Clearly, I have not done justice to the range and subtlety of much of Marxist work. My concern has been roughly to attend to the Marxist claim regarding the social center of gravity and responsibility. My argument that Marxists misplace that center and that an analysis of technology allows us to locate it more appropriately is ironical, given that no nineteenth century critic of the emerging technological society paid closer and more persistent attention to the concrete features of that society than Marx. But his fascination with power and his Hegelian determination to foretell the future made many of his followers feel bound to vindicate rather than develop his position.
The liberal democratic view, on the other hand, has always maintained a certain aloofness from the grimy details of production and the dubious circumstances of consumption. Yet it has become deeply implicated in the development of modern technology. It is impossible to grasp the power and extent of modern technology without understanding liberal democratic theory. That theory is a force even in places where modern technology has a conservative or socialist cast. I am unable here to develop this suggestion. Instead I turn to the examination of liberal democracy to throw light on the ways in which technology has come to rule our lives. And as noted earlier, taking up technology in this framework is to consider it in terms that are most widely shared and taken most seriously.
14
Technology and Democracy
Political discourse today constitutes the forum in which we transact our most important business. Thus in discussing the political circumstances of technology we take an important step toward understanding the rule of technology. In this chapter I am primarily concerned with the theoretical dimensions of politics. Political theory, however, should not be taken as an abstract and inconsequential comment on political reality. Rather the concepts and concerns of theory have practical significance in reflecting and informing our political aspirations. To be sure, the common aspirations are modified and deflected in many ways, and hence the practical outcome of political action is, as we will see in the remaining chapters of Part 2, quite at variance with political theory.
Still, it is helpful to begin with theory. In the modern era it has been given its dominant features by the liberal democratic tradition, “liberal” taken in a broad sense which will become clear in what follows. The decisive theoretical traits are conveniently introduced through a brief historical sketch. It will show that the liberal democratic vision of society is guided by a distinctive convergence of the notions of liberty, equality, and self-realization. This cluster of concepts seems to be in happy consonance with the instrumental conception of technology.
After that brief exposition, I turn to a critical examination of how valid and viable liberal democratic theory is in the concrete circumstances of modern technology. I begin by asking how well the liberal democratic enterprise has fared by its overt and professed norm of equality. Seeing its failure on that score, we must probe more deeply and question the very consistency of the core cluster of concepts: liberty, equality, and self-realization. It turns out that these norms can be realized jointly only according to the pattern of technology. This becomes clear when one asks not merely whether opportunities in a liberal democratic society are equal and just but what kind of opportunity they represent. Yet the implementation of the liberal program yields a semblance of success only because the technological specification of democracy, when examined radically, is seen to constitute a definite vision of the good life and so answers a question that liberal theorists are at pains to leave open. This pivotal problem, however, is not confronted in liberal theory and remains an unspoken and deeply perplexing issue. Even in cases where modern technology becomes an explicit problem, the failure to grasp it incisively veils the social significance of technology.
Beginning then with the historical sketch, let me repeat that the strand of the intricate network of democratic theory that is most pertinent to an understanding of technology is one that is part of the liberal tradition and has been made prominent by John Stuart Mill, who in turn found its best articulation in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s writings. It serves as a motto for Mill’s On Liberty and says:
The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.1
This principle, as Mill recognized, came out of German Idealism and was inspired by classical notions of human culture.2 Humboldt might have been thinking of Goethe as a representative of this ideal, a man who was a lyric, epic, and dramatic poet, a literary critic, stage director, painter, natural scientist, and state official. And Humboldt himself in his manifold talents and accomplishments contributed to the rich diversity of which he speaks.3 Though the cultural conditions of human development have changed radically in the nearly two hundred years since Humboldt developed his liberal democratic theory, his principle is still thought to be crucial to liberal democracy presently and for the future. According to Macpherson, a liberal democracy is “a society striving to ensure that all its members are equally free to realize their capabilities.”4 That principle competes with a commitment of liberal democracies to “a capitalist market society.”5 And Macpherson suggests “that the continuance of anything that can be properly called liberal democracy depends on a downgrading of the market assumptions and an upgrading of the equal right to self-development.”6 In Macpherson’s view, the unsolved problem of liberal democracy is its relationship to the class division that is entailed by capitalism. Liberal democratic theorists began, so he argues, by sanctioning the established classes at the expense of equality. Then they thought class division to be a merely accidental obstacle to liberal democracy. In the early twentieth century, they believed that classes had made way to a pluralism of interests. Finally, around the middle of this century, they recognized the rule of an elite which was periodically elected and approved by the people at large.
Ronald Dworkin, to the contrary, has argued that a free market system least prejudges the opportunities that are offered to people in pursuit of their self-development and that it allocates opportunities most efficiently. Admittedly, the market leads to inequalities, but these can be curbed through taxation and transfer payments.7 Macpherson and Dworkin agree, however, that a moral principle is central to a truly liberal democracy. “Mill’s model of democracy is a moral model,” Macpherson says. Its moral significance lies in its concern to foster equal “chances of the improvement of mankind.”8 As suggested above, there were exemplars of a fully developed human being when Humboldt first formulated the principle, and so there was an understanding of the direction in which one had to move if humankind was to be improved. But little argument is needed to maintain that Goethe and Humboldt no longer constitute widely agreed upon models for the improvement of humanity. Does it make sense to urge a social and political commitment to the ideal of people “acting as exerters and enjoyers of the exertion and development of their own capacities” when it is quite unclear what the direction of such development should be?9 Dworkin gives an emphatically affirmative answer and argues that it is in fact distinctive of liberalism that it subscribes to a theory of equality which
supposes that political decisions must be, so far as possible, independent of any particular conception of the good life, or of what gives value to life. Since the citizens of a society differ in their conceptions, the government does not treat them as equals if it prefers one conception to another, either because the officials believe that one is intrinsically superior, or one is held by the more numerous or more powerful group.10
For Dworkin, this position does not betray a retreat from moral issues but is itself the “constitutive political morality” of liberalism.11 “Its constitutive morality,” he says, “provides that human beings must be treated as equals by their government, not because there is no right and wrong in political morality but because that is what is right.”12 To arrogate the determination of the good life for others is t
o practice paternalism.13
Dworkin’s formulation of the liberal democratic position is attractive because it seems to provide a principled and moral foundation for the apparently arbitrary way in which ends are formulated and selected in technology. The unexamined multiplicity of ends reprehended in prior chapters now seems to be the result of a commitment to a more fundamental ethical principle, equal respect for all citizens, and to the consequent endeavor to prejudge citizens’ preferences as little as possible. Dworkin’s position also sanctions the inclination of the social sciences toward empirical laws and their reserve concerning norms or values as discussed in Chapter 12. Laws, it was urged in the same chapter, circumscribe a possibility space that allows for infinitely many actualizations. Similarly, if the social sciences restrict themselves to the analysis and description of social structures and functions and refrain from advocacy and prescription, they appear to respect the notion of equality Dworkin finds basic to liberalism. Finally, it is clear that the universe of political discourse in this country is delimited by Dworkin’s principle of liberalism. This is well illustrated by the national debates that are engendered every four years by the presidential elections. Those debates are entirely devoted to the question of how the means toward the good life can be secured and improved. They deal with the problems of how our lives can be made more secure, internally and internationally, how economic growth can be promoted, how access to opportunities can be broadened. The question of what the good life itself is never comes to the surface.
Dworkin suggests in effect that an instrumental notion of liberalism as a social order is the appropriate way to secure a substantive notion of liberty and equality. He thus belongs to an old tradition of political theory where the machinery of the state is devised so as to prevent the abuse of power and to a somewhat younger tradition that is concerned to make political institutions pliable to citizens’ self-determination. But there is a strand in the fabric of political and especially democratic theory that we have ignored so far and that provides a crucial link between democracy and technology. It is the utopian tradition that was not concerned to fit democratic principles onto a class-divided society but proposed a new kind of society without classes where everyone would lead a free and rich life.14 Macpherson, I am sure, is correct in his claim that the liberal democratic tradition became dominant in the early nineteenth century precisely because it abandoned the utopian democratic ideal of a truly egalitarian society.15 But although there were henceforth no successful attempts to realize the utopian ideal in the political practices of the Western democracies, the ideal lived on in the promise of technology that was discussed in Chapter 8. It was said there that the promise of technology has become a commonplace. As such it has deeply informed our conception of democracy. Daniel Boorstin in fact suggests an equation of the promise of technology with the concept of democracy. He asks us to “consider democracy not just as a political system, but as a set of institutions which do aim to make everything available to everybody.”16 He speaks of “our high-technology, well-to-do democratic society, which aims to get everything to everybody.”17 And most explicitly he says:
“Democracy,” according to political scientists, usually describes a form of government by the people, either directly or through their elected representatives. But I prefer to describe a democratic society as one which is governed by a spirit of equality and dominated by the desire to equalize, to give everything to everybody.18
Summarizing this brief historical account, we can say that the concepts of freedom, equality, and self-development are joined and developed in different constellations and with varying emphasis and that this conjunction of concepts has a close affinity to modern technology. Let me now state these connections more explicitly and abstractly. To begin, it seems obvious that the notions of liberty and equality are root concepts of democracy. The latter is unthinkable without the former. But what role does self-realization play in democratic theory? We must remember that liberty and equality are basic political norms but certainly not clear ones. Liberty is easily defined in a negative way, as the absence of constraints; correspondingly, liberation is most obviously an enterprise of breaking fetters and throwing off burdens. The Enlightenment was in large part just such a liberation movement. But liberation cannot simply be the razing of all established or traditional structures. There comes a point where the foundations of any kind of social existence are threatened and liberty turns into chaos. Now the ideal of self-realization comes into play as providing limits and a center for freedom. This ideal enjoins us to clear away what stands in the path of self-realization and to procure what is needed to achieve the ideal.
Self-realization similarly helps to specify and stabilize equality. Given that there are ineradicable differences among human beings, in what respect are we equal? And to what does equality entitle each of us? The norm of self-realization suggests that we are all equal in being capable of developing our common and various talents and that we have a right to the opportunities for such development. Self-realization constitutes a uniquely congenial specification of freedom and equality as they were understood in the Enlightenment because it appears to be a standard that puts the slightest constraints on the rebellious spirit of that movement and yet promises to provide enough guidance to steer society past social catastrophe. Finally, this vision of society appears to be practically feasible through modern technology, the latter understood instrumentally. In this view, technology provides powerful and effective means without constraining the individual’s choice of the good life.
Having the crucial points of liberal democratic theory before us and seeing how it commonly appears to be joined to technology, we must now ask how well this vision accords with the obvious and the more hidden features of contemporary reality. It is clear, as has already appeared from the historical sketch, that the liberal democratic vision of equality has not asserted itself in practice. In the work world of this country, for instance, opportunities are sharply predetermined by one’s sex, race, and above all by the social stratum into which one has been born.19 The popular imagination is fond of illustrations that seem to show that this is the land of opportunity and upward mobility. And tales of the self-made man are no doubt used as instruments of social stability. They are thought to explain and justify the social order. This phenomenon belongs to the question of social justice and will concern us in detail later. At any rate, the common misunderstanding in regard to the opportunities a liberal democracy provides in the work world does not concern the nature of equal opportunity itself but rather the gap between the ideal and reality. It is therefore an error which is remedied when we are ready to face the facts of inequality. This is increasingly the case. But to act on the recognition of the inequality of work turns out to be extremely difficult for the body politic.
If in our society a principle of selection and limitation governs the distribution of work opportunities, then the principle indirectly determines social and material opportunities as well. The resulting inequalities are an embarrassment to liberal democracies. But again that means that in principle at least the conceptual resources of liberal democratic theory are adequate for the analysis and remedy of these problems. It is far different when we try to grasp the nature of the opportunities that have in fact been provided by the liberal democracies. It is undeniable that in respect to health, comfort, mobility, and access to culture the gap between the most and the least privileged is narrower in liberal democracies than in many other societies. And technology is surely the decisive factor in the narrowing of this gap. This achievement has been celebrated many times.20 To be sure, none of the Western democracies has achieved the equality that liberal proponents like Macpherson, Dworkin, or John Rawls require. But each of these societies has a broad middle class where roughly equal opportunities obtain. Since these areas of equality are surrounded by unjustifiable extremes of poverty and affluence, they fail, of course, to represent embodiments of justice. They do, however, afford an illu
stration of what today’s life among equal opportunities would be like. We may take them therefore as hypothetical cases of a liberal democracy, successfully realized in a technological setting. And it is just such possible success that turns out to be profoundly questionable when one asks what kind of opportunity is equally provided here.
Probing the nature of these opportunities takes us to a deeper level of democratic reality and analysis. At this level we no longer examine society by the standards of liberal democratic theory but in light of the pattern of technology. One should not, however, think of this deepening of the critique as subjecting the democratic program to an extraneous standard. Rather, the consideration of technology in this context exposes a profound, if not fatal, flaw in the liberal democratic structure. We can approach the salient point in a conventional way by distinguishing in sequence three visions of society, each appearing to be a necessary condition for the subsequent one. Let us call the first the constitutional or formally just society where equal liberties for all citizens are anchored in the constitution and in the civil and criminal legislation which specifies the constitution. This country very nearly realizes the vision of the constitutional society. But formal justice is compatible with substantive inequality. I may have the right to do nearly everything and yet the economic and cultural means to do next to nothing. This is one reason why liberal democratic theorists press for a second vision of society, that of a fair or substantively just society. They recognize that justice is as much a matter of economic arrangements and legislation as of civil rights and liberties.
Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry Page 14