Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry
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Although Bell mentions hedonism in an aside and is properly skeptical of educational advances by way of electronics, the common optimism that flows from a consideration of technological machinery to cover all of technology rises to the surface.34 Bell speaks of
a rapidly increasing population, more literate and more educated, living in a vastly enlarged world that is now tied together, almost in real time, by cable, telephone and international satellite, whose inhabitants are made aware of each other by the vivid pictorial imagery of television, and that has at its disposal large data banks of computerized information.35
He sees “the entire nation (if not large parts of the world)” becoming psychologically (not geographically) urbanized, adopting “a highly interactive, heavily mobile, culturally and politically attentive mode” of life.36 Finally he suggests, if uncertainly, that information and theoretical knowledge, procured electronically, represent “turning points in modern history.”37 And he concludes his study with the traditional promise of technology:
But the nature of modern technology frees location from resource site and opens the way to alternative modes of achieving individuality and variety within a vastly increased output of goods. This is the promise—the fateful question is whether that promise will be realized.38
I have tried to show that we have enough evidence to see that the promise cannot be fulfilled when we straightforwardly accept the setting to which Bell alludes. The technological setting, patterned after the device paradigm, so I have argued, is profoundly connected with the way in which we conduct our lives. I have also urged that the results of the rule of the technological paradigm are distressing in a significant and even decisive respect. If there is a way of recovering the promise of technology, it must be one of disentangling the promise from the dominant way in which we have taken up with the world for two centuries now. It must be a way of finding counterforces to technology that are guided by a clear and incisive view of technology and will therefore not be deflected or co-opted by technology. At the same time such counterforces must be able to respect the legitimacy of the promise and to guard the indispensable and admirable accomplishments of technology. To delineate these counterforces is the task of the third part of this study.
PART 3
The Reform of Technology
Focal things and practices can empower us to propose and perhaps to enact a reform of technology. These things and practices are therefore at the center of Part 3 which leads up to the focal concerns and then derives measures of reform from them. The first step is to connect the concern to reform with the openings for reform that have appeared in Part 2. This is the task of Chapter 20. Its major point is that a fruitful reform of technology must be one of the device paradigm and cannot allow itself to be confined within the framework of technology. And to undertake a consequential reform, one must find an appropriate kind of discourse. It must be a speaking that avoids the liabilities of those moral arguments and attempts at social reform that are patterned by technology. Instead it must be guided by a matter of final concern. Chapter 21 considers these difficulties and seeks to explain the proper discourse of reform, namely, deictic discourse, whose necessity has been stressed throughout this study.
Deictic discourse is about something that addresses us in its own right and constitutes a center by which we can orient ourselves. On this continent, nature in its pristine state is the clearest and most eminent instance of such a thing. In Chapter 22 I try to show how the wilderness has inspired deictic discourse and how, when we speak about the wilderness appropriately, we can say that it constitutes a focal concern and a fruitful counterforce to technology. In Chapter 23 I go on to develop the notion of a focal thing more generally in an effort to point out that focal concerns can prosper in the daily context of technology. But they can do so only if we grant them an assured place through a focal practice. I take running and the culture of the table as instances of such a practice. In Chapter 24 I pause to consider difficulties with focal concerns and alternatives to them. Having disposed of these problems more or less, I proceed to spell out concrete measures of reform for the personal and private realm, for the tradition of excellence, and for the family.
The final and most recalcitrant problem for a reform of technology out of a focal concern is the question whether we can extend the reform constructively to the national community. This is the problem of Chapter 25. The key difficulty is to recognize that such an extension can only come to pass through a philosophically informed restructuring of the economy. More precisely, it is a matter of recognizing and developing tendencies that are assuming shape even now. They announce themselves in the distinctions between the standard of living and the quality of life, between the centralized and highly automated industry on the one side and the local, labor-intensive economy on the other. The philosophy of technology allows us to see these and related issues in a principled and hopeful way. Such a hopeful vision can be joined with the initial hope of the promise of technology. It helps us to see how the early hopes can be clarified and recovered. Those are the reflections of Chapter 26, and they bring the present essay to its conclusion.
20
The Possibilities of Reform
In turning from the analysis of technology to proposals of reform, we must first establish a fruitful connection between these two parts of our essay. We must draw on the insights gained from the examination of technology without acting as though with the examination in hand the reform were a matter of course. Accordingly the first chapter of the third part begins by surveying those points of Part 2 where we have come upon the problem of reform. Among the possibilities for reform that do emerge, the most promising is the suggestion that a signal and orienting event or practice might arise from within technology and answer our misgivings about technology in an intrinsically technological manner. Finding this promise unwarranted at least for now, we can clarify the task at hand by distinguishing reforms within the paradigm of technology from reforms of the paradigm. The distinction is tested and elaborated against further reform proposals, among them the program of appropriate technology.
To begin then, it is not difficult to obtain agreement that some kind of reform of technology is to be wished for. Problems and pains are too widespread and obvious to permit complacency. But just as there is much confusion and inconsistency about the character of technology, so there is about the direction of reform. Hence if there is anything to the analysis of the preceding two parts of this study, it must prove itself in principled and appropriate suggestions of reform. Yet, as said before, it would be misleading to speak of the prior parts as the foundations on which a reform proposal can now be erected as though an understanding of the problem and character of technology would entail the basic outline of a reform. It is the other way around. What concerns or distresses one about technology is its tendency to destroy or displace things and practices that grace and orient our lives. It is the concern for these focal things and practices that sharpens one’s vision for the momentous features of technology. So talk about the reform of technology is really the completion and justification of the analysis of technology. Of course the relationship between the critique of technology and one’s ultimate concerns is reciprocal. We are at times diffident or even unaware of our profoundest commitments and more alive to what strikes us as detrimental and degrading in our lives. Following up these injurious tendencies and explicating them can then help us to obtain a clearer and more confident view of what truly and positively matters to us. Still, though the relationship is reciprocal, it remains anchored on the side of our substantive and positive concerns.
Another way of stating the problem of reforming technology is this: The reform proposal must correspond to an analysis of technology that is incisive and principled. If it answers to a superficial analysis, it may well be feasible, but it will remain inconsequential too. If the reform proposal responds to profound misgivings which, however, have not been explicated in a systematic analysis of techno
logy, the suggestions may be ambitious, but they will have no purchase on the deeply entrenched rule of technology and be easily dismissed as utopian. To find a course away from superficiality and utopianism one requires both radicality and circumspection. To serve the latter it may be well to recall the places where we had come upon the reform of technology while analyzing its character. The most persistent and common reform tendency consists naturally in a return, knowing or not, to the founding promise of technology, in a reiteration of the prospect of liberty and prosperity on the basis of advancing scientific insight and of continuing engineering ingenuity. Throughout Part 2 and particularly in Chapters 18 and 19, we have seen both how strongly we still cling to the promise and its restatements and how ironically and inexorably the promise has been and likely will be subverted as long as the pattern of its implementation remains implicit and unchallenged.
It remains so, as appeared in Chapter 13, when we cast our misgivings about technology in the form of “raising the value question.” Since in the common view technology is seen as an assembly of mere means and since values are taken as general standards of preference that are to be realized in whatever is the most efficient way, values are in preestablished harmony with technology. The superficial variety of ends that the technological machinery procures engenders the illusion that fundamental decisions are to be made in the technological realm of ends and that a debate on values is the road to those decisions. And though it is not unimportant which technological ends are chosen, they remain commodities one and all. Thus the value debate typically leaves the debilitating division of our lives into mindless labor and distracting consumption unexamined and intact.
Macpherson and Habermas, as seen in Chapter 14, are disturbed by the character of the technological machinery in the broad sense and by the kind of life it fosters. But the instrumental conception of technology survives their misgivings and scrutiny and serves as the pivot of their reform proposals. The latter call for greater equity and efficiency of the machinery and for more participation by the people in its direction. Yet without a trenchant analysis of that machinery and of its bias, people’s allegiance to it cannot be judged. And if it is true, as argued in Chapters 15 and 16, that technology together with its inequities commands as of now the uneasy loyalty of the people, calls for social justice will be ineffective, and proposals for a different kind of government are idle.
In Chapter 11 we did come upon an attempt to grasp the idiosyncrasy of the technological approach to reality and an endeavor to discover in it the basis of a new order. It was the counsel of functionalism to define and realize the functions of the things about us by the principles of science and engineering, and it was the conviction of functionalism that a world so designed would be one of formal beauty, of vigor and honesty. But that program failed to realize the instability of the concept “function.” Since the function of something, a house or a chair, was thought to be something other and less than the traditional thing in the fullness of its features, how was the function to be fixed? The theorists of functionalism did not see that the reduction of things to commodities that had been going on for more than a century constituted a deeply ingrained answer to this question, and, since they too had implicitly accepted the answer, they overlooked the crucial significance of the question. So functionalism came to be submerged in the mainstream of technology.
And yet perhaps we should not so quickly give up on the initial concern of functionalism, i.e., on the endeavor to find a new order at the heart of technology. Technology, even in a vague, general, and pretheoretical sense, and whether conjoined with science or not, surely stands for what is typical of our time. It is natural and honorable to want to discover greatness in the character of one’s time and to claim that greatness as one’s own. Let us consider two such efforts. The first can be taken as the affirmation of a point that was rejected in Chapter 12. There I said that the technological era, unlike Classical Greece or the Middle Ages, had not brought forth focal things or events, temples or cathedrals, processions or celebrations in which the significance and coherence of life had come to be focused. Perhaps we have not looked far enough. What about the physically, scientifically, and technically imposing objects and enterprises of our time? R. R. Wilson in an essay on “The Humanness of Physics” tells us: “When Ernest Lawrence built his cyclotrons with a dedicated passion he was not that different from Suger, also with a dedicated passion, building the cathedral of St. Denis.”1 Wilson has the applause of the editors of the anthology in which his essay appeared: “One has but to see the Central Laboratory of Fermilab rising cathedral-like from the plains of Illinois to see the aptness of Wilson’s comparison of accelerator builders to the cathedral builders of the thirteenth century.”2 The first launching of the space shuttle provided another occasion for attempts to discover epochal meaning at the center of technology. One writer saw a secular test in the launch: “A people are testing themselves in relation to their heritage. . . . A people are testing their resolve to reach beyond the ordinary and thereby, if history repeats, magnify the human spirit.”3 Others saw in the shuttle “a space-age Taj Mahal that leapt into the sky on twin pillars of impossibly bright yellow and blue flame.” They praised the astronauts’ heroism and “their willingness to trust their lives to an untested craft, a faith in technology and sheer scale that many Americans wish they could recapture.”4
The medieval cathedral was a focal point of its time because it embodied the unified vision of the world that the Medievals had attained from different traditions and through many trials.5 Though the cathedrals were built on and represented intricate theoretical principles that were incomprehensible to lay people, the crucial points of those principles were open to all: the beginning, middle, and end of the history of salvation; the hierarchical order of reality that culminated in divine majesty; and the place one occupied in history and hierarchy. The cathedrals were accessible to all in the practices of construction, extending over many generations, and then in the practices of celebration. Though a simple person would not have a sophisticated understanding of the cathedral as a model of the cosmos and as the embodiment of the City of God, that person’s grasp of its meaning and participation in its presence could still be profound and direct.
The validity of the vision of the world in the high Middle Ages is a question in its own right. I am here concerned to stress some of its formal features: comprehensiveness, unity, accessibility, and enactment. Such features (or their instantiation) are merely necessary conditions for the greatness and validity of a world view and of the focal things and practices in which it comes to be present. But they are conditions that are clearly not met by the accelerator and the space shuttle. What do these objects tell us about the beginning and end of all things? About the order of society and the universe? How can they be comprehended in a profound if unsophisticated manner by ordinary people, and how can such people participate in them firsthand? We may find positive answers to these questions by treating technological objects as symptoms of a certain order; they do certainly not constitute comprehensive and eloquent embodiments of that order. They fail to gather our world and to radiate its central meaning into ordinary life. Are the astronauts truly heroes whose faith in technology we should emulate? “Behind the astronauts,” Ronald Weber answers, “we recognize armies of skilled technicians, and the astronauts themselves seem as interchangeable as the parts of their machines.”6
The claims for the presence of meaning at the heart of technology that we have considered are just suggestions, undeveloped and untested. But there is also a thoughtful and extended argument to the same effect. It is Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.7 The book is not a straightforward philosophical treatise. It has a complex literary structure; it exhibits ingenious pedagogy; it contains striking and profound observations; and the philosophical views that it advances are not always consistent with one another (a virtue, perhaps, in a book of this kind). Still, there is a clear and central thes
is. It is conveyed in the title which recalls Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery.8 The latter book is an account of how Herrigel came to attain enlightenment and peace through the practice and discipline of archery to which he was initiated by a Zen master. Accordingly Pirsig suggests that peace of mind can be found in the midst of technology by carefully attending to a technological object such as a motorcycle. The suggestion is made explicit in the great promise of the book: “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.”9 What makes the pronouncement so attractive is its promise of reconciling nostalgia and technology. It tells us that we can find a world of peace and serenity and be at home not just in God’s pristine and vanishing creation but in the midst of our own creations which surround us daily.
To attain harmony with technology, so Pirsig tells us, we must take up the practice of maintaining and caring for the technological objects about us. This instruction responds in a positive way to the disengagement and disfranchisement that beset typical technological culture. It tells us to penetrate the commodious surfaces of technology, to reassert our mastery over the machinery of technology, and so to become full members of the city of technology. To the counsel of engagement there corresponds an analysis of disengagement. Pirsig sees it in three forms. The first stems from the envelopment in technological devices such as automobiles or planes which insulate us from the character of the land, the rhythm of the day, and the expanses of plains and mountains.10 Disengagement can, second, stem from ignorance and resentment of technology, from the inability to understand how water faucets and motorcycles work, from incompetence in using or repairing such devices, from the frustration and anger in the face of technological failure, and, finally, from a broader rejection of the forbidding and ugly character of the technological landscape.11 There is a third kind of disengagement which debilitates the professed experts of technology—motorcycle mechanics, for instance—when they deal with technological devices in a distracted and offhand way, covering up one blunder with another.12