But lest we lapse into the substantive view of technology, we must persist in the search for points of genuine choice. And again our concept of technology tells us where to look. Genuine choices occur when one is called upon to decide between engagement and disengagement. Such decisions are made in the realm of leisure and consumption, but often they are too close and inconspicuous to become visible in the usual categories of social science. A genuine choice is made when a family decides to eat out more often. The practice of preparing a traditional meal, of setting the table, of saying grace, of conversing and eating thoughtfully is partly surrendered to the machinery of a fast-food chain and partly lost. The meal has been impoverished to ordering and consuming standardized foods. When one moves from city to city in pursuit of professional advancement, the possibility of a rooted kind of life is cut off just as the means for the consumption of freely disposable commodities are increased. When parents decide to give their child a stereo set and receiver instead of a flute and instruction, they help to inundate the child with sounds and fail to encourage fully embodied and disciplined engagement with music. Whenever something is replaced rather than repaired, a piece of history, something that bespeaks and sustains the continuity of life, is then surrendered to the garbage heap; and an opportunity to mark and affirm the stages of life is lost.
People do have choices here. It is to take a condescending view if one excuses families who surrender and betray their traditions by saying that advertisements told them to eat out more often and to refurbish their home according to the dictates of the Sears catalogue. Of course, people no longer have a choice between horses and motorcars or between shoemakers and shoestores. And the residents of a valley may have no choice whether it will continue to be farmed or will be dammed. But it is possible to delimit in people’s lives occasions where in the absence of economic or legal pressures they confront an issue that turns on engagement versus distraction. And through such decisions they confirm or protest the rule of technology.
With what kind of consciousness are such decisions made? To answer this question we must develop and illustrate reflections that were proposed in Chapter 12. When a social paradigm is deeply entrenched, it not only informs most human practices but it also patterns the organizations, institutions, the daily implements, the structures of civilization, and even the ways in which nature and culture are arranged and accessible. All of reality is patterned after the paradigm, and in this sense we can say that the paradigm has acquired an ontological dimension. When applied to technology, this is not to explain the paradigm’s origin but to highlight the extent and intensity of its rule. When the pattern is so firmly established, it also tends to become invisible. There are fewer and fewer contrasts against which it is set off; and meeting us in objective correlatives, it attains an objective and impersonal force. To move within the realm of devices and commodities is then entirely normal, and to exchange the engagement with things for the consumption of commodities is to extend the range of normalcy. This relation to technology is neither one of domination by technology nor one of conscious direction of technology. It is perhaps best called one of implication in technology. Living in an advanced industrial country, one is always and already implicated in technology and so profoundly and extensively that one’s involvement normally remains implicit. The rule of technology is not the reign of a substantive force people would bear with resentment or resistance. Rather technology is the rule today in constituting the inconspicuous pattern by which we normally orient ourselves.3
But whenever the turn from a thing to a commodity or from engagement to diversion is taken, the paradigm by contrast comes into view at least partially, and an occasion of decision opens up. It is of course an empirical question how aware people are of these occasions. An answer by questionnaires is impossible because the pattern of technology is too implicit and complex to be available as a framework for yes-or-no answers, rankings, or even multiple choices among statements. There is empirical evidence that bears on the question, but it is necessarily ambiguous. Still it is not without significance. Some of the ambiguity can be resolved if we first answer the question ourselves as citizens and eyewitnesses of the technological society. We have ourselves taken the step from engagement to diversion; we have had occasion to see others take it and to talk to them about it. What moves one to take the step, so firsthand experience tends to show, is the persistent glamour of the promise of technology; the relief that one looks forward to in having the burden of preparing another meal lifted from one’s shoulders; the hope of a richer engagement with the world on the basis of greater affluence; the desire to provide one’s child with the fullest and easiest means of development; the impatience with things that require constant care and frequent repair; and the wish to affirm one’s existence through the acquisition of property that commands respect. But these sentiments are tinged, especially in retrospect, with feelings of loss, sorrow, and of betrayal, both in the sense that one has betrayed a thing or a tradition to which one owes an essential debt, and in the sense that one has been betrayed in one’s aspirations. Implication in technology then receives an admixture of uneasiness which results in what may be called complicity.4
Such reflections afford a framework for the consideration of empirical findings. There are three surveys on people’s attitudes toward technology that I want to consider. To begin with, it is fair to claim, I believe, that the concept of technology that guides those investigations is a prereflective version of the paradigm that is being worked out here. Two of the surveys ask for agreement or disagreement to the statements “People (today) have become too dependent on machines,” “Technology has made life too complicated,” and “It would be nice if we would stop building so many machines (factories) and go back to nature.”5 Clearly technology is seen here as something more than a neutral instrument and yet not as a force in its own right. It is understood as the comprehensive and dominant way in which reality is being shaped today. The explicit definition in one of the surveys shows an obvious kinship with our notion of technology. It defines technology as “the activity which leads to the widespread availability of products based predominantly on . . . scientific knowledge.”6 The surveys agree that there is “considerable ambivalence” in people’s attitude toward technology, that “the public applies a rather wide range of sometimes contradictory values to its evaluation of technology.”7 On balance the attitude seems favorable. People do not want to go back to nature. On the other hand, such a suggestion reveals the weakness of an unreflective notion of technology and of interviews which, without probing and prompting, elicit answers that are definite in form and inconclusive in content. Is a return to nature the decisive countermove to technology once technology is more thoroughly examined? What is it that people do not want to return to? Caves? Campfires? Hunting and gathering? They do believe that the quality of life is better in the country than in the city and that we have become too dependent on machines. But they do not find that life in the technological society is too complicated.8 They appreciate the comforts of present technology.9 But it appears from other investigations that a general increase in technological comforts, i.e., a rise in the standard of living, does not lead to greater satisfaction or happiness.10 People’s implicit denial that the progress of technology has increased their mental and spiritual well-being is accentuated by their occasional denial that technology has increased their material well-being, a denial clearly at odds with the facts.11 Apparently people cannot let go of the promise of technology and continue to be vitally concerned with a high and rising standard of living.12 They look forward to higher standards of pleasure, comfort, convenience, security, and leisure.13 This trust or hope in technology is particularly strong among the poor and less educated, although these people know that in the past their hope and trust have not been fulfilled.14
It appears then that the popular attitude toward technology as it appears in surveys is compatible with the relation to technology that has been explicated
above as one of implication or complicity, and the inevitable ambiguities of survey findings can be resolved accordingly though other resolutions are no doubt possible. There are also empirical investigations in greater depth that bear on our understanding of the ways in which people have worked out their relation to technology.15 The results are striking, particularly when their research interest and conceptual framework are not aligned with those of our present concern. An example can be found in Sennett and Cobb’s study of The Hidden Injuries of Class, and the phenomenon in question is the move from the ethnic neighborhoods of Boston to the suburbs.16 In the old neighborhoods people live in extended families which provide an engaging social context. But engagement can be experienced as a burden. “What appear as sustaining bonds at one time,” the authors say, “may appear as oppressive chains at another.”17 They show in a number of cases how the departure from extended family and tradition is taken as a liberating move: “It can be said that an American dream of freedom, of alone-ness, has seized hold of these once-isolated people—and left them dissatisfied.”18 The American dream of freedom is a version of the promise of technology. The progress of technology makes a single-family house in the suburbs attainable for at least some workers, and it provides the mobility such residence requires. It liberates a young couple from the “oppressive closeness” of their parents. But when people so disengage themselves, they also become lonely. Similarly, this holds for people who try to escape from the restrictions of a rural setting. Sennett and Cobb report from studies of such migrants: “They came to Los Angeles to work in order to be free, on their own; and they feel lonely.”19
16
Political Engagement and Social Justice
This is the last of the four chapters dealing with the social and political setting of technology. It begins by summarizing and highlighting the character of technological politics and then attempts to secure further if not final conviction for it by showing that it can explain what remain scandals and puzzles to traditional liberal theories: political apathy and the persistence of social injustice. Speaking summarily, then, we can say that technology undergirds our political and social system. The system therefore comfortably survives crises that would be grave threats to it were it capitalist or democratic in the usual senses of these terms. This country has had riots in the big cities, lost a war, had a president resign in disgrace, had inflation approach 20 percent and unemployment rise above 10 percent, and sees its energy basis erode. But the common pace of life has hardly been affected. Political action, when it faces a crisis, finds its orientation in the device paradigm. Politics has become the metadevice of the technological society. Wherever subsystems of technology clash or founder, there is a call for political action to procure ease and safety for the system as a whole. Habermas is correct in seeing that government has become strangely meliorative and remedial.1 It is the agency of last resort and yet barren of positive guidance. This becomes intelligible, however, when we recognize the government as the ultimate servant of technology.
Often the government solves a crisis by creating a government agency that becomes a device for the procurement of a definite social benefit. The citizen participates in the solution of such a crisis as the beneficiary of the social commodity and as the supporter of the governmental machinery. But this relation to the machinery is narrowed to the payment of taxes. Otherwise the machinery has its paradigmatic inaccessibility. The citizens normally do not understand it; and if they did, engagement would still be impossible. There are islands and overlays of social engagement in bureaucracies; there is occasional cordiality, friendship, and grace; and though all this is important in making life for the workers in a bureaucracy and for the recipients of the benefits more bearable, the commodities are finally allocated mechanically. In fact, the intrusion of humane and personal considerations into the central mechanics of a government agency would invite corruption.
Government proper, particularly in its legislative and executive branches, has not entirely taken on the form of a device. Technology constitutes the pattern that is distinctive of our age, but it impresses itself on matters that have a deeply traditional cast and force. It also proceeds on various fronts and at different rates. This gives rise to stresses and crises which, as Habermas has remarked, have the unforeseeable and uncontrollable character of natural catastrophes.2 They are beyond technological control, however, only in their origin. Once they have come into view, they are interpreted as burdens of which we can free ourselves by assigning them to appropriate machineries.
This common and unchallenged framework has an orienting and stabilizing force. It affords a measure of patience and confidence and tolerance for the changes that typically result from technological solutions: increasing disburdenment and the procurement of narrow commodities in place of the complex engagement with things. If there is impatience, it is typically not with the framework within which problems arise and solutions are attempted but with delays or inefficiencies in the procurement of commodities. The overall economic stability has certainly grown with the progress of technology.3 It is a reflection of that increase in stability that the tolerance for disturbances has decreased.
As the machinery of government becomes more sophisticated and powerful, disturbances change from unforeseeable crises to deviations from a standard state which are anticipated in their range if not their details and met through homeostatic adjustments. Society then becomes a nearly closed system. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is the exemplar of such a society, and Manfred Stanley has provided a theoretical outline of it under the heading of “the libertarian technicist society.”4 It appears clearly from Stanley’s sketch that when government becomes a perfect technological device, political disengagement becomes complete as well. Though there is a discernible tendency in this direction, government as of now is still an open system.
It is open in two very different senses. From the technological point of view it is negatively open, open in the sense of being incomplete. From the standpoint of a critique of technology, it is positively open, i.e., it affords an institutional forum of discourse and action where the citizens could preserve and make room for engagement. Members of the technological society are largely impotent vis-à-vis corporations and government agencies when they are called upon to act as consumers and taxpayers. But as citizens they have a scope of action that is undeniably wide and genuine. Again it is to take a condescending view of people’s energy and judgment to blame the politicians, the lobbies, and the media for civic apathy. Complacency bespeaks a general acceptance of the technological society. Acceptance, of course, ranges from quiet resentment to chauvinist affirmation.5 The positive opening within technology, at any rate, lies fallow for the most part. This is clearest in regard to the electoral process where the openness of the social order is most evidently institutionalized. There is some indication that voters in recent years have become more consistent in their decisions.6 But the general political awareness is still deplorably low, and participation in voting has generally been declining since the Second World War. In 1976, only 54 percent of those eligible to vote cast a ballot in the presidential election.7 This is often seen as a failure of technology since it is, supposedly, the poor and uneducated who typically do not vote; and it is seen as a failure of democracy because, so it is said, many are alienated from the political process due to its overpowering size, remoteness, and corruption. But Arthur Hadley has found that the largest single group of nonvoters consists of people who are apathetic out of contentment.8 And while the people who vote represent little more than half of those who are eligible to vote, the people who participate in the shaping of the political issues and in the selection and promotion of the candidates to be voted on constitute only a quarter to a third of the eligible voters.9 Finally when we look at the character of the political activity that does take place in the electoral realm, we must recognize, as was remarked before, that it engenders no searching debates of the good life and the common good and hence
no radical decisions and actions. Beyond the common implication in the technological order there is little sense of civic responsibility. Voters and interest groups typically look at a candidate as a potential supplier of a commodity that is only obtainable politically. And candidates see themselves in large measure as brokers of various and often conflicting interests whose strength is measured by the size of their voting constituency.
I want to stress again that electoral politics still presents the most open forum for collective reform. This would become apparent and decisive if actions taken on the private occasions of decision which were discussed in the last chapter were to gather momentum and lead to the insight that one soon exhausts the private bounds of engagement and that broader and deeper engagement requires that we make room for it collectively, i.e., politically. These prospects will concern us in Part 3. Meanwhile there is a collective scope of action already articulated within the democratic and technological social order. It is bounded on the one side by the promise of liberal democracy which was to secure equal opportunities of self-realization for all. As we have seen in Chapter 14, following Macpherson, the democratic vision had to contend with class divisions and became dominant only when it entered into an uneasily evolving compromise with class divisions. Thus the collective scope of action is on the other side delimited by continuing and obvious inequalities. The technological promise of liberation, enrichment, and conquest has an obvious kinship with the promise of democracy. And Boorstin and others have conflated the two. But it was also argued that the developments of the two promises were quite dissimilar. The promise of technology was acted out and developed into a definite style of life which ironically evacuated the ideals of freedom, wealth, and mastery. The promise of democracy was technologically specified, but even in this version it has not been kept. Availability is not equal for all; some people’s life is clearly more commodious than that of others. This requires explanation since the democratic call of equality for all still has force and is to this day the battle cry of reforms.10 But why have reforms not been more successful when the formal elements of liberal democracy are certainly at hand and when technology, quite apart from having specified the notions of equality and self-development, has provided powerful means of information and communication that should aid the cause of the less privileged?
Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry Page 17