Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry

by Albert Borgmann

  Inasmuch as our legal system is traditional and not just technological, it exhibits a version of that continuity. Conservatives are aware of it and concerned to protect it against the technological diremption into machinery and commodity. Thus Irving Kristol sketches the “managerial” conception of democracy that is based on the root idea “that democracy is a ‘political system’ (as they [the social scientists] say) which can be adequately defined in terms of—can be fully reduced to—its mechanical arrangements.” To this Kristol objects: “The purpose of democracy cannot possibly be the endless functioning of its own political machinery. The purpose of any political regime is to achieve some version of the good life and the good society.”3 Can the reform of technology find its public extension by taking the conservative clue and in trying to strengthen the bond between legality and morality? Conservatives attempt to do this, as is well known, by promoting moral issues in the area of civil liberties and criminal justice. But as was pointed out in Chapter 14, such endeavors try to make up in legal force what traditional morality has lost in genuine presence and authority; and as suggested in Chapter 20, there are further efforts to shore up the felt weakness of the traditional moral standards by claiming that these standards are necessary for the outward and tangible stability of society.4 But it follows from Chapter 21 that tolerance requires us to keep civil and criminal justice as liberal as possible, and that requirement, to be sure, has an outward resemblance with the goals of the “managerial” or technologically specified democracy, and it has a genuine affinity with the liberal tradition of democracy. Consequently, when matters of civil and criminal justice are publicly transacted in the kind of language that is appropriate to focal practices, i.e., when these civil and criminal issues are drawn into public deictic discourse, the problem is not that well-established and well-tested social structures will be called into question in an attempt to overturn them; the problem is rather one of securing a new and deeper understanding of the status quo. Such reinterpretations are of course fatuous if they simply layer a new meaning on an old phenomenon without concrete changes taking place anywhere. They are substantial, however, if an old phenomenon is placed in a new context. As said before, to see the context of something is to see its significance. In the present case, civil rights and criminal sanctions must be seen in relation to the focal practices that already exist in the private realm and in relation to public changes to which I now turn.

  Conservatives, as pointed out in Chapter 14, do a disservice to morality, not only through their failure to discover its present vigor and by compromising moral authority through attempts at cogency but also by undercutting their moral concern in the area of economic legislation. There is no sharp dividing line between laws that pertain to civil and criminal matters and those that regulate and direct the economy. Still, the latter kind of law is in general more concrete and emphemeral than the former. More important, it touches us more immediately and consequentially than the former. The lives of many of us are not directly affected by legal changes regarding homosexuality, prostitution, abortion, pornography, or wiretapping. This reminder is not to deny the supreme importance of civil liberties but to point out that it is in the economic realm where through legislation we establish the firm, concrete, and specific boundaries that tangibly constrain everyone’s life.5 Conservatives, in pushing hard for the progress of the economy and technology, promote a style of life that suffocates the remainders of traditional morality and one that is inhospitable to the morality of focal concerns, a morality that is in important ways the continuation and development of pretechnological traditions.6

  But to direct the reform of technology by way of economic legislation is to steer it into quicksand, or so it must seem. The economy is notoriously complex and unmanageable and the economic literature more so by an order of magnitude. Fundamental proposals of social reform regularly expire when the economic profession inspects them and finds them to be impossibly naive and simplistic. It certainly would be foolish to deny that the economic machinery in this country and its attendant scholarship are intricate and difficult to come to grips with. But the difficulties are of two very different kinds. One consists of the technical difficulties which are studied, developed, and jealously guarded by mainstream economists. The other difficulty is philosophical and consists in the task of seeing the economic machinery in context, recognizing it as a mere machinery, and restricting it to its proper place. To extend philosophically the reform of technology into economics is not to suggest ways of tinkering with the economic machinery but to show that there is room for economic reform and to outline concrete goals. If there is an opening for change and if the aims are clear, then it becomes the task of economists and of practical experience to determine the precise and best path from here to those goals.

  The opening for reform has several dimensions. Most prosaically, reform requires a certain kind of prosperity, a material surplus that allows us to survive while we contemplate, design, and install new structures and that forgives the mistakes that are inevitably made during reforms. It is well known that absolutely poor people are conservative because they lack the margin necessary for innovation.7 It is less obvious that an unconditional commitment to affluence, as defined in the previous chapter, is as incapable of reform as poverty. It is capable of progress, of course, and there are technically fundamental innovations in the service of that goal. But every significant effort and surplus is restricted to securing and advancing the standard of living. As long as this commitment is unconditional and largely unspoken, every suggestion to proceed in another direction can be waved aside as unreasonable. Appeals to what is taken for granted by nearly everyone can afford to be simple and brief. An example is provided by Lester C. Thurow who is thought to have provided a ruthlessly honest, tough-minded, provocative, courageous, and insightful analysis of our present economy.8 But all that incisiveness is confined to the framework of technology whose validity needs only be alluded to in such phrases as: “Man is an acquisitive animal whose wants cannot be satiated. This is not a matter of advertising and conditioning, but a basic fact of existence.”9 It is true that technological voraciousness is not the work of a minority conspiracy but part of a broad and deep agreement as regards the modern approach to reality. Still, it is a historical phenomenon that has come into existence very recently and through a sharp reversal of the human condition. What we know of human culture in its original and longest period, extending over hundreds of millenia, tends to show that material wants were firm and limited and that play and celebration filled the available time rather than relentless production and consumption.10 And even in more recent and recorded history, the latter two activities appear to have been structured and confined by sanctions and the social order.11

  Obviously, the technological societies possess the material surplus necessary for reforms. Technology provides the space for its own transformation. But to free that space requires us to uncouple public policy from technology. More concretely, it is clear from recessions that the technological societies can substantially reduce their consumption without suffering genuine material hardships. This, unfortunately, is true in the aggregate only since, especially in this country, the burdens of economic downturns are unequally distributed. Military expenditures, on the other side, show that the industrial countries can afford substantial unconsumable production. In both instances the economic margins that have been removed from consumption are yielded grudgingly or resentfully. One who is engaged in a focal practice, however, can reduce consumption without resentment. Engagement opens up space, takes time, and allows things to emerge and to endure. Thus it stems the voracious and wasteful tide of technology which, haunted by the specter of boredom and due to its shallow contact with any one commodity, requires ever new and more consumption. Not that focal practices inevitably lead to frugality. Raising and training horses, surely a noble and engaging enterprise, makes heavy demands on resources. And as said before, people who center their life in a focal c
oncern may still want to obtain the approval of the larger society by acquiring the trappings of consumption. But it is evident in principle that the wealth of focal practices is in most cases consistent with substantially reduced affluence.12

  We must be aware here of a seeming inconsistency in the remarks above. It looks as though the frugal aspect of an engaging way of life is used as a premise to argue for the possibility of a reform of technology. In light of the preceding chapters it is obvious that the reform of technology is to serve focal concerns and not vice versa. In a sense this is a matter of emphasis. Focal concern and the reform of technology are one and the same thing. To reform technology is not to address an urgent problem in its own right but to allow focal things to prosper. And the latter task requires us to connect those things with technology in a principled and affirmative way. The kind of reform, then, that is of concern here needs to be properly located and oriented, and this can only happen in public deictic discourse. Since it will be deictic discourse of the political rather than poetic sort, it will speak generally and approximately of the focal things that matter. It must emphasize the point that there is an alternative to consumption and affluence, a life, namely, of engagement and wealth. It will have its forums on the editorial pages, at public hearings, and in legislative assemblies.

  Having assured ourselves that the opening for the reform of technology has a material and communicative dimension, we must now ask whether it has a social and empirical one as well. The question is whether there is in fact an inclination on the part of the people to move toward a world of focal things. To move in this direction is to move away from technology. In Chapter 15 we considered empirical and statistical evidence that indicates that underlying the seemingly unconditional allegiance to technology, reflected in Thurow’s remarks above, there is ambivalence and uneasiness. But one lets go of the old only if one is prepared to approach something new. Are people ready to do this? There is, as urged in the two preceding chapters, the other American mainstream, a devotion to great things in their own right, a concern with skill and discipline, the practice of a calmer and more engaging life. These indications we can verify in our own experiences, and these again can be amplified through more principled accounts such as Studs Terkel’s American Dreams.13 But here too we must balance immediate insight against the broad and scholarly findings of the social scientists. Such evidence is here as always suggestive at best since its representative character is obtained at the price of foregoing preparatory explanations, successively probing questions, challenging counterproposals, etc. By itself the question whether one would be ready to move toward a world of focal things is unintelligible and has not, of course, been put to the public. But there have been surveys on people’s readiness to adopt a simpler and calmer way of life. Duane Elgin has surveyed the evidence, and it suggests that there is in fact a substantial popular tendency toward simplicity, one that is endorsed in this country by a majority of two-thirds to three-quarters of the respondents. The people who in fact, knowingly and willingly, practice simplicity constitute perhaps a third of the population. And there appear to be similar trends in some European countries.14 The firmness and the real springs and principles of these commitments are mixed and cloudy of course. Some of the motives could certainly be accommodated by reforms within the paradigm of technology. And of those that aim at a reform of the technological framework, some are of the abstract and spiritualistic sort that courts the danger, I believe, of dogmatism and of technological subversion. Still the evidence suffices to show that the unqualified claim of people’s unconditional allegiance to technology is indefensible. It seems clear that people are ready to embrace another way of life and that millions have already done so.

  But if it is true “that a quiet revolution may be taking place in our national values and aspirations,” why is it so well concealed?15 One reason might be the inertia of technology; once a way of life has become so deeply entrenched, so well articulated, and so widely expressed in our environment, it will for a time continue on its own momentum even when a majority of people have withdrawn their support from it. The concealment of the quiet revolution might also betray the kind of attitude with which people hold their unorthodox convictions. A pollster’s question, depending on how it is asked, will put the respondent in a reflective and even magnanimous frame of mind. But the highmindedness of the response will be dissipated in the technological everyday which, as we have seen, has a particularly distracting and disorienting force.16 But this debility harbors strength as well.

  It becomes visible when we turn to the question of how the real but concealed and inarticulate opening for the public reform of technology can be given shape and force. It can only be achieved through a collective affirmation. A collective affirmation is a shared and public commitment to a certain kind of behavior or enterprise. It is to the body politic as a practice is to a group of persons. It allows us as a national community to accomplish tasks that would lie beyond the capacity of individual decisions. A collective affirmation may be informal and is then anchored in mutual expectations and informal sanctions. An example is politeness, sociability, or civility.17 If every morning or at every encounter I had to decide whether to restrain my frustrations, suppress my resentments, and extend goodwill, I might behave rudely as often as not. And with everyone in this position, life would be brutish and nasty. But in fact I feel constrained by expectations of politeness and put the best face on my troubles. I am strengthened in this commitment by the evenness and cordiality of others and by the fear of being met with raised eyebrows and turned shoulders if I were to be habitually discourteous. A collective affirmation may also be implicit as has emphatically been said of technology. It is a firm and consequential affirmation nonetheless and accounts for the tight coherence and coordination of our various enterprises. The Constitution of this country is one of the most stately collective affirmations. The declaration of war, unhappily, is an example of how a nation becomes capable of efforts and sacrifices that would be impossible to achieve if they were proposed and attempted one by one.18

  Without a collective affirmation of reform, technology, due to its entrenchment and resourcefulness, will remain the rule. Such an affirmation will have to grow out of public deictic discourse, and its general theme and major forums have already been mentioned. There is a continuum between such fully public discourse and the more dispersed and private speaking that is to be found in the books that are testimonies to focal practices. But is public discourse of the deictic sort just a possibility and a desideratum, or are there more concrete and established issues that bespeak its emergence and can serve its fuller development? I believe that there are such issues and that they can be brought into public focus through the appropriate distinction between the quality of life and the standard of living. That distinction is often made in a way that vaguely parallels the distinction between wealth and affluence as drawn in the preceding chapter. Thus Schumacher uses it to formulate the crucial challenge for socialism: “What is at stake is not economics but culture; not the standard of living but the quality of life.”19 Similarly, Louis Harris summarizes his findings about the quiet revolution of aspirations: “Significant majorities place a higher priority on improving human and social relationships and the quality of American life than on raising the standard of living.”20

  Lowdon Wingo has defined the quality of life more narrowly as “the extent to which environments, social and physical, are conducive to a state of happiness.”21 Some of the physical elements of that quality of life are natural such as mountains, lakes, clean air, and water. Others are human made such as transportation or school systems. Examples of the social elements are freedom from crime, demographic homogeneity, or civility. What all the elements have in common is that they are not commercially producible and cannot be bought individually and privately. Members of a community possess them all at once or not at all.22 The concept of the quality of life, whether defined broadly or narrowly, is beset with ambiguiti
es. These can be resolved by assimilating the broad sense to wealth, as previously defined, and by accentuating in the narrow sense that aspect that stands for the degree to which the public realm is hospitable to wealth. I am not saying that these ways of resolving the ambiguities lead to a sharply defined notion suitable for cogent arguments of public policy; far from it. What they do is to direct our attention to the focal issues and to those problems of disputation and agreement that are not just technical puzzles and burdens but genuine tasks that we should willingly accept and tolerate if we cannot settle them.

  Here the task of public deictic discourse is twofold: to clarify and deepen the parlances and discussions of the quality of life and show that under the latter heading we have already been concerned with the public reform of technology. To see this we must first clarify the tie between wealth and the narrow or public sense of the quality of life. We can depart from the contrast between private luxury and public poverty which Galbraith gave prominence a quarter of a century ago. In a celebrated passage he has us consider a family on an outing, equipped with luxurious devices and commodities and surrounded at the same time by a squalid and decaying environment.23 That family enjoys a high standard of living and a low quality of life. Again terms are used in various ways; but it is at least consistent and helpful to use synonymously “standard of living,” “per capita GNP,” and “affluence,” the latter defined as the availability of numerous, varied, and refined commodities.24 In public policy, it would seem, we can either favor that part of the economic machinery whose goal is rising affluence and whose performance is measured as the GNP; or we can favor the production and maintenance of the social and public goods that constitute the quality of life, narrowly understood. I think this is largely true; because it is true, the state of affairs that has so been described provides the most immediate public measure for the reform of technology; because it is true with qualifications only, there is a need first for clarification by way of public deictic discourse and then for more incisive and consequential economic legislation.