Yet even when technology is explicitly envisaged as a social problem and in its connection with democracy, technology has a tendency to deflect a searching examination. Before we turn to the concrete circumstances of this elusiveness, we should take note of its theoretical reflections. They can be seen in the considerations of Macpherson and of Jürgen Habermas.
Macpherson takes a much more critical view of present liberal democracy and therefore penetrates more nearly the veil that conceals the technological specification of democracy. His call for a participatory democracy implicitly aims at the disengagement that technology has imported into democracy. And he is closer to the mark yet in formulating as the first prerequisite for the emergence of participation “a change of people’s consciousness (or unconsciousness), from seeing themselves and acting as essentially consumers to seeing themselves and acting as exerters and enjoyers of the exertion and development of their own capacities.”43 “The other prerequisite,” he says, “is a great reduction of the present social and economic inequality. . . .”44 But when he looks about for factors that may fulfill the prerequisites and advance participatory democracy, he finds them in people’s dissatisfaction with what economists would call the externalities of technology, the deterioration of the environment, the depletion of resources, unemployment, urban decay, the inability to manage economic growth.45 These are shortcomings by the technological standards themselves. They are failures of procurement and availability and so within the framework of technology. We will see in subsequent chapters that these problems are solvable within technology and, if solved, would only strengthen the rule of technology. Preliminary evidence that Macpherson’s factors of discontent are challenges within and not to the ruling paradigm can be seen in the fact that these problems are fully at the center and attention of public discourse.
Macpherson’s positive sketch proposes to revive participatory democracy along formal lines, through new forms of gathering, organizing, debating, voting, delegating, and so forth. But if the substance of the good life remains technologically or even ambiguously defined, reform will be impossible or inconsequential.46 The direction of school systems in this country is often quite participatory in form. But when one considers voter turnout, composition of school boards, and the role of experts, one will find that the school system is not much more politically vibrant and vigorous than the telephone system. The substance of the good life must be taken into consideration if radical political reform is to become a live option. To illustrate the difficulty of inaugurating a principled discussion of the good life, let me in conclusion of this chapter turn to some of Jürgen Habermas’s reflections on technology and the good life.
Habermas recognizes that the questions of ethics in regard to the social order are not controversial but eliminated and repressed.47 This state of affairs, he contends, can best be explained through the distinction of work and interaction. The distinction also is said to help us understand the fundamental change in temperament that distinguishes our time from all others and that the classical sociologists have tried to capture in various pairs of contrasting terms.48 “By ‘work’ or purposive-rational action,” Habermas says, “I understand either instrumental action or rational choice or their conjunction.”49 Interaction, on the other hand, is defined as “communicative action, symbolic interaction. It is governed by binding consensual norms, which define reciprocal expectations about behavior and which must be understood and recognized by at least two acting subjects.”50 In traditional societies, interaction is superior to work and keeps the productive activities of work within bounds.51 In the bourgeois revolution, work emancipated itself from interaction. Economic productivity expanded and was legitimated by the market ideology, i.e., the principle of fair exchange. Since work is purposive-rational action, the expansion of work at the expense of interaction is well called rationalization. It proceeds from below by transforming traditional structures such as labor, trade, and transportation. It proceeds from above when the traditional world views are criticized by the standards of purposive rationality. This critique attempts to unmask traditions as ideologies and thereby hides and makes inaccessible its own ideological character.52 It allies itself with the modern sciences not only because they provide a model of rational critique but because their methodology “reflects the transcendental viewpoint of possible technological control.”53 This orientation has issued in “the scientization of technology” the explanation and promotion of technological processes on a scientific basis.54 The drive toward total rationalization Habermas calls the technocratic intention which finally establishes itself as the technocratic consciousness.55 This domination can be broken and a genuine discussion “about the goals of life activity and conduct” can be initiated only if the conditions for the ideal speech situation can be approximated.56 “Communicative competence” is Habermas’s term for the set of those conditions that includes unrestrained discussion, significant rapport despite the inviolable distance between the partners of communication, and full complementarity of expectations, including exclusion of unilaterally constraining norms.57
Let us begin our critical remarks with a consideration of communicative competence and work our way back from there. Richard J. Bernstein has pointed out that one may take the outline of communicative competence as a set of conditions necessary for any communication. But in that case the move from necessity to sufficiency of conditions can bring us to all kinds of actual communication, deceptive, self-deceptive, or distorted. And so communicative competence has little guiding force.58 If, on the other hand; we think of communicative competence as an ideal of communication that, when approximated, guarantees the establishment of discursively redeemed, unconstrained consensual norms, the ideal is abstract and pale to the point of impotence.59 One seed of this dilemma lies in the distinction between work and interaction, which is reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s between labor and action and suffers from similar deficiencies.60 To posit “subsystems of purposive-rational action,” i.e., relatively autonomous elements of work within the normative framework of interaction, is to read the notion of mere means, which is typical of modern technology, back into pretechnological settings.61 To be sure, traditional cultures had focal things and practices where norms were eminently embodied and enacted.62 Accordingly there were prosaic and utilitarian matters peripheral to the focal ones. But what an immersion in the concrete details of a traditional setting impresses on one is the close texture of means and ends, of the ferial and the festal, of productive and social relations. An adumbration of such a fabric was given in Chapter 9.
It is the failure to examine incisively the radically novel means-character of modern technology that flaws Habermas’s investigations and proposals. He senses the idiosyncrasy of rationalization, i.e., of the emancipation of work from interaction, but he provides no sufficiently radical analysis. This appears by the way when Habermas discusses rationalization from below, i.e., the subordination of traditional structures to standards of work. These structures include labor, trade, transportation, and institutions of private law. But if it is true that in traditional settings there were always and already subsystems of work, the structures just mentioned must have been examples. And if labor or trade, for instance, already constituted subsystems of purposive-rational action, there was no need to subordinate them “to conditions of instrumental or strategic rationality.”63 Rationalization from below would have been unnecessary and impossible as a fundamental and noteworthy restructuring. But we know that traditional labor and trade were indeed thoroughly transformed in the course of technology. Habermas is right that something like rationalization from below took place: But his notion of work and its distinction from interaction are unable to capture precisely the nature of this change.
Habermas’s lack of incisiveness is more notable in the central points of his diagnosis and therapy. In light of Habermas’s distinction, the course of modern technology is marked by the escape of instrumental and strategic rationality from the gu
idance of norms. Why do not means without ends run wild and end in disaster? According to Habermas the inclination of emancipated work toward fatal crises is checked by state intervention in social and economic affairs, and this leads to a repoliticizing of the institutional framework of society.64 But the corrective measures, Habermas contends, do not spring from a positive vision of the good society; they rather constitute “reactive crisis avoidance,” i.e., a series of ad hoc measures which patch up ever new and unexpected cracks in the system.65 But in whose interest is it to keep the system intact? Habermas recognizes it is impossible in an advanced technological society to delimit a class in the strict sense that has a dominant position based on the exploitation of other classes.66 Yet he claims that latent class antagonisms persist.67 And his continued use of the term “capitalism” suggests that there remains a class of capitalists. The notion of the technocratic consciousness implies the same thing. There must be a class of people who do the kratéin, the dominating, in or through technology.
Habermas thus stakes out a position precariously poised between the more orthodox Marxist positions we touched on in Chapter 13 and the realization that underlying the standard distinctions of both the Marxists and the liberal democratic theorists there is an elastic structure or pattern which bestows coherence on the shifting and occasionally disparate surface features in the economics and politics of technologically advanced democracies, a structure, moreover, that shields and removes itself from public scrutiny. And occasionally Habermas seems to imply that this basic structure commands the consent of all. The eclipse of interaction by work, he says, “is paralleled subjectively by the disappearance of the difference between purposive-rational action and interaction from the consciousness not only of the sciences of man, but of men themselves. The concealment of this difference proves the ideological power of the technocratic consciousness.”68 But even here we find a telling ambiguity. Is “the consciousness of men” the technocratic consciousness itself, or is it in its obtuseness the consequence of domination by a class of technocrats?
The resolution of this ambiguity would require an explication of the underlying structure or pattern of the technological democracies. As said before, however, Habermas is deflected from these tasks by his uncritical notion of work, understood essentially as instrumental action, This finally makes his proposals converge with those of the liberal democratic positions. Technology is in the end and after all acceptable as rationalization if it is taken as a mere tool and subordinated to a higher kind of rationalization, namely, the institution of communicative competence.69 But the latter is merely the iteration of tool procurement at a more sublime level, very much like Macpherson’s reform proposal.70 Accordingly, Habermas fills the gap as regards the end to which those means are to be put with the conjunction of the liberal democratic maxim of equal self-realization and the technological promise of liberation and enrichment.71 To be sure, there is the more systematic claim that communicative competence will of itself give rise to genuine consensual norms for the good life. But given the experiences that we all have had with “unrestrained discussions,” that claim would be altogether unconvincing without the background of the promises of technology and democracy.72
It appears then that we can make room for the discussion of the good life only if we have before us the pattern of technology and the peculiar way in which, under the semblance of a mere tool, it preforms our discourse and agenda. Having seen the complex and various ways in which the technological paradigm informs our dominant theories of the social order, we must now attend to the concrete and empirical circumstances of the rule of technology.
15
The Rule of Technology
The question this chapter poses is how people have in fact worked out their relationship to technology. Concrete and detailed answers have been given in the chapters that introduced the device paradigm and the foreground of life that is distilled by the pattern of technology. Although such investigations are indispensable to opening up new perspectives, they have an unavoidable appearance of anecdote and conjecture. For this reason, and also to get beyond the diffractions that the pattern of technology undergoes in the prevailing social theory and discourse, we must consider what empirical findings there are on this point. As suggested before, however, the data of the social sciences are not by themselves helpful. They are precise and ambiguous at the same time. We may think of them as objective points on the social map which are compatible with many, though not all, encompassing outlines of the character of society. In trying to sketch this fuller picture we must allow ourselves to be guided by intuition and firsthand experience. The attempt to obviate the need for such guidance by assembling a sufficient number of data points would be futile. Social reality is too rich and complex to be captured in this way.
Before we turn to the empirical findings, we must therefore construct a linkage between the intuitive and theoretical considerations developed so far and the results of polls and questionnaires on people’s attitude toward technology. A helpful link to this end is the question of responsibility. Is there a clearing in which people can take responsibility for technology? Do they have occasions and forums of choice? And with what degree of awareness do they decide? When one attempts to answer these questions, one has to establish, so it appears from the preceding chapters, a position that escapes the obscurity of the substantive view of technology and overcomes the superficiality of the instrumentalist view. The inadequacy of the substantive and instrumental views becomes apparent in the unsatisfactory and sometimes inconsistent answers that they provide to the question of responsibility. Langdon Winner has put the issue succinctly:
On the one hand we encounter the idea that technological development goes forward virtually of its own inertia, resists any limitation, and has the character of a self-propelling, self-sustaining, ineluctable flow. On the other hand are arguments to the effect that human beings have full, conscious choice in the matter and that they are responsible for choices made at each step in the sequence of change. The irony is that both points of view are entertained simultaneously with little awareness of the contradiction such beliefs contain. There is even a certain pride taken in embracing both positions within a single ideology of technological change.1
Different concepts of technology naturally suggest different notions of freedom and responsibility. The substantive concept implies determinism, the instrumental concept agrees with libertarianism. One might be tempted to approach the question of the rule of technology from the side of freedom and determinism, to ascertain the ethical and metaphysical groundwork on which to erect a theory of technology, But a glance at the literature shows that one cannot fall back on a universally accepted answer to this question, and none can be worked out here. Enough indications, however, have been given in earlier chapters to afford orientation vis-à-vis freedom and determinism. The natural sciences reveal reality to be thoroughly lawful. Within the boundaries of lawfulness, things and events stand out in unique ways which can be scientifically acknowledged and explicated but not (without regress) predicted or warranted. To stand out in such ways is to be significant. Human beings stand out in a privileged way because they are both significant and capable of significance, i.e., they can grasp significance and make it prevail more fully. This capacity for significance is where human freedom should be located and grounded. Again, we cannot expound here how such a notion of freedom is related to traditional notions.2 But we can point out how this view informs and advances the present inquiry. It is guided by a definite significance, or, as it was expressed on earlier occasions, by a substantive concern. This is a very general answer, given that “significance” is nothing but the highest generic term for things and practices that stand out in their own right. What specifically are those things and practices? A less general answer was given when it was said that the present critique of technology is moved by a concern for those things and practices that used to and still can engage and grace us in their own right and which
are now threatened by technology. One must go further in the description of those things and practices, and we will do so in Part 3.
Regarding the rule of technology, the foregoing remarks already imply the decisive question; and it can be put explicitly this way: How are people positioned between their engagement with things and the approach to reality which is patterned by technology? This question is answered, first, by delineating the scope of action and the occasions of decision where people work out their position in relation to engagement and technology. And, second, the answer requires reflection on the kind of awareness with which people work out their lives.
Turning first to the question of the leeway that people have in working out their technological existence, there is a scope of action about technology in that there are even today pretechnological and metatechnological practices of engagement. This scope of action in which people exercise their responsibility becomes concrete in an occasion of decision. The chief obstacle in delimiting such occasions stems from the fact that technology is seldom offered as a choice, i.e., as a way of life that we are asked to prefer over others, but is promoted as a basis for choices. It is so advanced in political or properly technological terms. Ronald Dworkin has provided the political formulation, and in light of it a decision against technology or, more accurately, against technologically specified democracy is one against freedom simply and for prejudice, paternalism, or totalitarianism. The properly technological version is given as the promise of liberation and enrichment, and to refuse the promise would be to choose confinement, misery, and poverty. The point can be made differently. Enlightened and confident proponents of technology do not meet their critics with antagonism and reproof but with sympathy and resourcefulness. They will invite the dissenters to explain what they find deficient or lacking in the present scheme of things, and the technologists will agree with their adversaries that these things should and someday will be made available. The procurement of availability seems to deflect and co-opt all criticism. Or in terms of the previous considerations, technology has the tendency to disappear from the occasion of decision by insinuating itself as the basis of the occasion. When modern men and women today make their decisions as voters or consumers, technology, as a rule, has provided the fundaments of their choices.
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