What emerges here is a distinct notion of the good life or more precisely the private or personal side of one. Clearly, it will remain crippled if it cannot unfold into the world of labor and the public realm. These aspects will concern us in the next chapter. To begin on the side of leisure and privacy is to acknowledge the presently dispersed and limited standing of focal powers. It is also to avail oneself of the immediate and undeniably large discretion one has in shaping one’s free time and private sphere.27 Even within these boundaries the good life that is centered on focal concerns is distinctive enough. Evidently, it is a favored and prosperous life. It possesses the time and the implements that are needed to devote oneself to a great calling. Technology provides us with the leisure, the space, the books, the instruments, the equipment, and the instruction that allow us to become equal to some great thing that has beckoned us from afar or that has come to us through a tradition. The citizen of the technological society has been spared the abysmal bitterness of knowing himself or herself to be capable of some excellence or achievement and of being at the same time worn-out by poor and endless work, with no time to spare and no possibility of acquiring the implements of one’s desire. That bitterness is aggravated when one has a gifted child that is similarly deprived, and is exacerbated further through class distinctions where one sees richer but less gifted and dedicated persons showered with opportunities of excellence. There is prosperity also in knowing that one is able to engage in a focal practice with a great certainty of physical health and economic security. One can be relatively sure that the joy that one receives from a focal thing will not be overshadowed by the sudden loss of a loved one with whom that joy is shared. And one prospers not only in being engaged in a profound and living center but also in having a view of the world at large in its essential political, cultural, and scientific dimensions. Such a life is centrally prosperous, of course, in opening up a familiar world where things stand out clearly and steadily, where life has a rhythm and depth, where we encounter our fellow human beings in the fullness of their capacities, and where we know ourselves to be equal to that world in depth and strength.
This kind of prosperity is made possible by technology, and it is centered in a focal concern. Let us call it wealth to distinguish it from the prosperity that is confined to technology and that I want to call affluence. Affluence consists in the possession and consumption of the most numerous, refined, and varied commodities. This superlative formulation betrays its relative character. “Really” to be affluent is to live now and to rank close to the top of the hierarchy of inequality. All of the citizens of a typical technological society are more affluent than anyone in the Middle Ages. But this affluence, astounding when seen over time, is dimmed or even insensible at any one time for all but those who have a disproportionately large share of it. Affluence, strictly defined, has an undeniable glamour. It is the embodiment of the free, rich, and imperial life that technology has promised. So at least it appears from below whence it is seen by most people. Wealth in comparison is homely, homely in the sense of being plain and simple but homely also in allowing us to be at home in our world, intimate with its great things, and familiar with our fellow human beings. This simplicity, as said before, has its own splendor that is more sustaining than the glamour of affluence which leaves its beneficiaries, so we hear, sad and bored.28 Wealth is a romantic notion also in that it continues and develops a tradition of concerns and of excellence that is rooted on the other side of the modern divide, i.e., of the Enlightenment. A life of wealth is certainly not romantic in the sense of constituting an uncomprehending rejection of the modern era and a utopian reform proposal.29
How wealth can be secured and advanced politically and economically is the topic of the next chapter. I will conclude this chapter by considering the narrower sphere of wealth and by connecting it with the traditional notions of excellence and of the family. In Chapter 18 I suggested that the virtues of world citizenship, of gallantry, musicianship, and charity still command an uneasy sort of allegiance and that it is natural, therefore, to measure the technological culture by these standards. Perhaps people are ready to accept the distressing results of such measurement with a rueful sort of agreement. But obviously the acceptance of the standards, if there is one, is not strong enough to engender the reforms that the pursuit of traditional excellence would demand. This, I believe, is due to the fact that the traditional virtues have for too long been uprooted from the soil that used to nourish them. Values, standards, and rules, I have urged repeatedly, are recollections and anticipations of great things and events. They provide bonds of continuity with past greatness and allow us to ready ourselves and our children for the great things we look forward to. Rules and values inform and are acted out in practices. A virtue is the practiced and accomplished faculty that makes one equal to a great event. From such considerations it is evident that the real circumstances and forces to which the traditional values, virtues, and rules used to answer are all but beyond recollection, and there is little in the technological universe that they can anticipate and ready us for. The peculiar character of technological reality has escaped the attention of the modern students of ethics.
To sketch a notion of excellence that is appropriate to technology is, in one sense, simply to present another version of the reform of technology that has been developed so far. But it is also to uncover and to strengthen ties to a tradition that the modern era has neglected to its peril. As regards world citizenship today, the problem is not confinement but the proliferation of channels of communication and of information. From the mass of available information we select by the criteria of utility and entertainment. We pay attention to information that is useful to the maintenance and advancement of technology, and we consume those news items that divert us. In the latter case the world is shredded into colorful bits of entertainment, and the distracted kind of knowledge that corresponds to that sort of information is the very opposite of the principled appropriation of the world that is meant by world citizenship.30 The realm of technically useful information does not provide access to world citizenship either. Technical information is taken up primarily in one’s work. Since most work in technology is unskilled, the demands on technical knowledge are low, and most people know little of science, engineering, economics, and politics. The people at the leading edge of technology have difficulty in absorbing and integrating the information that pertains to their field.31 But even if the flood of technical information is appropriately channeled, as I think it can be, its mastery still constitutes knowledge of the social machinery, of the means rather than the ends of life. What is needed if we are to make the world truly and finally ours again is the recovery of a center and a standpoint from which one can tell what matters in the world and what merely clutters it up. A focal concern is that center of orientation. What is at issue here comes to the fore when we compare the simple and authentic world appropriation of someone like Mother Teresa with the shallow and vagrant omniscience of a technocrat.
Gallantry in a life of wealth is the fitness of the human body for the greatness and the playfulness of the world. Thus it has a grounding and a dignity that are lost in traditional gallantry, a loss that leaves the latter open to the technological concept of the perfect body where the body is narcissistically stylized into a glamorous something by whatever scientific means and according to the prevailing fashion. In the case of musicianship the tradition of excellence is unbroken and has expanded into jazz and popular music. What the notion of wealth can contribute to the central splendor and competence of music is to make us sensible to the confinement and the procurement of music. Confinement and procurement are aspects of the same phenomenon. The discipline and the rhythmic grace and order that characterize music are often confined, as said above, to the performance proper and are not allowed to inform the broader environment. This is because the unreformed structure of the technological universe leaves no room for such forces. Accordingly, music is allowed to conform t
o technology and is procured as a commodity that is widely and inconsequentially consumed. A focal concern for musicianship, then, will curtail the consumption of music and secure a more influential position for the authentic devotion to music.
Finally, one may hope that focal practices will lead to a deepening of charity and compassion. Focal practices provide a profounder commerce with reality and bring us closer to that intensity of experience where the world engages one painfully in hunger, disease, and confinement. A focal practice also discloses fellow human beings more fully and may make us more sensitive to the plight of those persons whose integrity is violated or suppressed. In short, a life of engagement may dispel the astounding callousness that insulates the citizens of the technological societies from the well-known misery in much of the world. The crucial point has been well made by Duane Elgin:
When people deliberately choose to live closer to the level of material sufficiency, they are brought closer to the reality of material existence for a majority of persons on this planet. There is not the day-to-day insulation from material poverty that accompanies the hypnosis of a culture of affluence.32
The plight of the family, finally, consists, as argued in Chapter 18, in the absorption of its tasks and substance by technology. The reduction of the household to the family and the growing emptiness of family life leave the parents bewildered and the children without guidance. Since less and less of vital significance remains entrusted to the family, the parents have ceased to embody rightful authority and a tradition of competence, and correspondingly there is less and less legitimate reason to hold children to any kind of discipline. Parental love is deprived of tangible and serious circumstances in which to realize itself. Focal practices naturally reside in the family, and the parents are the ones who should initiate and train their children in them. Surely parental love is one of the deepest forms of sympathy. But sympathy needs enthusiasm to have substance. Families, I have found, that we are willing to call healthy, close, or warm turn out, on closer inspection, to be centered on a focal concern. And even in families that exhibit the typical looseness of structure, the diffidence of parents, and the impertinence of children, we can often discover a bond of respect and deep affection between parent and youngster, one that is secured in a common concern such as a sport and keeps the family from being scattered to the winds.
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Political Affirmation
Assuming that a principled reform of technology can be carried out in the realm of privacy and of the family, can we take meaningful measures to reform the national community? This is the final question of our essay. Clearly, enthusiasm and sympathy require us to seek an affirmative answer, and it is also clear that appropriate measures of reform must be articulated in public deictic discourse. But granted that such discourse has the required focus, it is not clear that it has constructive force as well. It will question the established order and may yet be unable to replace it. One pivot of this difficulty is the distinction between legality and morality. The currently clear separation of these two areas is an indicator of the stability of technology. Is it possible to undertake a constructive reform by establishing stronger bonds between the moral and the legal realms? The legal system as far as it pertains to civil and criminal matters, so I will argue, should be preserved in its morally liberal character. The factors in the legal system that shape our lives intimately, inconspicuously, and also unavoidably are the ones that pertain to economics.
To institute a reform of technology by way of economics we must first delineate the philosophical significance of economic reform. This I attempt to do by showing that there is an opening for economic reform and a clear goal within that opening. The implementation of reform can then largely be left to economic expertise. But we can go beyond these broad and basic points and show that a kind of technological reform via economics is already going on. To prosper and to become consequential, it requires explication and a collective affirmation. The latter is the constructive culmination of public deictic discourse. The former can depart from the distinction between the standard of living and the quality of life. When the distinction is properly clarified, it will become apparent that we must advance the quality of life at the expense of the standard of living. We can carry this policy into the work world by recognizing and strengthening the distinction between the local and labor-intensive economy and the centralized and highly automated economy. Reforms along these lines will make room for focal concerns in a fruitful and public way. The force of such measures must finally prove itself in regard to two vexing problems of public policy, the restoration of the large cities and the reduction of social injustice. The chapter closes with the consideration of those issues.
Taking up the problem at hand initially and generally, we must ask: How can the reform of technology be extended into the public world and the world of labor? Or more precisely, how can focal concerns be carried into the political realm and into the machinery of technology? Let us begin by noting the constraints on such extensions that are entailed by the findings of the preceding chapters. Since focal things and practices are dispersed and various, the public world cannot be restructured around a central national focus. It would be foolish to proclaim such a focus and totalitarian to impose one. The restriction to the reform of work is just opposite to that which constrains public reform. Labor is devoted to the advancement and maintenance of the technological machinery. The latter has crucial parts that are highly centralized if not truly nationalized. Since we want to preserve and perfect technology as the background and support of focal concerns, it will be impossible to transform the work world entirely in the image of the small-scale, engaging, and socially profound focal practices. Still, incisive and principled reforms in these areas are possible and necessary.
Conceivably, these reforms could arise inconspicuously and unnoticeably, nourished by diverse and implicit concerns. In fact, this is happening to some extent. But it is surely more appropriate to the human condition if profound changes are clearly comprehended and embraced. And this can only occur if there is a discourse that is congenial to the obstacles and goals of those changes. In the present case, the language that is suitable to the understanding of the obstacles of reforms is the one in which the pattern of technology is recognized and criticized. Its suitability to the public arena at first faces only the normal pedagogical problems. Since it is a kind of descriptive or analytical language, it has familiar and accessible character. But the critique of technology finally depends for its direction on the substantive concerns to which we attend in deictic discourse. Deictic discourse, however, is forever contestable, as pointed out in Chapter 21. And the question was raised in that chapter whether the introduction of uncontrollable issues into the public forum would not lead to confusion and paralysis at best. We can throw more light on the difficulty by turning to the subject matter of deictic discourse, i.e., focal concerns. It has been urged that we should be equal to them in testimony and appeal; and there is in fact a literature, as we have seen, that is admirably suited to this task. Yet all this speaking is essentially private. And it can afford to fail because it can count on the stability of the technological background whose fate is not concretely and literally at issue. But assuming that technology itself is drawn into the ken of deictic discourse, are we not jeopardizing the stability of society by subjecting it to inconclusive contests and diverse concerns?
We can approach an answer to this dilemma by considering yet a third way of stating it. To undertake a public reform in terms of deictic discourse is to subject the public realm to moral evaluation and eventually transformation. But such a proposal arouses immediate and profound suspicions. One important expression of the public order is the legal system. And this country is based on the clearest possible separation of legality and morality.1 This meets the requirement of tolerance and is the achievement of our liberal democratic heritage.2 Technology of course threatens to succeed all too well in this task and to establish what Stanley call
s the libertarian technicist society with its amoral public order of technological rationality. In fact our legal system tends in this direction and assumes, however imperfectly, the pattern of a technological device with an inaccessible and unintelligible machinery that procures, at least for some, commodious security and order. The irony is that this seemingly amoral machinery is far from leaving the question of the good life open and is inextricably coupled with an ethos, a definite style of life. In this broader sense of ethics our legal system is as morally charged as any in history though, as seen before, its properly technological fruits resist analysis in traditional moral terms. Yet though technology has begun to pattern the legal system, the latter, like many other forms of present life, has retained traditional features.
The aspect of the interpenetration of the traditional and the technological that concerns us here can be grasped under the title of pluralism. The present system fosters or protects two kinds: the shallow pluralism afforded by the availability of many different commodities and the more profound pluralism of a diversity of focal practices. Certain laws or parts of the Constitution serve both goals, though the former are very differently understood depending on which of the latter they serve. Thus freedom of speech serves shallow pluralism in allowing the mining of taboos on sex and violence for the production of entertainment. In the realm of focal practices freedom of speech guarantees the possibility of testimony and appeal concerning matters of focal significance. The law that requires us to honor contracts is needed for the efficient functioning of the machinery on which shallow pluralism rests. In the more profound pluralism, honoring contracts is of a piece with, if not the same as, the fidelity that characterizes focal practices. This ambiguity of the legal system is quite general and pertains to the legality-morality distinction as well. For shallow pluralism, as suggested above, it is explicated as the machinery-commodity or labor-consumption distinction. In a world of a plurality of focal practices, so it follows from the preceding chapter, legality would secure the generic features that all focal practices have in common whereas morality would be divided among the specifics of the focal practices. In the latter case there would be a continuity and gradation between the legal and the moral with the attendant difficulty of drawing the necessary dividing line between the two.
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