But it is clear that, if technological boredom is to be kept at bay, there must be a kind of enrichment which is unlimited. It is available under the heading of entertainment and comes in the shape of commodities that we ingest, that we eat, see, or hear. These constitute the final and central commodities and the foremost foreground of technology. The procurement of such commodities, of food, shows, and music, is largely free of social and physical limits. Since entertaining commodities are essentially private, greatly attenuated in their physical bulk, and consumed entirely, leaving hardly a residue, crowding is not a problem. Since there are obvious limits to the time and capacity of an individual’s consumption, entertainment respects rather than attacks physical boundaries.57 Interest is maintained not through the extension of the consumption activity but through the novelty and diversity of the entertaining commodities. To be sure, there must be a source that yields ever new and different dishes, stories, and melodies. It is comprised of tradition and culture, news, and staged events. The first segment constitutes a nearly inexhaustible and partially self-augmenting store of events, plots, stories, and settings. History can be mined for television specials and series. Nature can be portrayed to terrify or amuse us. Ethnic dishes can be discovered and packaged. And what was once entertaining can be rediscovered or revived. Seasons in the opera or in football exploit the tradition not only in what they procure but also in the sequence and rhythm of presentation which mimic the cycle of the seasons and the trajectory of epic or epochal events.58
A more finite resource of entertainment consists of the social, moral, and sexual taboos. The unmentionable is said, the strictly private is exhibited, and the forbidden is done. In a pretechnological setting such taboos were compounds of economic and moral restraints. They had to be observed not only to respect divinity and guard a notion of human dignity but also to guard against the collapse of the social order and its economic basis. But when the substructure of a society is transformed according to the device paradigm, social morality can shrink to the acceptance of the paradigm, the willingness to labor and to respect the demands of the technological machinery; and private morality is conflated with the liberty to consume whatever commodities are procured by the machinery. The traditional taboos become available as an exploitable resource since they are not needed for the new order and can be mined with impunity.59 This is perhaps the worst case analysis since, as Hirsch contends, an undergirding social morality of the traditional sort may remain necessary for the functioning of a technological society. But there is at least a tendency toward the worst case; and, whether we will reach its extreme stage or not, there are independent reasons why the exploitation of taboos must eventually run its course. The contravention of taboos is entertaining only to the extent that there are residues of traditional morality which are pleasantly irritated when the taboos are violated. As these moral sensibilities fade, the “immoral” first becomes bizarre, then ridiculous, and finally boring.
It is an empirical question whether the exploitation of taboos is innocuous. The effect that television has on children is a focus of this concern.60 Considering the available evidence, one is struck, I believe, by how relatively slight the indoctrination effect of television is. The truly striking influence that television has on our lives is by way of its displacement effect, by its tendency to prevent an idyllic childhood and a vigorous adolescence, to suffocate conversation, reduce common meals, supersede reading, to crowd out games, walks, and social occasions.61 And this irresistible displacement effect rests in turn on the incredible attractiveness that television possesses and which has rightly, I believe, been likened to addictiveness. The force of television surely derives from a convergence of factors, many of which we have already touched upon. Inasmuch as television is a window on the world, it appears to be the most radical breach in the pretechnological wall of confinement and ignorance. It seems to be an exemplar of liberation and enrichment, and parents often intentionally expose and habituate their children to television, guided by the promise of technology.62 To surrender one’s children to an alien force of education and information is a tendency that runs parallel with the diminishment of authority that parents suffer.63 And both tendencies are reinforced by the technological desire to be disburdened of an annoying task (which child rearing sometimes is) by a dependable machinery that television provides with unequaled perfection; neither naps, books, toys, nor babysitters can pacify a child as steadily and reliably as television.
Thus as children most of us become accustomed to television. But that is possible and can continue into adulthood only because of the central attraction of television. There may be physiological components to its addictiveness. What must be said from the standpoint of technology is that television is eminently in tune with the device paradigm. It is first of all perfectly available as an institution or in its form. It requires no commitment in dress, transportation, or manners. It is equally available in its content. This is favored, though not required, by its form and in harmony with the ruling paradigm. Commodities are designed not to make demands.64 Exertion is given in labor and has no place in leisure, and due to the typically draining character of technological labor, little energy is left for leisure anyway. Technological leisure, Irving Howe said in 1948, just before the age of television, “must provide relief from work monotony without making the return to work too unbearable; it must provide amusement without insight and pleasure without disturbance. . . .”65 More positively, television remains the purest, i.e., the clearest and most attenuated, presentation of the promise of technology. It appears to free us from the fetters of time, space, and ignorance and to lay before us the riches of the world in their most glamorous form. In light of this cosmopolitan brilliance, all local and personal accomplishments must seem crude and homely.66 But not only are large portions and dimensions of the world procured for commodious viewing and so implicitly given commodity character. There is also the explicit and elaborate celebration of the most advanced and paradigmatic foreground of technology which, as shown in Chapter 10, is presented in advertisements. This exhibition of individual commodities is complemented by a more implicit and contextual presentation of commodities in the typically glamorous technological settings of the programs dealing with contemporary matters.67 So seen, television is not so much the result of unfortunate developments in the media industry as it is the inevitable completion of technological culture.
If television is in fact so typical of technological culture and of consumption, the common attitude toward it may explain why technological leisure keeps us both enthralled and unhappy. We know from the work of television critics and from the responses of our friends and from our own that there is little pride in the quality of television programs and less in the habit of extensive viewing. The television viewer’s implication in technology typically takes the form of complicity as defined in Chapter 15. We feel uneasiness about our passivity and guilt and sorrow at the loss of our traditions or alternatives.68 There is a realization that we are letting great things and practices drift into oblivion and that television fails to respond to our best aspirations and fails to engage the fullness of our powers. These impressions generally agree with more systematic findings that show that television is “not rated particularly highly as a general way of spending time, and in fact was evaluated below average compared to other free-time activities.”69 More engaging activities such as “being with friends, helping others, religion, and reading,” sports and games (by men), and cooking (by women) are thought to be more satisfying than television viewing.70
At times an occasion of decision in the sense of Chapter 15 arises for a family regarding television. The breakdown of the set, the unavailability of a channel, or some sort of experimental situation breaks the habit of viewing.71 In such a situation almost all families experience a restoration of vigor and depth. They recall with fondness and a wistful pride life without television. But when the externally induced break comes to an end, a decision must be made
from within the normal framework of orientation. Some people give up television for good or succeed in curtailing it in a principled way (and some do so without an inducement from without). Most people, however, return to regular and extensive television watching.72 Refusing television is normally too much and not enough. Within the framework of the device paradigm, giving up television is excessively demanding. Television embodies too vividly the dream of which we cannot let go. It provides a center for our leisure and an authority for the appreciation of commodities. It is also a palliative that cloaks the vacuity and relaxes the tensions of the technological condition. So it is normally not enough to reject or constrain television. One must recognize and reform the larger pattern if one is to reform its center. Thus we are led to the question of the reform of technology. That question can be raised more helpfully if we first ask how stable the framework is that needs to be changed.
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The Stability of Technology
Some critics believe that an intrinsic instability of technology will force a reform. I begin this last chapter of Part 2 with a discussion of the kinds of instabilities that have been discovered in technology. But I find none of them fatal to the survival or affluence of the technological societies. Technology has the conceptual resources and thus the physical and social ones as well to deal with its crises. What is required to that end is the extension of the technological paradigm to the global scale where the earth itself is seen and treated as a device, namely, as a spaceship. If that technological totalitarianism comes to pass, life will take on an essentially secure, trite, and predictable cast.
But even if my arguments were to convince the critics of technology, they would not satisfy its proponents. The latter would insist that the future of technology is open in an exciting and creative sense. They would point to the marvels and possibilities opened up by the microelectronic revolution. In conclusion of Part 2 I examine both popular and scholarly support for this thesis. It appears, however, that the impact of microelectronics on our lives will be entirely contained within the paradigm of technology.
The trait in the character of technology that concerns us finally, then, is its stability. The lack of stability is frequently a target of the critics of technology. The charges extend from suggestions that the course of technology is precarious to assertions that technology is headed for self-destruction. And the claims of instability vary again as regards the flaw in technology which is seen as the pivot of infirmity. A recurring criticism holds that technology suffers from a profound moral or spiritual defect.1 Technology dehumanizes and alienates us, it is said.2 The consequent moral decay is of course compatible with the outward stability of technology, and that seems to diminish the significance of the spiritual failure. As suggested in the preceding chapter, when the economic and social penalty of indulging in a vice is removed by technology or turned into a benefit, morality becomes a resource that is available and exploitable for entertainment. To urge a straightforward adherence to pretechnological morality as E. F. Schumacher does so earnestly must then appear quaint and ineffective, much as we may admire the moralist. The vices of greed and envy against which Schumacher speaks so often are indistinguishable within a technological setting from the hard-driving and competitive spirit that is widely considered a positive force in the advancement of technology.3 This is not to deny morality but to urge that it must be fundamentally rethought in the technological era. The inappropriate vision of the spiritual criticism of technology is heightened or exposed by the substantive sense of technology it often employs. The liabilities of that concept are then easily taken advantage of by the proponent of technology.4
I believe that most critics of the moral defects of technology sense the weakness of their approach and therefore reach for criticisms of technology which cannot so easily be dismissed and which allege that technology, because it is spiritually defective or in addition to its being so, is overtly unstable or self-destructive.5 Whether the allegations of the tangible defects of technology stem from a deeper concern or not, they must be considered in their own right. The variety of these claims can be ordered by distinguishing the flaws to which they point. The central flaw might be structural, psychological, or physical. Hirsch’s analysis, considered in the preceding chapter, can be taken to assert that commercialization and the futile competition for positional goods are intrinsic and expanding features of advanced industrial production and consumption and, though not themselves immoral, lead through their expansion to the erosion of the indispensable moral basis of the technological society. Staffan B. Linder argues that gains in productivity due to technological advances make labor time more valuable, and the latter in turn raises the value of leisure time. To make the best use of the valuable but inevitably limited leisure time we cram more and more devices, commodities, and consumption into the sphere of leisure, a move that increased production enables us to make. The result is a life that becomes more and more hectic, tense, and unhappy.6 A purely structural flaw of technology would be one that would imperil technology even if humans possessed infinitely robust psyches and the physical environment were infinitely resourceful. But technology is usually said to exhibit structural deficiencies relative to human frailty and ecological limitations. Still, it makes sense to distinguish these flaws since they are often emphasized separately. For Schumacher it is a matter of simple inspection that technology is not only morally objectionable but leads to psychological stresses which threaten to tear the fabric of society.7
Finally, it is a familiar warning that the progress of technology is about to exhaust the capacity of the planet, both as a source of energy and raw materials and as a sink for wastes. At times that technological tendency, particularly in conjunction with other flaws, is thought to be nearly irreversible and quite possibly lethal.8 Even if a cataclysmic catastrophe can be avoided, the physical limits to growth, so it is said and so it appears, will bring to an end the period of technological growth and affluence that began with the Industrial Revolution; and that of course comes to saying that technology itself as a unique form of life will come to an end.9 When this conclusion is reached by writers such as Schumacher, Illich, and Warren Johnson, who also express the gravest reservations about the spiritual soundness of technology, there is an unmistakable note of satisfaction in their claim that technology is finally a self-destructive or at least self-limiting phenomenon.10 These authors are gravely pessimistic about the physical and psychological sustainability of technology; but they are simultaneously optimistic that this spiritually pernicious force will run itself into the ground. This may be called the unwarranted pessimism of the optimists. Closer inspection shows, I believe, that technology at its center is sufficiently resourceful to cope with its supposed flaws.
Technology in the paradigmatic sense has the conceptual resources to deal with its crises, and it therefore obtains the material resources as a matter of course, at least in the long run. In light of the device pattern, the dissatisfaction with the spiritual quality of technology is one with the end of technology. But the end of technology is composed of radically novel objects and activities, of commodities and consumption. The latter must be analyzed and understood before they can be criticized. Criticism is necessary, as I have urged in the chapter above. A critique, however, that immediately applies traditional standards to entities without precedent will unavoidably be deflected from its goal, i.e., from the end to the means. And indeed, the consequent critique of the structural, mental, and material flaws of technology is in the main one of the technological machinery. In Chapter 18, I have suggested how within the framework of the device paradigm one will likely counter and overcome Hirsch’s apprehensions regarding the structure of production and consumption. The mental stresses of a technological culture which Schumacher sees coming to the surface in “symptoms such as crime, drug addiction, vandalism, mental breakdown, rebellion, and so forth,” are either not typical of or not fatal to the central and advanced technological societies, the Scandin
avian or Western European countries or white middle-class America.11 Advanced technology inflicts severe injuries only on people and peoples who live at its periphery, and it remains indifferent to these harms, as said in Chapter 16, unless they become harmful to the central regions of technology.
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