Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry

by Albert Borgmann

  The social and political realm and the theories that try to make sense of it are complicated and contentious. Introducing technology as an object of analysis into that complex does not by itself simplify matters. Therefore, it is advisable to proceed at first in smaller and careful steps. This I want to do in the present chapter, and I propose to take three such steps. To provide a tentative orientation I begin with some brief remarks on what is involved in orienting oneself both today and in a pretechnological setting. I then discuss one current and widely applauded attempt at orientation, that of raising the value question. Finally, I examine a straightforward and frequently if not consistently held view of how and where we are to locate responsibility for the present social order; I am speaking of the Marxist view. These initial considerations prepare the ground for the more insistent inquiries of the following three chapters.

  To begin, then, it is widely admitted that there is a problem of orientation in the technologically advanced countries. There is a literature of disorientation that in various ways chronicles and analyzes this loss of direction.1 What is it to orient oneself? When life was rooted in a particular region, the direction that points to the rising sun sometimes attained a privileged rank. To orient originally meant to erect a church “with the longer axis due east and west, and the chancel or chief altar at the eastern end.”2 It was to take one’s bearing a sole oriente, from the rising sun. But Copernicus taught us, so it is said, that the sun does not really rise. And space in modern cosmology is isotropic; it has not privileged points, directions, or axes. Science may be a necessary condition of disorientation. But to repeat an earlier point, it is not the task of science, in its central sense as a body of laws and theories, to ascertain the conditions that are prominent and abiding and allow us to be at home in the world. Disorientation is the result, at least approximately, of a certain way in which we take up with reality, and the loss of the traditional points of reference may not be experienced as debilitating at all. A world in which the sun is thought to rise always in the same region may seem stifling and antiquated. That is the tenor of Buckminster Fuller’s account of living on “Earth.”

  I travel between Southern and Northern hemispheres and around the world so frequently that I no longer have any so-called normal winter and summer, nor normal night and day, for I fly in and out of the shaded or sun-flooded areas of the spinning, orbiting Earth with ever-increased frequency. I wear three watches to tell me what time it is at my “home” office, so that I can call them by long distance telephone. One is set for the time of day in the place to which I am next going, and one is set temporarily for the locality in which I happen to be. I now see Earth realistically as a sphere and think of it as a spaceship.3

  But usually, the loss of the traditional norms is not considered in these sanguine terms. Many analysts of the technological society are concerned about the progressive erosion of standards. What heightens the sense of crisis enormously is the disagreement among the analyses regarding the source of our troubles and consequently about the appropriate remedies. In discussions where technology is recognized as the title for the character of our times, it is sometimes thought that we can find our bearings in relation to technology by raising the question of values.4 But such a procedure may only strengthen and conceal the reign of what we seek to question. To see this, let us follow Kurt Baier and distinguish between the value possessed by things and the values held by people.5 “The value of something,” Baier says, “. . . is a certain sort of property of it.”6 More precisely, it “is the thing’s capacity to confer a benefit on someone, to make a favorable difference to his life.”7 We can see here that the discourse of values does not recognize things in their entire depth, where nearly every discernible property is significant and an essential tie to the world of the thing. Such discourse rather presupposes the means-ends distinction that comes into its own in the machinery and function of the device. Accordingly, Baier defines values held by people as the “tendencies of people to devote their resources (time, energy, money [the means of all means]) to the attainment of certain ends.”8 The relative stability of ends and the radical variability of means that again comes to fruition in the device is likewise congenial to value talk and stressed by W. Norris Clarke: “The essential principle of education involved here [i.e., in the endeavor to control technological progress], it seems to me, is a shift of emphasis from means to ends, from teaching customs or ways of doing things—so quickly obsolete or irrelevant today—to teaching basic values or goals to be aimed at steadily through the flux of changing ways and means.”9 The affinity of the discourse of values with the paradigm of availability is palpable when Baier talks about ways of assessing the value of things:

  A book, a lecture course, an invention, a suggestion has greater value than another if it satisfies more fully than the other thing the listed desiderata; if it is generally easier to satisfy the conditions under which it can or will play its characteristic causal role (being available for reading, attending, etc.); if it more reliably brings about or is a greater help in bringing about certain intended changes in the lives of people, or brings them about in more lives, or in a larger proportion of lives to be improved; and if the changes brought about constitute a greater improvement.10

  No matter how the question of values is raised and settled, the pattern of technology itself is never in question. Technology comes into play as the indispensable and unequaled procurement of the means that allow us to realize our preferred values.

  One can, of course, extend value talk to encompass the discourse of focal things by defining the values of objects and subjects in such a way that the values are satisfied or instantiated only by things. But value talk then becomes awkward and misleading. One cannot hope to guard focal things and the engagement with them by saying that some values are hard and measurable and others soft, fragile, and elusive.11 Rather there are certain goals that are consonant with the paradigm of technology, and these appear to be hard and measurable in value talk. Some of these values pertain to the means or machinery of technology, to employment, resources, or productivity. Though these are instrumental values, one can appeal to them as guides or ends in political controversies because the ends proper that they serve are understood and granted by almost everyone. Those final values are commodities. Since they are procurable, they are also quantifiable, i.e., hard. Commodities, in comparison with focal things, are highly reduced entities and abstract in the sense that within the overall framework of technology they are free of local and historical ties. Thus they are sharply defined and easily measured. Focal things, on the other hand, engage us in so many and subtle ways that no quantification can capture them. As with social phenomena, it is not the case that things are imbued with mysterious unquantifiable properties. Rather their significance is composed of so many, if not all, of their physically ascertainable properties that an explicit quantitative account must always impoverish them greatly. We can count the number of fast food outlets, the hamburgers sold, the times a family eats out.12 And such a measurement of eating understood as consumption can with some additional data capture its commodity. But how can we begin to measure a family meal, thoughtfully prepared and celebrated at home? Again we can measure highway miles; we can count cars per population and scenic resting places. But how does one determine and quantify the essential dimensions of a hike in the wilderness? When there is a conflict in public policy between the engagement with focal things and the procurement of availability, value talk conforms to the abstract and narrowly defined character of commodities. But when value talk is about things, it falters, and the object of discourse slips from our grasp. Discourse that is appropriate to things must in its crucial occurrences abandon the means-ends distinction. It must be open to and guided by the fullness of the focal thing in its world, and it can communicate the thing only through testimony and appeal.

  The nature of principled discourse of focal things requires an investigation of its own. Here I only want to set if
off against value talk and expose the futility of value talk for the radical analysis of our relation to technology. In spite of its shortcomings one should, as a matter of prudence and pedagogy, encourage discussions that raise the value question. Without this familiar if inadequate approach, a fundamental analysis of technology remains forbidding. Moreover, values will remain indispensable as ways of summarizing, recollecting, and preparing for our experiences with things. It is the fundamental status of values that must be rejected.

  Normally the value question is raised within the paradigm of availability. Technology in our sense is the unspoken and invisible framework of discussion of values, and such discourse, taken at face value, engenders the illusion as though people’s orientation comes to the fore in their choice of values. But the implication that the existence and power of the framework of technology trivializes the choice of values since it occurs within the framework and leaves the latter unquestioned would be challenged by Marxist critics. In their view, the essential choices that most people make are directed not by some concealed and consequential pattern but by other people who, at least in the Western democracies, constitute a small and definite minority class. The opposing view which sees technology as the major social force has to be established in its own right. But that complex task can be clarified if we first consider an influential alternative to that view. For the Marxists, then, it is the capitalists who currently determine the shape and direction of social developments. The Marxist thesis is advanced in different degrees of sophistication. In its crudest form it has become part of the standard political idiom, and its origin is scarcely recognizable. But it shares its crucial flaw with its learned siblings, and it has led to much confusion in political debates. The crude thesis is occasioned by overt stresses in the economies of liberal democracies. The notions of the class struggle and of exploitation are then employed to locate the blame for the economic problems. The class division is made in terms of “the consumer” and “the big corporations.” Exploitation is defined as the maximizing of profits by the corporations at the expense of the consumer. An example of the kind of charge that is made in these terms is the contention that “the gasoline prices are rising so fast because the oil corporations are ripping off the consumer; they are only interested in their profits.” Editorial writers, senators, the person in the street, and academics level accusations of this sort, and there is always broad if uncertain approval. The lack of firm and consequential assent is due to the suspicion that the charge depends for its force on untenable interpretations of “corporation” and “profit.” Corporations can be bearers of blame in this broad social sense only if they are identifiable with a definite set of persons whose interests are clearly opposed to those of the rest of the population. Accordingly, profits are objectionable if they constitute a surplus that is diverted to purposes that are contrary to the common will or good. But we know how tightly and manifoldly corporations are tied to society by way of their stockholders, managers, and employees, and we also know that most of the profits are channeled back into the economy to sustain and expand the productive machinery.

  To define the central point of the Marxist critique more sharply, we can narrow the scope of its critical concern in three moves. First of all, the Marxists share with almost anyone who sees cause for criticism the view that the present social order fails to serve people’s best interests. Second, they agree with democratic theory that people’s interests are decisively served by a fair assignment of rights, power, income, and wealth. And finally, like liberal democratic theorists, they would find little fault with the articulation of civil rights in statutes and the Constitution. Marxists see the decisive shortcoming of our society in the extreme and unjust concentration of power and wealth. The holders and beneficiaries of that power and wealth constitute the ruling class. To substantiate the Marxist claim one must, to begin with, identify this class. Its identification is sometimes made with surprising vagueness, even when a clear identification is crucial to an argument. Stuart Ewen suggests in his book, Captains of Consciousness, that there is a group of people who, in order to secure the power of capitalism, have systematically been shaping popular attitudes toward consumption. He names advertising theorists and writers who made such shaping their business. But who gave them a mandate to do so? Ewen refers to “mass industrial capitalism,” “modern industry,” “business,” “a profit-seeking mass productive machinery,” or “expanding capitalism.”13 Attempts have been made, however, to isolate sociologically a determinate ruling elite. G. William Domhoff’s endeavors provide an example of the insuperable difficulties that such an enterprise faces. If a ruling class is concretely defined according to wealth and criteria of class cohesion and consciousness, it turns out to be too small (a few hundredths of a percent) and is found to occupy too few offices to be able to rule something so large and complex as today’s United States.14 Domhoff’s strategy is to appeal to this core group when he argues for the determinacy and cohesiveness of the governing class. But he allows for an indeterminate fringe of business executives, scientists, scholars, and politicians who are connected to the core by institutional bonds of various sorts. And when he argues for the governing power of the elite he refers to its periphery.

  It is true of course that the center of the higher circles enjoys a disproportionate amount of wealth and political power. But what is it to enjoy wealth? Merely to have one’s name on countless stock and bond certificates means nothing. Wealth is enjoyed through the exercise of power or through consumption. Power, based on wealth, can be direct, the power, for instance, that a majority stockholder has in controlling a corporate board of directors and thereby the direction of the corporation. But John Kenneth Galbraith and others have argued that the control of big business is in the hands of an elite of experts who own a negligible portion of the corporations they direct.15 Or wealth bestows power indirectly by giving readier access to political office. Granted that the rich are disproportionately well represented in politics, the decisive question is whether they exercise their power against the wishes of the people. They have, to be sure, succeeded in preserving the privileges of the rich. But as was just suggested, those privileges are in the main either vacuous or exercised in consonance with popular goals.16 What sets the rich truly apart is the enjoyment of wealth through personal consumption. They are the ones who have the yachts, Picassos, and castles in Spain. Such extravagance raises ethical questions. But if the wealth, so consumed, were to be distributed over the entire population, the general benefit would be small.17 In that sense the consumption by the wealthy is economically insignificant. It is certainly not the sole or major sink of corporate profits in this country.18

  Writers of Marxist orientation have made significant contributions to the social critique of Western democracies. Marcuse has analyzed the stealthy reduction of the universe of political discourse and action.19 Baran and Sweezy have exposed the inability of Western economies to deal rationally with their productivity and to engender a life of dignity for all. Braverman has furnished a penetrating account of the degradation of work.20 But the real thrust of these endeavors is inevitably deflected because they finally rest their case on the assumption that there is a definite exploiting capitalist class. It is not just that the critical insights depart from and return to an erroneous factual claim; the primal and final error tends to infect and blur the intermediate insights themselves. If blame for the problems of the technological society is in the end attributed to the selfish interests of a determinate class, then the therapy that naturally follows from this diagnosis will prescribe an excision of those interests and little more. It is only a short step from saying that the capitalists are principally at fault to concluding that not much else is wrong. A fortiori nothing is really wrong with technology except that it has been abused by the capitalists. Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man provides a telling example of a Marxist analysis that wavers between the substantive and instrumental view of technology, between seeing in techno
logy a historical project that “shapes the entire universe of discourse and action, intellectual and material culture,” and seeing technology as technics that “as a universe of instrumentalities, may increase the weakness as well as the power of man.”21

  On the Marxist analysis, the reform of the technological society in the Western democracies should be simple. It requires only that the power and privileges of a vanishingly small minority be canceled and technology be redirected toward the common good. The means for such reform are clearly in place. People can read and write, communicate, speak and assemble freely. There is universal franchise, secret ballot, and election of the legislature or the executive. Faced with these possibilities, Marxists must resort to a massive exculpation of the people to save their case. They must explain popular passivity by reference to the power of advertisement, the threat of unemployment and police brutality, the promise of a high standard of living, the subversion of the mass media, and other more subtle modifications of the climate of opinion and action. But if all these factors were tools of domination, one should also discover evidence of resistance in regard to each if not revolt.22 When Marcuse, Baran, and Sweezy contemplate the lack of such evidence, they are moved to pessimism about the possibility of reform or revolution.23 But they are unwilling to conclude that there must be a kind of consonance between the character of social reality and people’s aspiration. What makes this difficult to come into view for a Marxist analysis is the emphasis on power relations among classes. To have introduced this consideration into economic and social analysis was one of Marx’s great contributions.24 But in time it diverted attention from the study of the concrete and inconspicuous material environment in which people come to terms with their lives. In spite of the illuminating details in the critique of popular culture that Marcuse particularly has provided, in the general and concluding view of Marxist critiques modern culture appears in a superficial and summary way. And accordingly, the positive goal of the good life that Marcuse, for example, advances is in accord with the dubious promise of technology.25