation between form and matter is necessary in the case of nature (wood does not exist except in trees; trees cannot but be made of wood), but not so in the case of an artifact (gold can be made into jewelry or a statue; a statue can be made of gold or bronze). Natural form is a principle of self-directed material development, while artifacts have a form that is imposed on matter by the artist.

The point to draw from Aristotle’s analysis is that technology depends on nature in a way that nature does not depend on technol- ogy. For an artifact must always be made from some material appropri- ated from nature. Things taken from nature by the artist and formed into an artifact are at most an interruption of natural process, which persists. Wood, for example, rots despite its treatment by the artist. Thus, technology is a derivative way of being, and control of natural processes is at best partial and temporary. Yet modern technology is an ideology of control and manipulation that has lost sight of this Aristo- telian truism. A succinct example of this modern oversight presented itself when I recently read a paper called “Nature versus Technology” precisely to make the Aristotelian point. Someone joked, “I’ve got my money on technology!” The point I made, of course, was that in fact technology is never removed from but rather always deeply embedded in nature, and that therefore, it is nature that will always have the last word, so to speak.

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Science, Technology, and the End of Nature

Two pivotal conceptions of nature since Aristotle figure centrally in the illusion that technology promises control over nature. The first is Chris- tian, the second scientific. Both these moments are complicit in a blur- ring of the distinction between nature and artifact such that human being comes to understand itself to be able to overcome and dominate nature. Nature is of course conceived as an artifact in a quite straightfor- ward way in Christian theology. It is the product of a divine artisan. More significantly, however, the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden at Genesis 3:17–24 establishes the divine mandate of earthly dominion for human being. Adam is sent from the garden with the instruction to till the ground and toil for sustenance. He has become like a god in eating of the Tree of Knowledge, and is subsequently empow- ered to manipulate his environment to meet his own needs. Modern science has roots that are deeply embedded in Christian theology, as indeed the Enlightenment project arose from this religious context.12

What I show in this section is that Bacon’s account of technological science endorses a logic of domination and control. The Newtonian sub- stitution of a mechanistic worldview in place of Aristotle’s teleological conception is complicit with the Judeo-Christian directive and the Baconian program. Once nature is freed of teleology, it is readily conceived as serv- ing no end other than human. Hence, the ideology of modern science lays nature bare for its technological reduction to resource.

Francis Bacon published his Great Instauration in 1620. His plan for science was to “conquer nature in action,”13 and he established his experi- mental task as inquisition.14 He claimed to “be content to wait upon nature instead of vainly affecting to overrule her,”15 yet his explicit goal was “that the mind may exercise over the nature of things the authority which properly belongs to it,”16 by extracting conclusions “out of the very bowels of nature”17 that is “under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded.”18 Bacon founded the modern experimental method in metaphors of domination and torture. His logic of scientific methodology did not allow nature to speak freely, as it were, but subju- gated it to his rule. Baconian science is thus not knowledge for the sake of knowledge, as Aristotelian science was. Rather, it is the groundwork for improving the human condition by manipulating nature technologically.

Newton’s work, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, first published in 1684, is substantially different in tone. He uses no meta- phors of warfare and torture. Yet his methodology remains experimental.

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He is interested in the manipulation of nature under idealized conditions determined and constructed by the scientist, rather than the observation of entities in their natural context that pervades, for example, Aristotle’s biology. But of course, physics has by Newton’s day changed its object. Whereas Aristotle was concerned with ta physika, things in nature that move themselves, such that biology constituted a substantial part of his inquiry into nature, Newton’s laws govern bodies subject to forces. Newtonian science is paradigmatically physics, concerning which his hypothetico-deductive experimental method seeks eternal and unchang- ing truths. His “mathematical principles of philosophy”19 homogenize natural entities into bodies whose properties “are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever.”20 Rather than letting nature inform his epistemology, he wishes to “derive the rest of the phenomena of nature”21 from his universal, rational principles. Accordingly, Newton’s text sets a standard for objectivity through mathematical idealization that distinguishes bodies not according to their teleology, that is, different qualities and functions, but only by quantifying them in terms of their universal attributes such as extension, hardness, impenetrability, and gravi- tation. Physics has thus come a long way from nature. In fact, the rela- tion between particle physics and the everyday objects of the human lifeworld is a problem even for physicists.

Furthermore, Newton’s mechanistic worldview in which nature is conceived artifactually as a giant clockwork, rests on severely narrowed conceptions of motion and causality. Whereas Aristotle thought about nature first and foremost in terms of final causes, Newton’s concern is limited to moving causes. Motion no longer includes growth, as it did for Aristotle, but is limited to locomotion. Newton wants to know how external forces govern rest and change of place, not how internal drives govern growth, and his laws of motion clearly govern locomotion. His worldview is mechanistic and his method is hypothetico-deductive. This conjunction of metaphysics and epistemology led Goethe to engage in a lifelong polemic against Newtonian science precisely because it envi- sioned nature in a reductive way.22 Newton affirmed ideologically in his scientific practice that nature consists in nothing more than bodies sub- ject to forces that can be controlled and manipulated in experimentation. Technological mastery of natural entities is the logical conclusion of a science that has no place for natural teleology. The objectification of nature renders it already available conceptually to be nothing more than manipulable resource. Thus, modern science in its incipience promises and claims to deliver human mastery over nature. No longer content simply to know nature, theoretical science is inherently technological in its usefulness for application. It is techno-science.

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Where does Aristotle’s third division of knowledge stand in this techno-scientific constellation? The mechanistic model separates ethical and political questions from scientific. The historical rise of science as technology determines the very essence of human being as knowers in modernity, and it displaces ethical questions and insights out of the heart of the human project of knowing. Ethical wisdom is neither quantifiable nor objective. Yet there are thinkers who argue that knowledge cannot be evaluated simply in terms of its truth or falsity. Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman, for example, argue that “theories appear to be the kinds of things that are true or false; but they are also the kinds of things that can be, e.g., useless, arrogant, disrespectful, ignorant, ethnocentric, imperialistic.”23 In a global context, it is certainly clear that the ideology and practices that constitute technology demand rethinking in ethical and political terms.

Globalized Technology in Its Social and Political Context

That Western techno-science gave rise to colonial practices that were both racist and unsound ecologically is readily evident in the attitude of Robert Boyle, well known for his law relating pressure, temperature, and volume, and less known for his governorship of the New England Com- pany. He explicitly wished to rid the New England natives of their per- ception of nature “as a kind of goddess,” which he saw as “a discouraging impediment to the empire of man over the inferior creatures of God.”24

Devaluing indigenous and local knowledge and practice as standing in the way of progress, as primitive and uninformed, because unscientific, has been a global colonial tradition. What I wish to show in this section is that the globalization of technology can and has been an unethical process. And further, that its unethical shortcomings are not simply the result of naïve faith in Baconian science, as we might perhaps understand if not justify Boyle’s view, but rather that globalized technology is en- tangled in a web of corporate interests and government policies in which vested interests have precluded democratic distribution of the promised benefits. In short, technology has not been globally implemented for the benefit of humanity, so much as for the benefit of an elite. The first part of this section treats eucalyptus planting in India; the second, the Bantu education policy in South Africa.

Vandana Shiva details how eucalyptus reforestation programs in India were based at best on selectively chosen data that do “not reflect the field reality and [do] not satisfy minimum scientific criteria.”25 Ignor- ing local farmers’ claims that the eucalyptus plants were lowering the water table and destroying soil conditions, the president of the Forest

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Research Institute of India argued that there is “no scientific basis in the popular fallacy that eucalyptus lowers the ground-water table.”26 In re- sponse to challenges to the government policy of emphasis on eucalyptus in 1981, the Forest Department conducted a single-plant experiment on one-year-old juveniles and then implemented a large-scale forestation program, with no regard to the variety of conditions in which the plants would be used and the well-established fact that eucalyptus has different water needs, growth rates, and biomass production at different stages in the life cycle. At worst, then, this program was based on misinformation, and the suppression and falsification of facts. Superficially, it may not seem to be a case of technology. Yet if technology is understood, as I have argued above, as a way of understanding and subsequently manipu- lating nature toward human ends, then forestry and agriculture are deeply, inherently, and incontrovertibly technological practices.

Furthermore, since, in this case, it was the government of India that established and implemented the eucalyptus policy, it may seem that the issues at stake here are national, not global. Shiva argues, however, that the complicity of the Indian forestry experts in wide-scale desertification served the interests of the pulp industry: “[S]cience and technology have become cognitively inseparable and the amalgam has been incorporated into the economic system.”27 This system is, of course, global capitalism, the eco- nomic foundation of Western hegemony, which Shiva argues is “based on exploitation, profit maximization and capital accumulation.”28 Accordingly, the issues of globalized technology, when situated within the context of a developing nation, are not thereby nationalized or localized. Rather, the case of eucalyptus in India demonstrates that globalized technology is embedded in Western hegemonic economic practices. Technology remains an integral part of the Western project of modernity, not despite but because of the Western values its dissemination promotes. This reality may be the greatest threat and weakness of the globalization of technology: while founded on the rhetoric of progress and improvement of the human condition, it can actually serve to further the interests of the few over the many on the basis of Western values of individualism over community, consumption over sustainability, and exploitation over liberation.

This was certainly the case with respect to the Bantu education policy in South Africa. Implemented in 1953, this program represented the culmination of a long history of racist education. Traditional educa- tional practices were efficiently displaced by colonial schools. Opened in the Cape in 1658, the first Western school educated young slaves: they “were to be taught the Dutch language and rudiments of the Christian religion and were encouraged to be diligent, with rewards of brandy and tobacco. They were to be efficient and pliant servants for their

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new masters.”29 This early moment in colonial educational strategies in South Africa remained the underlying theme, and is significant here in two respects.

First, from its very beginning, their education was never intended to give blacks access to the empowering features of Western technology. Rather, it was and remained directed at sustaining the racist status quo and white privilege by admitting blacks into the techno-scientific super- structure in order that they have the rudimentary skills required to con- tribute labor to industry. In 1855, Governor Grey argued that education “should try to make them . . . useful servants, consumers of our goods, contributors to our revenue,”30 and likewise Theal recommended to the Education Commission of the Cape of Good Hope in 1892 that “I would teach the natives to dig the ground and make their furrows straight; also the rudiments of carpentry. They make very good mechanics. . . . If the natives are to . . . be taught at all, they should be taught industry.”31

Nonetheless, the Apprenticeship Act of 1922 privileged whites in industry by requiring apprentices to have a minimum of eight years of education, that is, to complete Standard 6, which is grade 8 in a 13- grade system. Even by 1970, less than 10 percent of African pupils were achieving that level of education.32 In fact, half of the six million African children who started school between 1955 and 1968 dropped out before they became literate (Standard 3).33 The Bantu Education Act was not about enabling Africans to participate fully in Western techno-science, but about maintaining their function as the semiskilled laborers the national economy required. It was not to produce scien- tists and engineers, but “to train Africans to help man the local admin- istration at the lowest ranks and to staff the private capitalist firms owned by Europeans.”34 If an African wished to study engineering, for example, and thus participate in technology above the level of laborer, he or she had to apply for a permit to attend a white university where such things were offered. In 1960, the Bantu education minister re- ceived 190 such applications, of which four were approved.35 The de Lange Report of 1981 stated that a minority of pupils required prepa- ration for academic study beyond grade 10, whereas “50–80 per cent of children in standards 5–8 [grades 7–10] receiving vocational education . . . is in line with the manpower needs of South Africa,”36

and therefore recommended dividing high schools into academic versus vocational. Academic education was unfunded, whereas vocational edu- cation was funded, and hence African children were relegated to vocationalism and relations of domination and exploitation were main- tained. The point of giving access to technology and training in the requisite skills to use it was not to improve the human condition, but

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to improve the Afrikaner condition by producing a working class, a labor force that could undergird the privileged white class.

Secondly, then, the Bantu education policy made manifest what Heidegger warned of in 1954. He argued that technology is a way of thinking in which “[man] comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve,”37 that is, human being itself is reduced to a resource, a means appropriable toward another’s end. Hendrik Verwoerd was responsible for implementing the Bantu Education Act. He had claimed in 1948 that the aim of black education should be “to inculcate the white man’s view of life.”38 It was not just designed to control and restrict black participation in the social institutions of science and technology, but also to turn blacks into compliant and useful tools in the technological superstructure. Africans themselves were to be in- doctrinated into becoming technological entities rather than autono- mous users of technology. Education was intended to “passively socialize pupils into the requirements of their future work situation.”39 It was an education for subordination designed to make the underclass content, or at least compliant, with their social role: “[T]he educational system must try to teach people to be properly subordinate and render them sufficiently fragmented in consciousness to preclude their getting together to shape their own material existence.”40 Segregated education was justified be- cause if an African boy got the same education as a white, it made him, “(a) lazy and unfit for manual work; (b) it makes him ‘cheeky’ and less docile as a servant.”41 In short, it made him into a malfunctional tool.

On the basis of this analysis of India’s eucalyptus program and the Bantu education policy, I conclude that the relations of domination that figure prominently in modern technology from its very incipience as techno-science, described in the previous section, have spilled over into political and social relations in the globalization process. The eucalyptus program demonstrates that globalized technology replaces generations of sustainable practice in its complicity with science and antipathy to local, context-sensitive wisdom. The Bantu education policy shows that it has been complicit in imperialism and colonial practices of racism and classism that treat indigenous populations as tools and maintain the institutions that prevent their full participation in the social structures within which they must live. Both histories show that the globalization of technology is deeply entangled in global capitalism, to the detriment of indigenous populations and practices. The technological dream of control is not limited to nature, but has been actualized in cross-cultural interaction and technology transfer such that globalized technology oppresses, con- trols, and manipulates in social and political contexts. Global technology is the enactment of Western privilege within developing nations insofar

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as it privileges Western rationality and knowledge over the indigenous, and it sustains Western privilege globally.

Yet the technological promise of control is a false promise. In the next section, I will use the nuclear power industry as an example of the dangerous consequences when the promise of control of nature breaks down. And I will use Andrew Feenberg’s analyses of the French experi- ence with videotex and the intervention of AIDS patients in medical experimentation to argue that not only is the promise of social control illusory, in fact users of technology can disrupt social programs by appro- priating it toward their own ends. Hence, I conclude my otherwise harsh analysis with an optimism that globalized technology also harbors pos- sibilities for democratization in which technology users can experience it as an empowering and liberating moment of their self-determination.

The Dream of Control

Kristin Shrader-Frechette argues on the basis of her research into the nuclear power industry that control of nature is more limited than the scientific-technological paradigm suggests, in fact even more limited than the scientists involved seem prepared to concede. For the first thirty-five years of nuclear commercial fission, she claims, the problem of the dis- posal of nuclear waste was not addressed because scientists “were saying that safely isolating the wastes would be easy, once they put their mind to it.”42

Several Congressional hearings concerning the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) nuclear facilities from 1986 to 1989 charged the DOE with a loss of credibility since 1,061 of their sites need massive cleanup costing from $130 to $300 billion. Shrader-Frechette attributes the messes to poor management and storage of waste as a result of DOE managers repeatedly violating their own environmental regulations as well as U.S. law, and claims further that DOE administrators have withheld funds and information from people interested in safety issues, penalized whistle- blowers, and failed to spend the money necessary for cleanup.43 It seems the technologists of nuclear power are not to be trusted.

There is, however, another problem that is epistemological in na- ture. It has to do with an attitude of overconfidence on the part of scientists and technologists. At Maxey Flats, Kentucky, for example, the corporate leaseholder, Nuclear Engineering Company, who later were renamed US Ecology, claimed in 1963 when their facility opened that it would take plutonium twenty-four thousand years to migrate one-half inch at the site. Plutonium has a half-life of more than twenty-five thou- sand years. Within ten years, it had migrated two miles off-site.44 The

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epistemological problem is that such predictions are based on modeling methodologies that are inadequate to the realities of nuclear waste dis- posal, and involve inferences that entail subjective judgment for which objectivity is nonetheless claimed. The issues concerning simulation models in hydrogeology include, first, that the data against which models are checked are inadequate and inaccurate since they make predictions, for example, at the Yucca Mountain site, over millions of years on the basis of about a decade of observation. Furthermore, models rely on field conditions that often do not obtain, are typically not testable, and tech- nologists rarely agree on what would confirm them.45 The technologists allow to pass for scientific finding, argues Shrader-Frechette, what is really scientific opinion. She concludes that the scientific rationality that underwrites nuclear technology is incompatible with an ethical rationality that would include stakeholders’ interests and concerns, and responsibil- ity toward future generations.

I argued above that the historical collapse of science and technology squeezed ethics out of the picture, and nuclear waste disposal in the United States is a clear case in point. Technologists have simply overestimated their ability to predict and control natural processes, and have reduced the ethical issues to technical ones. Meanwhile, the failure of the promise of technological control of nature has had and continues to have dramatic ethical consequences. For example, it has been well documented that communities of color and of the poor bear a disproportionate burden of risk with respect to toxic waste.46 This is also true globally.47 Technology has a price, which is paid as inequitably as its benefits are shared. The decisions that shape the lives of those who receive an unfairly low benefit, yet pay an unfairly high price, are made in the context of corporate practice and government policy, while affected populations remain unin- formed and unconsulted.

Yet if it is clear that control of nature is an overestimated if not false promise, it is equally true that technology users have on occasion shown themselves capable of appropriating technology to their own, more demo- cratic ends. In fact, several theorists have argued that technology can be a source of social empowerment, and that the reality of its authoritarian use and service of elite interests is historically contingent. Andrew Feenberg, for example, has shown how this was the case with the French experience of videotex, an on-line library system that stores pages of information in a host computer to be accessed by users with a terminal and a modem.48 In the 1980s, more than five million such terminals and modems, Minitels, were delivered to French users. The project was de- signed to bring France into the information age by means of this hi-tech system of information distribution. Met initially with distrust by a public

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who saw it as a national service from a highly centralized and controlling state, in the context of a conservative government, it nonetheless became popular quickly. It owed its success to the fact that it was “soon transformed . . . in ways its makers had never imagined.”49 People used it not for information, but as a communication system. In 1982, hackers transformed a technical support facility into a messaging system, and the operators of the service institutionalized the changes. Feenberg argues they were “creating new forms of sociability,”50 “a new social form”51 in which people are liberated from social control and instead able to social- ize anonymously in private, direct interactions over which they have increased control. Users of the chat space create themselves as virtual subjects who use “that anonymity to shelter and assert their identities.”52

Similarly, Feenberg argues, AIDS patients were able to intervene in the technocratic organization of medicine through an organized lobby. In the 1980s, the influx of thousands of AIDS patients destabilized the medical system and transformed experimental medicine, previously re- stricted in its use of human subjects out of paternalistic concern for their well-being, into a standard practice of care for the incurably ill. Rather than “participating in medicine individually as objects of a technical practice . . . more or less compliant to management by physicians,”53 AIDS patients challenged the system and turned it to new purposes in order “to bring the organization of medicine into compliance with their hu- man needs as participants in the medical world.”54 They intervened and redirected medical technology, and during that process defined them- selves as subjects rather than objects in the system, that is, as rational users rather than passive recipients.

If to know is to be human, and technology is the form of knowing that determines human being in modernity, then the recent history of medical technology and of the French experience with Minitel are both examples of democratic self-articulation throughout technological sys- tems in powerful and empowering ways. It seems, then, that the global- ization of technology raises questions and offers models for ethically and politically sound cultural practices, despite the ideology of domination and control that marks its incipience and permeates its history. The globalization of technology can serve to perpetuate ideological and prac- tical control of both nature and human beings, but offers the alternative possibility that this threat is not a foregone conclusion. Global technol- ogy plays a substantial role in determining the human experience, and its social and political ramifications warrant ongoing and particular analysis, lest this definitive function of human being remain a global mechanism for reinforcing privilege and hegemony over the values of community and democratic empowerment.

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Notes

1. Harding has written much herself, and compiled several anthologies: “Feminism, Science, and the Anti-Enlightenment Critiques,” in Feminism/ Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 83–106; The “Racial” Economy of Science (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); “After Eurocentrism? Challenges for the Philosophy of Science,” in Proceedings of the Biennial Meetings of the Philosophy of Science Association 2 (1993), 311–19; “Gen- der, Development, and Post-Enlightenment Philosophies of Science,” Hypatia 13: 3 (1998), 146–67; Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding, eds. Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

2. 980a22. The Loeb translation says, “All men . . .” (trans. Hugh Tredennick [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933]), as does W. D. Ross in his translation in The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), but I have chosen to translate anthrôpoi as “humans.”

3. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 19.

4. 145a14–18 and 157a10–11; 1025b18–26 and 1064a10–19. 5. He distinguishes these again on the basis that they have different

objects. The object of metaphysics is being, which is eternal and unchanging; the objects of mathematics, which includes astronomy for Aristotle, are number and relation, which move but are eternal; the objects of natural science are natural things that move in all ways, including generation and destruction. Cf. Physics, Books I–IV, trans. P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929), 198a29–31.

6. Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Stuttgart: Verlag Günther Neske, 1954), 16; “The Question Concern- ing Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 12.

7. It began with Robert Elliot’s “Faking Nature,” Inquiry 25 (1982): 81–94, which he has expanded recently in Faking Nature: The Ethics of Environ- mental Restoration (London: Routledge, 1997), but see also Eric Katz, “The Big Lie: Human Restoration of Nature,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 12 (1992): 231–41, also treated at greater length in his Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), and Steven Vogel, “The Nature of Artifacts,” manuscript forthcoming.

8. This novel branch of ethics raises questions concerning the technologi- cal restoration of nature that has been damaged or destroyed.

9. 192b14. 10. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1934), 1140a13; Parts of Animals, trans. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, The Basic Works of Aristotle, 640a32.

11. 194b7–8.

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157Global Technology and the Promise of Control

12. See David Noble, A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), although his focus is on the historical genesis of modern science and technology as masculinist projects.

13. Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration and New Atlantis, ed. J. Weinberger (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1980), 16 and 21. This is the introduction to his Novum Organum.

14. Bacon, The Great Instauration, 2. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 7 17. Ibid., 23. 18. Ibid., 27. 19. H. S. Thayer, ed., Newton’s Philosophy of Nature: Selections from his

Writings (New York: Hafner Press, 1953), 16. 20. Ibid., 3. 21. Ibid., 10. 22. See Dennis L. Sepper, “Goethe Against Newton: Toward Saving the

Phenomenon,” in Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal, ed. Frederick Amrine, Francis Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Com- pany, 1987), 175–93.

23. Maria C. Lugones and Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice,’ ” in Women and Values, ed. Marilyn Pearsall (Belmont, Cal.: Wadsworth Publishing, 1999), 14–24, 20.

24. Qtd. in Brian Easlea, Science and Sexual Oppression: Patriarchy’s Confrontation with Woman and Nature (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1981), 73.

25. Vandana Shiva, “Reductionist Science as Epistemological Violence,” in Science, Hegemony, and Violence, ed. Ashis Nandy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 232–56, 246.

26. K. M. Tewari and R. S. Mathur, “Water Consumption and Nutrient Uptake by Eucalyptus,” Indian Forester 109 (1983): 851, quoted in Vandana Shiva, “Reductionist,” 245.

27. Vandana Shiva, “Reductionist,” 237. 28. Ibid., 232. 29. F. Troup, Forbidden Pastures: Education under Apartheid (London:

International Defense and Aid Fund, 1976), 8. 30. Quoted in B. Rose and R. Tunmer, Documents in South African Edu-

cation (Johannesburg: A. D. Donker, 1975), 205. 31. Quoted in Rose and Tumner, Documents, 213. 32. A. N. Mbere, “An analysis of the association between Bantu Educa-

tion and Christian nationalism: A study of the role of ideology in education.” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1979.

33. Simphiwe Hlatshwayo, Education and Independence: Education in South Africa, 1658–1988 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000), 74.

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34. W. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974), 240.

35. M. Horrell, A Decade of Bantu Education (Johannesburg: South Af- rican Institute of Race Relations, 1964), 167.

36. Quoted in L. Chisholm, “Redefining skills: Black education in South Africa in the 1980s,” in Apartheid and Education, ed. P. Kallaway (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1984), 387–410, 389.

37. Martin Heidegger, “The Question,” 27/“Die Frage,” 30. 38. Quoted in Troup, Forbidden, 20. 39. Hlatshwayo, Education, 20. 40. S. Bowles and H. Gintis, “Schooling in Capitalist America: Reply to

our Critics,” in Bowles and Gintis Revisited: Correspondence and Contradiction in Educational Theory, ed. M. Cole (London: Falmer Press, 1988), 2.

41. Rose and Tumner, Documents, 232. 42. Kristen Shrader-Frechette, “Reading the Riddle of Nuclear Waste: Ide-

alized Geological Models and Positivist Epistemology,” in Earth Matters: The Earth Sciences, Philosophy, and the Claims of Community (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2000), 11–24, 12.

43. Kristen Shrader-Frechette, Burying Uncertainty (Berkeley, Cal.: Uni- versity of California Press, 1993), 4.

44. Kristen Shrader-Frechette, “Reading,” 15. 45. Ibid., 16–18. 46. See especially Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Commu-

nities of Color, ed. Robert D. Bullard (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1994); and Environmental Justice: Issues, Policies, and Solutions, ed. Bunyan Bryant (Wash- ington, D.C.: Island Press, 1995).

47. See Faces of Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of Global Jus- tice, ed. Laura Westra and Peter Wenz (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995).

48. Andrew Feenberg, Alternative Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 144–66.

49. Ibid., 149. 50. Ibid., 152. 51. Ibid., 160. 52. Ibid., 159. 53. Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (New York: Routledge,

1999), 127. 54. Ibid., 142.

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