Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry

by Albert Borgmann

  But most political philosophers have a still brighter vision of society; for it is possible that typical life in a constitutional and just society is indolent, shallow, and distracted. What we finally want is a good society. The primary liberal democratic commitment is to a (substantively) just society. Liberal democrats merely hope for a good society; they believe that it is neither necessary nor possible to advance the good society politically; one can only let it happen. It is not possible to give it any political realization because that would be a violation of equal respect for all citizens. It is not necessary because we can in building the just society restrict our arrangements to the opportunities for the good life without prejudice to the individual conceptions of the good. I want to argue that just as the constitutional definition of society remains incomplete and corruptible without a statement of substantive justice, so the just society remains incomplete and is easily dispirited without a fairly explicit and definite vision of the good life. The last point can also be put this way: justice and culture are inevitably and strongly continuous with one and another.

  Right now I want to show that justice, to the extent that it exists in Western democracies, is of a piece with technological culture. An alternative to this continuity is proposed in Part 3. We can begin this part of the analysis by connecting the distinctions just made with the notion of opportunity in the following way. A constitutional society furnishes formal or vacuous equality of opportunity. A just society secures fair or substantive equality of opportunity. Whether we have a good society depends on the kind of opportunities that the society provides for its citizens. And this last question is inevitably answered in some definite way. Moreover, the answer is always and already given in the ways in which we have set up formal and fair equality of opportunity. Thus in the liberal democratic and technologically advanced countries it is not so much the degree of equality and the range that distinguish their opportunities; it is the nature of the opportunities that sets them apart. Opportunities in a pretechnological society were to be grasped and acted out as a destiny. More precisely, one opportunity among others, however few, was to be taken up and lived out in a lifelong commitment; and all other opportunities ceased to be open and to exist. In a liberal democracy, on the other hand, any one opportunity is realized in a context of opportunities that remain open, and therefore an opportunity never turns into a destiny but merely into a state one is free to leave for the sake of one of the many opportunities that have remained open. Ronald Dworkin’s principle of restraint is taken to the extreme point where in political decisions even the expectation of a commitment to a destiny would be arrogant. Ironically, Gerald Dworkin allows interference by authorities, i.e., paternalism, in the choice that persons make only when that interference is needed to

  preserve the liberty of the person to make future choices. This gives us a principle—a very narrow one—by which to justify some paternalistic interferences. Paternalism is justified only to preserve a wider range of freedom for the individual in question.21

  Dworkin has in mind interference with “decisions which are far-reaching, potentially dangerous and irreversible,” or “which are made under extreme psychological and sociological pressures,” or those that entail “dangers which are either not sufficiently understood or appreciated correctly by the persons involved.”22 But Gerald Dworkin’s principle is really a guide for the shaping of society, and it is so in the broad sense in which the principle is formulated at the end of the quotation above. But how, concretely, do we act on this principle? It is clear that things that are to be taken up and relinquished easily must be free of contextual ties. If taking something up is to enter into strong and manifold bonds, then to abandon that thing is to suffer the trauma of the disruption of those ties and of injury to one’s faculties. But when the supporting structure of daily life assumes the character of a machinery that is concealed and separated from the commodities it procures and when these become isolated and mobile, then it becomes possible to style and restyle one’s life by assembling and disassembling commodities. Life becomes positively ambiguous as we saw in the discussion of the foreground of technology.

  Liberal democracy is enacted as technology. It does not leave the question of the good life open but answers it along technological lines. The question of life cannot be left open, either individually or socially. In living together, in doing this rather than that, we inevitably make decisions and give our lives a direction. Both the initial promise of technology and the modern democratic theories were profoundly ambiguous. The promise of technology ironically attained precision and force as it was acted out. Technology developed into a definite style of life. The theories of democracy remained vague, in some cases studiously so, about the character of life that they mean to promote. They were therefore overtaken by technology which they could not rival in energy and determinacy.

  How technology has patterned our life both in its concrete details and its broader compass will be covered further in the remaining chapters of Part 2. The answers will carry more force if we can develop them against a fuller understanding of the curiously veiled position that technology has in liberal democratic discourse. One might say that the theory of liberal democracy both needs and fears modern technology. It needs technology because the latter promises to furnish the neutral opportunities necessary to establish a just society and to leave the question of the good life open. It fears technology because technology may in fact deliver more than it had promised, namely, a definite version of the good society and, more important yet, one which is “good” in a dubious sense. The pivot of this predicament in liberal theory, however, is not the phenomenon of technology itself but the question of whether we can establish a just society without a commitment to a good society in a strong sense. This indirection of liberal discourse may bespeak the fear, mentioned above; but as likely or more so, it may have deep historical roots and stem from the original cast of the Enlightenment which, as noted earlier, was conceived as an intellectual and cultural event and only incidentally as a practical one.

  Now to give the conjecture just proposed a measure of substance, let us look first at some liberal democratic policies that illustrate the salient point, and then at the ways in which that point has exercised such liberal proponents as Ronald Dworkin, Rawls, and Macpherson. The policies in question come out of the democratic commitment to liberation. In this endeavor, liberal democratic policy is often unwittingly and perhaps inevitably the accomplice in the dissolution of the traditions used to encourage a vigorous realization of freedom. To make divorces, abortions, and entry into the labor market easy, to strike down residency requirements, and to protect pornography is of course to withdraw formal social support from the traditional family, from the reverence for emerging human life, from rooted communal living, and from the view that there are privileged and sacred ways of expressing love. To be sure, when such traditional goods are in jeopardy they cannot be secured by civil and criminal law. The law can conform to matters of ultimate concern or morality only when there is something like unanimity. There are probably more shared views on morality in this country than we realize.23 But to make a controversial moral point prevail through the law as conservatives intend to is to compromise the point. The discourse that can do justice to such matters is deictic. It can never exact assent apodeictically though it can work toward consensus in a principled way. If one skips this task and reaches for the cogency of the law or the Constitution, one suggests in effect that the point in question lacks genuine authority.24 Here lies the kernel of truth in Ronald Dworkin’s version and advocacy of liberalism. The political forum cannot deal with matters of ultimate significance straightforwardly through political decisions. The forum must be kept open. But openness is not emptiness.

  Conservatives are correct, I believe, in their attempt to draw matters of ultimate concern into the universe of political discourse. But, as suggested, they tend to short-circuit the discursive transaction of such problems. What is worse,
as a rule they are inconsistent in their policies. The traditional good they seek to secure through civil and criminal legislation they undermine through economic legislation. It is through the latter that democracies are given substance, and in this regard conservatives and liberals alike have fallen prey to the irony of technology. Both are committed to a policy of economic growth in excess of the increase in population. Though they differ in the ways in which they want to distribute the fruits of economic growth, both factions understand such growth as an increase in productivity which yields more consumer goods. Improved productivity, as we shall see, entails the degradation of work, and greater consumption leads to more distraction. Thus in an advanced industrial country, a policy of economic growth promotes mindless labor and mindless leisure. The resulting climate is not hospitable to the traditional values of the conservatives. This is the predicament of the conservatives. Nor is such a climate favorable to “human development in its richest diversity.” It produces a wealth of different commodities. But underneath this superficial variety, there is a rigid and narrow pattern in which people take up with the world. This is the liberal predicament.

  These considerations suggest illustrations of the point that, when we promote a just society along liberal democratic lines, we also advance the technological society and its specific and dubious notion of the good life. But it seems impossible for liberal democratic theorists to acknowledge the essential continuity between the just and the good society and to rethink both justice and goodness in light of this affinity. Thus Ronald Dworkin, who has given such a precise account of the presently dominant version of liberalism, defends this version against all objections save one: “that it denies to political society its highest function and ultimate justification, which is that society must help its members to achieve what is in fact good.”25 Dworkin acknowledges the force of the objection but believes that on this issue “reasonable and moral men will disagree.”26 In this remark there lies at least a suggestion that the value neutrality that supposedly is required by the underlying “constitutive political morality” of liberalism infects and dissolves its fundament. Dworkin admits that the fundament has one objectionable feature: it occludes public discourse about the good life. It does so by design at the level of “political decisions.” It need not do so, even by liberal standards, at the fundamental level where the constitutive political morality of liberalism is articulated. The subject of political morality is after all eo ipso within the discourse about the good life. But such fundamental discourse, so Dworkin suggests, will remain inconclusive by the standards of reason and morality, and hence the liberal political morality is really no more fundamental and constitutive than the value neutrality which follows from it at the level of political decisions. Dworkin believes that, at any rate, the problems that are “fundamental for political theory” are to be raised “in moral philosophy and in the philosophy of mind.”27 I would agree that as long as fundamental problems are so located their discussion will remain inconclusive.28 If the fundament of the social order can be discovered, it will be through the examination not of minds and morals but of the concrete and typical ways in which people take up with their world.

  Dworkin sees clearly that moral neutrality is too weak a foundation for a just society.29 On the other hand, an insightful and articulate moral commitment to equality is too strong to yield a merely just society and will involve us in the question of what a good society is. Dworkin can keep that question at bay only through vagueness. It besets his appeal to the principle that we owe all persons equal respect. The appeal is forceful when it expresses a concern for people who are deprived and neglected in an obvious way.30 Here the call for equal respect is consonant with the liberating promise of technology. I agree with Dworkin that this call badly needs to be heard in this country and that this necessity is an indictment of our policies. On the other hand, of all the fellow citizens to whom he wants us to extend equal respect, most are not in a situation of need but in one of distracting and debilitating affluence. These are the people who have been overtaken by the irony of technology. What does it mean to treat someone so situated with respect? Must it not mean that respect takes the form of distress and of a concern to invite these people to consider their deeper and fuller aspirations? But this is the question the liberal school is unwilling to face. Respect must decay to indifference. Dworkin avoids this conclusion through his vague and distant view of the technological society. From that viewpoint it may appear as though our central social concern ought to be the extension and completion of the truly liberating phase of technology. But technology in many respects has passed this stage. When Dworkin counters moral neutrality explicitly by volunteering a liberal commitment to the good society, vagueness settles on the features of such a society or, when concrete features of a cultural sort are envisioned, their effects are kept bland and uncontroversial.31

  The problem of the good life is irrepressible once the question of justice is fully opened up, and we can see how this problem comes to the fore at various levels and in different contexts. But might it not be possible to draw a principled and appropriate line between justice and goodness if we see this task clearly and approach it with both rigor and circumspection? This is one of the challenges John Rawls tries to meet in his celebrated theory of justice.32 The line can be drawn in Rawls’s terms if we can specify a fair arrangement of the primary social goods which does not favor a particular notion of the good life. The primary social goods are rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, income and wealth, and self-respect. Evidently some conception of goodness is at work here. Rawls acknowledges this but also believes that the goodness here invoked is general and uncontroversial, “thin” as he says.33 That view has been challenged from many sides.34 The major vehicle of these challenges is the counterexample. One takes a hypothetical kind of a legitimately good life and shows that Rawls’s just society fails to be neutral toward that sort of life. I think these charges are in general both devastating and indecisive. They are devastating in the sense that Rawls’s argument has strongly formal, even deductive, pretensions.35 And if one can show that Rawls’s premises yield the wrong conclusions, that demonstration should signal the defeat of Rawls’s endeavor. But in addition to its formal guise, Rawls’s theory has a richness of insight and of contemporary relevance which allows it to survive formal defeats. Consequently, more helpful light falls on Rawls’s enterprise when we confront it, not with hypothetical and formally sketched counterexamples, but with the situation that exists, i.e., with the technological society and its distinctive pattern. This I want to do critically here and more constructively in various chapters of Part 3, and in either instance I hope I will be forgiven for using a great book as a mere foil.

  We may begin by asking how Rawls responds to the charge that his theory of justice is unfair to certain conceptions of the good life. He could raise the generality of his theory and designate justice as pertaining to those “things which it is supposed a rational man wants whatever else he wants.”36 But one might rightly wonder what such things would be or even whether there can be such things. The reply is that these things consist of the primary social goods. One could still be puzzled as to the nature of primary social goods, and Rawls would then present the standard list given above. Can one now in good conscience profess to have a concept of the subject of justice which is sufficiently specific and clear to serve as a framework for the choice of principles of justice? As Rawls notes, liberties and rights are more easily defined than social and economic arrangements.37 But what if one persists in wanting to know, e.g., what the opportunities are that Rawls wants to be secured in a just and equal manner?38 Rawls answers this question implicitly at best and in roughly two ways.39 Opportunities in one sense are universally shared social or economic structures so basic as not to prejudge the question of the good life. In another sense, opportunities consist in the availability of such a variety of ways of life that no reasonable variant is precluded. But both senses,
I want to argue, are conceived technologically or they are incoherent.

  First we must recognize that the question of whether there can be largely value-neutral opportunities does not admit of a helpful general answer since it is just generality which occludes the decisive issues. Turning then to opportunities in the sense of basic structures, we may think of these among others as the economic infrastructure, the systems of transportation, utilities, and communication. Consider a system of roads and highways or a telephone and television network and assume them to be equally available to all. Surely they do not tell people when or where to travel, whom to call, or what to watch. On the other hand, a mountain valley that has been split by a road is no longer a place for solitary hiking. A perfect telephone system would suffocate the art of correspondence. And television at the least discourages municipal theaters and symphonies. We can see here the outlines of the technological pattern. Basic social and economic structures can be indifferent only as to the choice of commodities; but they are far from neutral as to the choice of engagement with things versus consumption of commodities.40

  Rawls might reply that the social arrangements are more or less just as long as anyone is free and able to hike someplace, write letters, or stage plays with like-minded people. If there is sufficient opportunity for a variety of life-styles, there cannot be a complaint of injustice. And we can in fact, so it seems, have voluntary associations for engagement with things within the liberally just society. But as Rawls himself recognizes, “The social system shapes the desires and aspirations of its members; it determines in large part the kind of persons they want to be as well as the kind of persons they are.”41 Still, let us assume that groups of people have a clear view of the present technological structure of society and a strong commitment to various kinds of engagement with things. Let them act on their convictions by forming voluntary associations as Rawls suggests.42 Clearly, however, the deeper the commitment and the more determined the action, the more radically such an association will want to transform its immediate social and even physical setting. Failure to do so would amount to complicity with a kind of life that the association rejects. To the degree of their decisiveness these groups will attenuate the bonds with the larger community and so the subject of justice. At the limit we would have various societies where once there was one, and each would have wedded justice to a definite vision of the good life. To be sure, between technological homogeneity and sectarian fragmentation there is a just and fruitful middle ground. Much is to be learned from Rawls in locating it. But it cannot be found without the recognition that justice is strongly interwoven with goodness.