Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry

by Albert Borgmann

  To begin with the former task, we must remember from Chapter 18 that the public-private distinction is to be seen in light of the machinery-commodity distinction and that all those public goods that conform to the latter will be secure in the technological society. Specifically, those public goods that are indispensable parts of the productive machinery we will maintain reasonably well, if grudgingly so; this holds of the interstate highway system, air traffic guidance and safety systems, scientific and technical research and education, water supply systems, and so on. Public goods that can be procured as commodities are prospering. Examples are radio and television programs which, as urged above, surely have public and social character. The joys that are now to be had in National Parks clearly could be converted into commodities; and naturally those who consider that an obvious and desirable goal would largely turn the parks over to the corporations that are expert at constructing the necessary machinery of procurement. Some of these public and social concerns are necessary and salutary, others are frivolous or pernicious; they are all within the framework of technology. Public policy tends toward a reform of technology when it guards and nourishes things in their own right, those which we do not consume but meet with respect and engagement. Setting aside wilderness areas, keeping rivers free-flowing, rehabilitating lakes, saving endangered species, promoting the arts, literature, and the useless sciences, supporting education as a means of achieving world citizenship and the excellence of an engaging life—these measures advance the quality of life appropriate to wealth. Using “quality of life” in this appropriate sense, as I henceforth will be, one can say that there is already in public policy an awareness of the need to decide either in favor of the quality of life at the expense of the standard of living or vice versa. As in private life there are occasions of decision where we affirm or revoke our allegiance to technology, so there are forums of decision in public policy. The debates of the federal and state budgets are the broadest and most consequential of these forums. Narrower ones are hearings on utility siting, on forest management, wilderness areas, etc. What clouds the public awareness of the decisions at issue is the inclination of the advocates of wealth and the quality of life to disguise their concern, so it was said in Chapters 20 and 22, as one for affluence and the standard of living. Not that deictic discourse should be used to the exclusion of technological arguments if the latter are sound. It would be heartless to challenge a legislature to save the timber wolf out of concern for the quality of life or not at all. That may well lead to the extinction of the wolf. Rather one should begin by getting a hearing for deictic discourse.

  But eventually one must hope to go further in word and deed, for the alternative between the quality of life and the standard of living is more profound than it at first appears. Although the necessity of choosing one at the expense of the other is due to the limits of our resources, that necessity is more significantly anchored in the general finitude of our world. Even if we had limitless means of transforming our environment, the world will finally have to be of one sort rather than another, and we will accordingly respond to it this way or that. The crucial question is how prominent and far-reaching a position we will secure in our world for engagement. So far I have suggested how we may make and are in fact already making room for the things that center or inspire our focal practices. Clearly, we should go much further in that direction, and, if we did, the face of the technological universe would look much different. There would be more open space, more academies and concert halls, more preservation of historical treasures. And such a shift toward the quality of life would, as urged above, entail a certain shrinking in the production and consumption of commodities. But though the productive machinery of the technological society would so be reduced to a certain extent, its character and tendency would remain intact. This has the consequence, as seen in Chapter 17, that a large proportion of the adult population would have either mindless and stultifying work or, increasingly, no work at all. But in that chapter we also noted that, in the Western world, work is still considered one of the significant ways, perhaps the crucial one, in which we are engaged with the world. It is through work that each of us should be able to secure a free and prosperous life for all of us. Surely the engaging life remains an illusion if no engagement can be found in work.

  In certain settings of the pretechnological world, work was an engaging activity and in fact had focal character in a pretechnological sense. This is suggested by the sketch of the wheelwright’s work, drawn in Chapter 9 from Sturt’s book. Such work was centered on carts and wagons that gathered and disclosed the land and the people. It had a unity of achievement and enjoyment, requiring skill and forging deep personal bonds. But Sturt also makes vivid the fact that as the world of things becomes technologically transformed, its focus, the wheelwright’s shop, becomes blurred and finally extinguished. There have been recent attempts to revive the arts and crafts and to make them prevail in a technological setting. People who make custom furniture, weave rugs, throw pots, or establish local bakeries are the practitioners of this new tradition. It has an approximate heading in the expression “local, labor-intensive industry,” and I will use this title though it needs clarification. Clearly, that kind of industry exists and is developing, like other reforms of technology, at the inconspicuous margins of public attention, and it contrasts with the centralized and highly or fully automated industry which is paradigmatic of technology. The reform of technology requires that we recognize, politically affirm, and promote this distinction, and accordingly establish a two-sector economy. Let me work out the details of this proposal in two stages. The first clarifies the notion of the two-sector economy, considering similar suggestions that have been made by others. The second elaborates the requirements and consequences that this part of the reform of technology would bring with it.

  Galbraith has shown that we already have a two-sector economy. One is composed of a thousand gigantic corporations which dominate half of the economy; the other half is composed of 12 million small firms.25 There are no clear quantitative criteria, Galbraith says, that would unfailingly allow us to assign a firm to one sector or the other. “But there is a sharp conceptual difference,” he insists, “between the enterprise that is fully under the command of an individual and owes its success to this circumstance and the firm which, without entirely excluding the influence of individuals, could not exist without organization.”26 The one sector Galbraith calls the market system, the other the planning system. What accounts for the division of the economy? The planning system has absorbed all business except where it is “unstandardized or geographically dispersed.”27 In those cases large-scale planning and organization are to no avail. In distinguishing the market from the planning system, Galbraith delimits that realm of the economy that has an affinity with the kinds of businesses that the proponents of appropriate technology call for, those that allow for self-determination, work on a small scale, and are likely to adjust their enterprise to local circumstances. But like the proposals of appropriate technology, Galbraith’s market system lacks a vital center. It is defined in reaction to the planning system. The former can call its own only what the planning system has been unable to arrogate. Though the tasks of the market system may be recalcitrant to total absorption by centralized and automated machinery, clearly technology will not rest until all tasks are taken over according to its paradigmatic approach. And just as Galbraith’s division leaves the domain of the market system insecure, so it leaves the quality of work within it unexamined and unprotected. The task, then, is to elaborate a version of the division that is firmer and more consequential and one that is guided by insight into technology and engagement.

  Galbraith is at pains to highlight the distinction between the market and planning systems to expose the neglect that the former has suffered, which in turn has greatly reduced the economic security and rewards in that part of the economy. Here Galbraith is guided by the liberal democratic, technologically specified notio
n of social justice.28 Lewis Mumford, being more critical of technology, also is more inclined to see the differences that the predominance of one or the other system makes to the good life. Mumford’s distinction, though closely related to Galbraith’s, has a large historical sweep. “My thesis, to put it bluntly,” he says, “is that from late neolithic times in the Near East, right down to our own day, two technologies have recurrently existed side by side: One authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable.”29 I do not share Mumford’s demonic conception of the modern variant of authoritarian technology, nor can I accept his intimations that it has a tendency toward instability.30 I think he is right, however, in seeing that democratic technology proceeds on a surveyable and familiar scale, fosters skill and social union, and is more respectful of nature.31

  At an earlier stage of his writing, when Mumford was still more hopeful of the prospect of technology, he had proposed a division of work that affords a further clue for the reform of technology. “Work for Automaton and Amateur,” he called it.32 Obviously it parallels his later distinction and constitutes a modern version of it. It suggests that a critical return to the promise of technology requires us to deal with both the degradation and elimination of work.

  The chief benefit the rational use of the machine promises is certainly not the elimination of work: what it promises is something quite different—the elimination of servile work or slavery: those types of work that deform the body, cramp the mind, deaden the spirit.33

  Automation, as we saw in Chapter 17, extends the promise of this kind of liberation. It provides work of its own kind, the exacting and demanding work of its associated technostructure and the work of what Mumford calls “machine-tending,” which is at least not as deadening as strictly divided labor since it “often calls for alertness, non-repetitious movement, and general intelligence.”34 But did we not also find in Chapter 17 that the automatic liberation from servile work would result in the elimination of much if not most work? In his later article Mumford argues like Galbraith that “significant forms of work” would remain for democratic technology because they would remain “unprofitable or technically impossible under mass production: work dependent upon special skill, knowledge, aesthetic sense.”35 In the earlier book he even thought that the work of the amateur would remain indispensable to the automated machine processes themselves because the former alone could provide the educational basis, the discoveries, and the flexibility of production that the welfare of the latter would require. But these are precarious hopes.

  We must go further then in defining and securing a space for engaging work. As in the case of leisure, one should not think of focal practices as remnants of a pretechnological era but as engagements in their own right which attain a splendor of their own in technology if only we make room for them. The many people who devote themselves to arts and crafts against forbidding economic odds testify to the technologically unsurpassable dignity of work that engages us fully.36 But as in the case of leisurely focal practices, those of work show real significance if they stand in a discriminating and affirmative relationship to the technological setting of the highly automated industry. Engaging work is largely and inevitably dependent on the latter for tools, machines, energy, materials, transportation, and communication. But it will not adopt technological devices indiscriminately. The criterion will be whether a device is helpful or detrimental to the worker’s skill and to the focal depth of the work. By the focal depth of a piece of work or a service I mean the extent to which they tangibly gather and embody the capacities of the worker, the aspirations of the recipient, the natural features and cultural tradition of the local setting. We should affirm the dignity of such engagement by making room for it as work, not as a hobby, not as “Work for the Amateur,” the way Mumford has it. We should come to depend on the fruits of that work, and the workers should be respected in our expectations. Thus we can avail ourselves of the circumstance that such work is not only complementary to the disengagement of technology but, being labor intensive, to the technological elimination of labor as well. Local and labor-intensive industry can at least in principle absorb the workers whom automation leaves unemployed.37

  Though Galbraith’s reform proposals divide the economy in a different way and for different reasons than here proposed, one can only agree with his statement of the first requirement of reform: “The emancipation of belief is the most formidable of the tasks of reform and the one on which all else depends.”38 The emancipation in this essay is from the belief that technology must be the rule of life, and the emancipation can be achieved, if at all, through public deictic discourse. In such discourse we must explicate people’s misgivings about technology by illuminating them through the device paradigm. We must encourage one another’s dedication to focal practices. We must speak up at forums of decision to clarify the fundamental choice at issue and speak on behalf of the quality of life. More specifically regarding work, we must emphasize the benefits of engagement and employment. But extolling these virtues will be misleading if the distinction between wealth and affluence is not made. Without it, the two-sector economy will be taken, as most economic reform proposals rightly are, to be a design in support of affluence. The critics who have invested themselves in technology will quickly see and point out that the two-sector economy will reduce affluence, and they will brand the proposal as mistaken or fraudulent. Hence it must be recognized all along that a reform of technology will diminish affluence but increase wealth.

  When social theorists, and philosophers particularly, contemplate the implementation of reform, they often envisage a moratorium on public action during which the reform is publicly proposed, discussed, and accepted. But such an event is unlikely and unnecessary. Political conversations and actions will proceed side by side, unevenly, and sometimes inconsistently. We have already taken political steps in the direction of a reform of technology. But it seems in this case unlikely to me that the reform will get very far without a public deictic conversation catching up with it and then running ahead of it. Only in this way can we achieve a collective affirmation of wealth at the expense of affluence, and only through a collective affirmation can we attain the endurance and resourcefulness required to translate it into a political affirmation, i.e., one which after trials and false starts has found expression and some permanence in our laws and institutions.

  Let me emphasize again that the importance of public deictic discourse does not derive from the assumption that it alone will give us the reform of technology that presumably is needed so desperately. Discourse on behalf of focal concerns does not claim to be the most promising entrant in the competition to reform technology. Its significance lies in allowing us to be true to our deepest experiences and aspirations and to make these prevail against technology. Hence we must in the public arena be attentive to the poets and prophets who speak of focal concerns most adequately. The unique things and forces of which they speak are connected by bonds of kinship. When talking about the latter, we speak at some distance about what finally matters, but we also speak about general issues that allow us to agree and to act politically. In fact, where the reform of technology is transacted politically, we not only deal with the generic features and the general well-being of diverse focal practices but also with concerns of reform that have no focal origin and are motivated by more or less articulate conceptions of security, peace, equity, ecology, and the like. I find these difficult or impossible to understand as foundations for the good life; yet it would be sectarian to insist that people not only set out jointly in the right direction but also share the final goal. Principled alliances for reform and common action of diverse groups are possible if there is clarity and tolerance regarding goals. The first measures of reform are the most ambiguous since, though they may all be departures from technology, they can lead to very different final points. Being most ambiguou
s they can also be accepted by the greatest number of people. As the reforms proceed, the ambiguities are more and more resolved toward an ever smaller subset of the initial array of goals. To the extent that such resolutions become more difficult, reform slows down and finally reaches a point of stability somewhere between the extremes of the strictly technological universe on the one side and a world structured around one great focus on the other. The point of stability is also one of balance between the desire to see one’s focal concern prevail and the respect for the focal concerns of others, an equilibrium, i.e., of sympathy and tolerance.