Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry
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Yet cathedrals move us to act. They do so, among other ways, through a kind of discourse that conveys the distinctive and eloquent features of such an edifice. Thus Cardinal Melior’s speech moved the citizens of Chartres to undertake the construction of the Gothic cathedral.24 Their response was not merely declarative but active; to say yes to the cardinal’s address was to commit oneself to action. Active assent, of course, does not always issue in epochal enterprises. It has more prosaic variants. When I say, “Yes, this child is drowning,” I commit myself to saving it. Extending a point of Wittgenstein’s we can say that the criterion of a certain kind of understanding and assent is a certain kind of action.25 And active assent is determined by the thing or practice to which it is given; they must be of considerable or ultimate concern. Thus when someone fails to act in the face of an ultimate concern, we are entitled to say that the person has failed to comprehend it. Incomprehension can stem from incapacity as in the case of retarded or mentally ill people. It can also be due to the lack of background, the experiences that would sensitize a person to a matter of ultimate concern. But it is not only difficult to obtain active assent, it is also difficult to judge it, and for the same reason. Active assent is given to something that is complex, i.e., rich and profound. Thus even when active assent to it is given, its validity can be judged only as the responsive action unfolds; and, responding to something intricate and extended, such action may exfoliate over years or decades. It takes time to see whether the assent to “Do you love me?” is declarative or active.26
Deictic discourse and explanation do not have the cutting edge of paradeictic or paradigmatic explanation either. The latter begins with the delineation of a pattern that can be examined as regards its consistency and precision, and we can then hold the paradigm against the thing to be explained to see if it exhibits the pattern. This allows us to assume the position of a third party which establishes whether there is a match between explanandum and paradigm. But as urged in Chapter 12, the appearance of conclusiveness is misleading since any contestable thing will exhibit many features and instantiate many paradigms. When a paradigm is devised and applied to highlight something decisive in a certain phenomenon, we often allow ourselves to be dazzled by the precision, novelty, and applicability of a paradigm and are so inclined to grant the point in question. But critics only need to catch their breath, outline and employ an alternative paradigm, and so dislodge the first paradigm’s claim to unique or privileged illumination. The question then arises as to what ultimately moved us to bring out the features that concern us, and such a question is answered through a deictic explanation.
Deictic discourse is explanatory in a good and common sense of the word. It illuminates what concerns me and, if successful, provides you with an understanding that will move you to act as I have been moved. It is a general, brute, and perhaps unenlightening fact that humans react forcefully to things with which they have contact by way of understanding, and it is similarly a fact that things will be so influential only if they have a certain complexity and extent. These general facts come to life when there is in fact a unique and eloquent thing that addresses us in its own right albeit through someone’s testimony. There can be no general argument that establishes the force of deictic explanation. What we can do in general, however, is to make room for it by recognizing that deictic explanation is not only compatible with apodeictic and paradeictic explanations but is complementary to them. The former provides the orientation that the latter normally presuppose and require.27
Deictic explanation discloses something to us and elicits active assent; it moves us to act. Thus it teaches us what we ought to do by telling us what is.28 It fills the gap in the is-ought dichotomy and the others that were listed in Chapter 12. But it remains contestable because it cannot, nor does it want to, control its subject matter or the conditions of its reception. Though deictic discourse is contestable, it is principled as well. It has a publicly accessible subject matter that can be considered and examined. It rests its case not by subjective standards but by pointing away from the subject to the thing in question.29
Still there is a general method of refusing it which may be mistaken for a refutation. This kind of refusal is itself immune to refutation But it can be exposed, understood, acknowledged, and so deprived of its sting. It takes advantage of the symmetry that necessarily obtains between the knower and the known, between my subjective capacities and what I experience as a matter of significance. Since one with lesser or different capacities will not experience the same significance, the claim is always possible that what I call significance is not the eloquence of something in its own right but an imposition of mine on a neutral or ambiguous state of affairs. More popularly, to “Come and see the great thing that has happened” one can always reply: “You think it is great, but is it really?” The rejoinder to this tactic is the reminder that the powerful and largely innate capacities that human beings possess, precisely in being so flexible and rich, impose few selective constraints on what we are in principle able to experience. But though I can make this point locally, pointing out how it obtains in a certain region of experience, I must, in making the point, invoke an unquestioned and unquestionable global context. I cannot in principle fully dissociate myself from myself so that as a third party I can demonstrate the objective adequacy of my experiential capacities to reality as it is in itself. And critics of objective significance can always bring their objection down to this unanswerable level. But unassailable charges should be conceded, not because they are so powerful but because they are inconsequential. The question of ultimate significance, as said before, is not to be answered in general anyway. It comes to a head when something addresses me really, concretely, and finally. When, in responding to such an address, I am met with a skeptical objection, such a counter will test my enthusiasm and sympathy, and such a test should be welcomed with tolerance.
We have come to the problem of deictic discourse being troubled by the character of technology and searching for a voice in which to articulate our misgivings and aspirations. We now have a general and tentative notion of how such speaking might proceed. We must render this notion more concrete and show how it can serve to ground and direct a critique and reform of technology. This we can do by considering the challenge of nature in this country.
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The Challenge of Nature
Deictic discourse is empowered by a focal concern. On this continent nature in its pristine state is the focal power which is most clearly eloquent in its own right since it has, through definition as it were, escaped the rule of technology. How it came to attain this force is best seen when one briefly considers the conquest of North America by technology. Out of this history, as we will see in the first part of this chapter, has come the endeavor of environmentalists or conservationists to speak on behalf of nature itself, i.e., to grant it presence in deictic discourse. Though these concerns are evident, they still get entangled in the prevailing technological idiom. The solution to this embarrassment, I will argue, is not a flight from technology but the realization that nature in its wildness attains new and positive significance within the technological setting. The concluding part of the present chapter is devoted to the articulation of this view.
Nature constitutes a singular challenge for technology in this country, especially nature in its pristine or wild state. In this latter sense, nature is in an obvious way the counterpart to technology. It is by definition a part of the world that has not been touched by the hand of technology.1 But though there is a clear distinction between wilderness and technology, it is much less clear why we should prevent technology from crossing the physical counterpart to that distinction and from penetrating the remaining wilderness areas. This question can finally be answered in deictic discourse only. The difficulties that beset such discourse are more visible and resolvable when such speaking is of nature in its wild state. And this is so not only because the subject of deictic discourse is in this case conce
ptually so well distinguished from technology and its tendency to subvert or suffocate deictic discourse; it is also so for historical reasons, the consideration of which will prove helpful.
In the initial encounter of Western civilization with the North American continent, the lines between technology and nature seemed to be clearly drawn. People were poised at the edge of a pristine and gigantic continent to conquer the virgin land. In fact, the relation was much more complex and difficult.2 First of all, the continent was not untouched at all; it was well settled and populated by a culture that Western civilization for the most part did not understand. And so the conquest of the American continent was at the same time the destruction of great cultures and peoples. A second and still less obvious difficulty lies in the fact that the terms of the fight between humans and nature changed dramatically while the battle was in progress. But the nature of the change remained unclear. And this in turn made it hard to see that the conquest of the continent destroyed not only the Native American cultures but also led to the loss of the European culture from which the conquest was launched. One reason for this concealment was the fact that there seemed to be traditional frameworks already in place for meeting the challenges of the continent. North America was seen, wrongly and yet definitely, as an empty continent. In the one framework America appeared as a garden, a pastoral setting of fertility and beauty for the life of simplicity and joy that had long been a dream of European culture.3 Though Virginia may have answered to the physical characteristics of that dreamscape, other parts of America did not. What decisively damaged the pastoral view of America, however, was the early realization that even where nature contributed its share of peace, order, and beauty, people failed to provide theirs.4 As Leo Marx has shown, the ideal remains crucial for the way in which Americans try to understand their world and themselves. But the early damage to this ideal made prominent the other traditional framework in which Europeans saw the new continent, a framework that was far more robust and better suited to the task of settling America and able to co-opt if not absorb the other framework. It was the view of America as a wilderness. Roderick Nash, who has chronicled the development of the American attitude toward wilderness, points out that this attitude has strong and deep roots in the Old World. From this mooring nature in its wild state appeared hostile and terrifying, an enemy from whom one had to wrest enclaves of culture. Nature was beautiful only when it had been cultivated and turned into a garden.5 The premodern attitude toward wilderness is not as relentlessly negative as Nash makes it out to be. More important, it obtained a cutting edge in the New World that it had long lost in the Old. To be sure, there were large wilderness areas in medieval Europe, and the notion of colonization or cultivation was still alive within England at the beginning of this century. But throughout this period there was also a relation to nature where humans had come to terms with nature. The wilderness was seen from within a long and finely developed tradition of commerce and familiarity with nature. There were catastrophes in the human encounter with cultivated nature. But they never entirely erased the experience of the intimacy and bounty of nature. All this was left behind at the threshold of the New World where Western civilization found itself on a continent that was thought of as wild simply and entirely.6
The conquest of the American continent by white people is a long and complex story. Our concern is with one feature of this process. It emerged after the first phase of colonization. The first settlements were erected in a struggle with nature that was still fought on pretechnological terms. But, gradually, the forces of colonization gathered momentum, and the assault on the entire continent was launched.7 It coincided roughly with the Industrial Revolution in America, and it mirrored an ambivalence in the domination of nature. There were certainly romantic and heroic components in the struggle with the wilderness.8 And there were attempts at settling down in the true sense, making a place one’s own and doing justice to the land. But there was also and increasingly the tendency to look at nature merely as raw material that was to be used and abandoned after it was used up.9 What made the tendency a gigantic transformative force was the systematic development and refinement of this approach. Driving nature to submission was finally not the work of individual adventurous pioneers but the extension and application of an approach to reality that was based on science, developed by engineers, and primarily practiced in factories. To be sure, the challenge of the frontier in turn spurred the development of the American centers of technology.10
The conquest of the continent consumed most of the energy of the Americans. Like Frederick Jackson Turner, we are inclined to think of this conquest as completed when the frontier ceased to exist in 1890. But this is to take a merely extensive view of the matter. Civilization’s initial grip on the land was often tenuous and hasty. It was through the rise of industrial technology that people took intensive possession of the land. This final subjection of nature and the land was still a pioneer experience in the sense that it had few cultural antecedents and obstacles to contend with. The conquest in its extensive and intensive dimensions generated excitement and provided cohesion and direction for the people.
It therefore escaped the general attention that no lasting ties to the land were being established, that firm traditions of communal living failed to grow up, that no focal points of celebration and orientation were being taken up by the communities, that the sense of responsibility for the land and for one another was weakly developed.11 European culture seemed outmoded for the task of conquering the continent and so was lost. The restlessness of the conquest suppressed the very need of a new culture along traditional lines. And yet the technological culture of domination and disengagement did not establish itself as the sole and unquestioned approach to nature. As nature changed from an adversary to a resource, the heroic tradition of the initial struggle lost its foundation. North America had begun to understand itself in distinction from Europe as a land of majestic natural forces. What national character it had was shaped by the encounter with those forces. To be sure, the first articulation and parlances of the force of nature came from the Romantic movement in Europe. But they only provided the initial spark.12 Wilderness is nature in a more primal state than the nature of fields, pastures, and vineyards. Wilderness is older than human memory; its beauty owes nothing to human work; its life is intricate and harmonious beyond human planning.13 Thus wilderness is a much more provocative challenge to human domination than groves and hedgerows which bespeak a human hand. Nature in Europe is cultivated nature. Wilderness has been a memory for centuries.
Wilderness is a challenge for technology. We can see how deeply ambiguous this sentence is because wilderness can be a challenge within the framework of technology and to the framework of technology. Technology is geared to meet challenges, to dam rivers, drain swamps, log forests, and mine coal. Wilderness areas, within this framework, appear as the last bastions yet to be taken by technology, the last areas where we should be able to cut, drill, and extract. At the very least these areas should be made available as recreational resources. But wilderness is a challenge also to this entire way of dealing with nature, i.e., to technology itself. In the controversies about the establishment of wilderness areas, the unspoken disagreement is always on how we should understand the challenge of nature, whether we should meet the challenge with domination or with respect.
It seems, of course, as though there is a continuum between domination and respect. The domination of nature, as we saw in Chapter 8, is as old as modern technology since it was the basis of its promise of liberty and prosperity. Surely the attack on nature was at times executed with violence for the sake of violence, and it led to the thoughtless ugliness that turned the Sutherlands in Pirsig’s book against technology. Yet the conquest of nature remained tied to the goal of liberating and enriching human existence. Once the heedlessness of the exploitation of the natural resources came to be recognized as a danger to the welfare of technology, the latter’s conceptual resources,
as urged in Chapter 19, could be drawn upon to bring technology in balance with its physical setting. To act in the technological spirit of scientifically grounded security and stability is to have proper respect for the limits and fragility of the natural environment. It is consistent with that sort of respect to urge the protection and preservation of those parts of nature that are not known to be useful but may turn out to be so in the future. “But when conservationists argue this way,” Christopher Stone holds,
to the exclusion of other arguments or find themselves speaking in terms of “recreational interests” so continuously as to play up to, and reinforce, homocentric perspectives, there is something sad about the spectacle. One feels that the arguments lack even their proponents’ convictions. I expect that they want to say something less egotistic and more emphatic but the prevailing and sanctioned modes of explanation in our society are not quite ready for it.14