Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry

by Albert Borgmann

  Almost anybody can learn to use them, and for his own purpose. They use cheap materials. People can take them or leave them as they wish. They are not easily controlled by third parties.40

  To require that tools, whenever possible, meet these conditions seems like a reasonable demand, and they certainly serve Illich well in his slashing attacks on the powers that be. Yet we may lead the disengaged and distracted life that is typical of advanced technology in the midst of conviviality as defined by Illich. The electronic and video marvels that we are being promised meet his definition of conviviality. Illich tries to secure the good life by establishing boundaries that would keep dehumanizing technology outside and allow the good life to flourish within. But such limits are always drawn too narrowly and too broadly at once. Illich, to give another example, would restore a more human scale to our dwelling and traveling by restricting all speeds to that of a bicycle, 15 mph, I suppose.41 But what if technology gives us human-powered vehicles that allow us to move at 50 mph?42 Would not conviviality have to accept the present patterns of commuting and population distribution?

  Technology will be appropriated, it seems to me, not when it is enclosed in boundaries but when it is related to a center. Schumacher stresses that we can be whole only if we are “truly in touch with the centre.”43 But this center is abstractly conceived. To see and to attain it we must, so Schumacher suggests, accept three “metaphysical ideas”: the “Levels of Being” or “Grades of Significance,” the existence of problems that contain opposing forces and can only be solved through love, and the validity of the traditional ethical norms as defined by the virtues.44 The forces around which Johnson proposes to center our lives are more concrete. He speaks warmly of “the authentic pleasures available in our society.”

  Some are unique to the affluent society—the education, the books, the good communications, the opportunity to travel, and the extraordinary experiences possible in our fluid, individualistic society. Others are more universal—family, friends, eating, drinking, working, playing in the park, or walking down the avenue. Whatever one’s tastes, there are pleasures to be enjoyed and cultivated.45

  Such a passage, however, inspires as much melancholy as hope. All these things and practices are so easily and unnoticeably subverted by technology. Johnson speaks far more univocally of the good life when he portrays village life.

  The villagers know their small world intimately—its rhythms, its moods, its natural history, and all its human occupants. The peasant works on the land or at a trade that his father and grandfather did before him; roots have not been allowed to wither, or ties to fragment. The beauty to be perceived in the village world is of the changing seasons, the ripening crops, children playing, and a mother nursing her infant. Peasants have not seen the art of all ages, as we have, but their own folk art grew out of their own experience and is an intrinsic part of it. Pervading everything are religious beliefs that give meaning to their lives, from the great events of birth, marriage, and death to the small objects that have been made sacred.46

  Here surely is an unmistakable counterpart to the technological society. Village life was not invariably so harmonious and benign. It could harbor superstition, oppression, and cruelty.47 As in the case of work, it is not a matter of trying to establish a universal superiority of the pretechnological world but to challenge the technological society which believes itself to be superior to all prior societies by confronting it with prior human accomplishments that were real and genuine if not all that frequent. Even if the challenge is issued fairly, the question remains, How can the challenge be made fruitful and cast into a proposal of reform? When the proposals of appropriate technology are close to our situation, they are ambiguous and fragile; when they are firm and incorruptible, they seem remote from the complexities and liabilities of the present. How can we give our deepest aspirations a voice that is both unmistakable and helpful?

  21

  Deictic Discourse

  The problem of this chapter is how we can hope to reopen the question of the good life. The liberal tradition believes that this issue has been left open and that the opening has been filled with a rich cultural pluralism. Critics of liberalism acknowledge the openness of our culture but find it to be chaotic and desolate. Both parties fail to see that beneath the appearances and parlances of radical openness there is a definite pattern of institutions and procedures and of life. The recognition of this pattern allows us to clear away the misleading overlays of moral discourse in the technological society and to acknowledge the immunity of technology to traditional moral analysis, an immunity that has confused and misled contemporary attempts at social reform.

  Seeing these difficulties clearly, we can hope to speak in a principled and forceful way about the good life when we allow ourselves to be guided by focal things, matters of ultimate concern that are other and greater than ourselves. Such discourse, which I have called deictic throughout, does not strive after cogency since it cannot, nor does it wish to, control its subject matter. But neither is it arbitrary since it is guided by an eminent, publicly accessible, and tangible concern which can be pointed up and explained. The elaboration of deictic speaking, of the attitude it embodies and the force it possesses, its connection with democracy, and its complementary relation to apodeictic and paradeictic explanation—these are the main issues of the present chapter.

  In taking up these topics, we must remember that the only serious discourse which commands wide attention today is political. It talks about the preliminaries of the good life with such obstinacy and with so profound a sentiment of its importance and legitimacy that one may well despair of raising the question of what kind of life these preliminaries are to serve and whether they are serving their purpose at all. To bar the government from action in favor of a particular conception of the good life is of course, as stressed in Chapter 14, the intention of liberal democracy. The liberal democratic theorists did not intend to purge all serious public discourse of a concern with ultimate norms of human conduct. But the result was inevitable. When the only kind of action in which we all join consciously and vigorously is political and if political action must be kept morally neutral or minimal, the universe of serious public discourse will shrink to fit this narrow notion of politics. On the surface at least we are still confident and even proud of the supposed openness and richness that liberalism has bestowed on our lives.

  Yet there is in political reflection, if not action, a recognition that the moral vacuity at the center of public life is debilitating. We have touched on Habermas’s indictment of this development toward the end of Chapter 14. Roberto Mangabeira Unger uses the term “liberal” to name a system of thought that has become unrivaled in power. At the same time he finds an antinomy in the liberal doctrine between arbitrary desire and objective reason, between subjective values and universal rules, an antinomy that is “fatal to its [the liberal doctrine’s] hope of solving the problems of freedom and public order as those problems are defined by the doctrine itself” and “leads to conflicting, irreconcilable, and equally unsatisfactory theories of society.”1 Alasdair MacIntyre similarly observes the arbitrary, interminable, and unsettlable nature of public argument; and though he calls the crucial event that ushered in this chaos by its more traditional name of “Enlightenment,” he recognizes that liberalism as defined by Dworkin identifies “a stance characteristic not just of liberalism, but of modernity.”2 Like Unger he sees a conflict between arbitrary individualism and rational organization.3 Thus to the more conventional view which sees in liberalism or the Enlightenment the liberation from the dogmatism and oppression of the dark Middle Ages there is counterposed the view of the catastrophe of liberalism which overturns the traditional order without being able to institute a new one.

  What both views have in common is the belief that the moral situation of the liberal democracies is open, either positively in providing rich opportunities of self-development or negatively in being chaotic. Of these the latter view
is more obviously incomplete since it is at odds with the stability and comfort that characterize modern life in its most typical form, in the advanced industrial societies of Scandinavia, Western Europe, and the broad middle class of North America. Manfred Stanley, as noted in Chapter 16, has theoretically illuminated this evident fact by showing that “the heightened technological rationality in public life” is entirely compatible with “the relativistic domain of multiple, aesthetically rich, and morally directioned private worlds.”4 The “libertarian technicist society” which would arise from the perfection and coordination of these two realms extends, as Stanley points out, a promise of “social stability.”5 Its scandal would not be political, civil, or social when we take these terms in a structural or functional sense; the scandal would be a moral one in a profound and catholic sense. “A libertarian technicist society,” Stanley says, “would presuppose a permanent schizoid dissociation between two kinds of reality.” It thereby would thwart any of the versions of the “persistent hope for progressive redemption from the present” that we find in the classical social theories of the modern period.6 And so the positive view of the moral openness of liberal democracies comes to be seen as a forlorn hope also.

  But in all this hopelessness there is a sign of hope. Since liberal democracy has not in fact left the question of the good life open we have taken a collective position in our actions, though not in our discourse, regarding the good life. We have worked out a definite and distinctive way of life, as shown in Part 2. But to see clearly what hope there is to reopen a conversation about the good life, we must clear away the misleading present overlays of moral discourse on the moral character of our way of life. For clearly there is discourse in the technological arena of an apparently moral sort. It is of two kinds; the first consists of public disputes. They regard, to begin with, the maintenance and expansion of the technological machinery. As in all human endeavors, we find here incidences of ineptness, negligence, corruption, and the like. To identify and remedy such failures we use morally charged terms such as responsibility, honesty, and integrity. But there is at least a good possibility that the technological society might cohere and function by an understanding and acceptance of the device paradigm alone without the foundation of traditional morality. And indeed controversies about “moral” breakdowns usually come to be conceived as examinations of technical failures and end in attempts to devise mechanisms that will prevent such failures in the future. Further, there are open questions about the most efficient ways of securing resources or delivering the fruits of technology. And there too we invoke morally tinged concepts such as a prudence, dedication, prejudice, and cowardice to promote or discredit a particular technological policy. But again the paradigm of technology itself sets the standards by which such problems are solved, at least in the long run. Then there are struggles about the global and national distribution of the benefits of technology. The goal is clear of course; one seeks a maximum share of commodities. And the determining force is mostly raw power. The picture is complicated by the shifting alliances that the parties enter into and which are often promoted under moral labels. But what makes such an alliance prosper or shatter is its success or failure in procuring commodities.

  There is, however, another complication of truly moral character, and that is the influence of the ideals of democracy or religion. There is at times in the name of liberty, equality, justice, or charity an effective political movement of a selfless kind. But the discussions of Chapters 14 and 16 have suggested that the force of these moral movements is uncertain at best in their effects. What is more troubling is the nature of their effect which is to admit more people to the blessings of technology. It is unquestionably urgent to free people from oppression, famine, disease, and illiteracy. To aid them, however, in the destruction of their culture and heritage in exchange for pointless consumption is a dubious sort of help, though surely it would be morally inconsistent to withhold from others what at least for now we prize ourselves. Finally, conservatives at times inject relatively pure moral issues into public debates, issues such as the death penalty, abortion, or pornography. Though these issues have their moments on the public stage and sometimes result in serious and even fatal harm to individuals, they are met with less and less understanding since they are so foreign to the technological temperament, and if the latter retains its vigor or increases it, those moral matters will be more and more emasculated.

  These discussions seem to be morally chaotic or inconclusive because either they are not at bottom conducted and settled by moral standards at all or they conclude in an arrangement that, regardless of its partly moral genesis, is no longer animated by moral concerns. MacIntyre’s examples of “interminable and unsettlable” moral disagreements are really of this kind.7 Historical contingency aside, these disputes become intelligible, predictable, and resolvable in accord with the pattern of technology. The great exception is the issue of war and armament. The arms policy of the great powers is technological in its attempt to procure safety through technological devices. But it is notably antitechnological in its disregard for standards of efficiency. A policy of disarmament and of global surveillance to insure it would certainly be more paradigmatic of technology. From where, then, does the irrational escalation of arms and insecurity come? Perhaps the vacuity of typical technological life engenders a craving for brute physical supremacy at the collective level.8

  At any rate, the moral import of the public disputes that we have considered is superficial. It is also preliminary because, being concerned with the means and machinery of technology, it leaves entirely unquestioned the moral standing of the end of technology, namely, consumption. The moral discourse that pertains to consumption, however, is pivotal to technology because our allegiance to technology revolves around it. This second kind of moral talk within the confines of technology is largely private, as is consumption, and the semblance of moral inconclusiveness takes on a different complexion. Here we often talk as though our actions were guided by that absolute freedom which is beyond all moral obligation and justification and as though this were itself the new morality.9 To use two examples: say there are tourists who want to shoot an elk from close range inside a fenced game farm. Is that not cruel and lazy? “I say, if they want that head they are entitled to it,” the game farmer replies.10 Say a husband and father in his forties buys a sportscar for himself. Is that not frivolous and immature? “If I can afford it,” the man replies, “I don’t have to justify it to anybody.” But this apparent freedom or arbitrariness is highly structured. It is in one regard merely an ironical and sometimes macabre echo of the liberty and prosperity that technology has promised and procured as the choice among indifferently available commodities. The freedom that we proudly or defiantly flaunt is restricted to the commodity side of our lives, to the inconsequential area of consumption. In another respect, the appeal to sovereign and impenetrable freedom is a ploy to cover up a network of reasons and aspirations which is no less open to insight and judgment than premodern moral situations. Moral examination and evaluation are never conclusive for reasons that will concern us soon. And they attain force only as they respond to concrete cases. Given the mere hints of cases that were provided above, we must conjecture about their ethical texture. But we can reasonably assume that the trophy hunter does not have the time and skill to engage in a real hunt and yet wants to have the prestige and the reminder of wildness that a mounted elk’s head promises to procure. In fact the game farmer cited above prefaces his moral pronouncement by saying: “This is a sporting enough hunt for persons who want to finish out their trophy room and are not capable of a strenuous hunt.”11 Similarly the middle-aged man may be dejected, seeing his children leave his care and his work taking a predictable and mediocre course. He may be attempting to recapture a sense of youth, vigor, and adventure; and so he buys a device that promises to embody those attributes and to bestow them on its owner and driver. It is worth noting that there is a kind of discourse whe
re the cover of the appeal to unconditional self-determination is lifted and the concealed motives are spoken out loud. That happens in the rhetoric of advertisement which expresses and approves for us the technological aspirations that we find both attractive and a little dubious. This frankness gives advertisement its forward flavor.12

  But it is not only the case that moral issues of some sort are in question when appeals to morally unbounded freedom are made. In light of the analyses of Part 2 above, we can see them fitting into a broader pattern. As already indicated, freedom comes here into play, not just negatively as the force that disburdens me from justification but positively too as the ideal of self-development, the fulfillment of my capacities and aspirations, an ideal of freedom in which the promises of technology and liberal democracy are joined. But the pursuit of this freedom is ironically deflected from its goal when self-realization is specified as consumption. It was argued in Chapter 18 that consumption procures a momentary and quickly fading sense of prosperity and power and overall leads to the atrophy of our capacities and the impoverishment of our lives. In Chapters 15 and 18 it was suggested that we have a vanishing or perhaps dawning sense of how tenuous and futile our allegiance to consumption is. This sense, joined with our reluctance to act on it, I have called complicity. I believe that what shows itself in the vacuity or arbitrariness of most private moral discourse is neither ethical pluralism nor ethical chaos but complicity with technology.