Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry
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What then is needed and feasible in the political arena to promote the two-sector economy and engaging work in particular? First there must be a collective agreement that the production of certain goods and services is to be entrusted to local, labor-intensive industries. The goods should lend themselves to engaging work and be capable of focal depth. We know from experience that these would include food, furniture, clothing, health care, education, and instruction in music, the arts, and sports.39 It is not a matter, obviously, of establishing an appropriate industry but of recognizing and promoting politically the one that already exists. Appropriate legislation may have a preamble about the virtues of truly engaging work, but it will not be able to capture such work in criteria and regulations. The law as always must be simpler and broader than the causes it serves. Thus we must agree on serviceable definitions of local ownership and labor intensity, and if these secure for the most part the kind of work that concerns us, nothing more need be done. If the definitions fail, we must tighten them and include criteria of size, consumption of energy, capital investment per worker, or whatever. In addition to broadly delimiting engaging work, legislation must contain mechanisms of support. These must be strong enough to nurture and protect local and labor-intensive industry as a populous and productive sector of the economy. At the same time they should provide for as smooth a transition and rest as lightly on the economy as possible. It would be burdensome to impose prohibitions, quotas, or embargoes on the centralized and automated industry in order to shift production to the other sector. Rather the local and labor-intensive sector should be favored through tax and credit measures to the point where its goods and services prevail in the market through relatively lower prices.40
The centralized and more and more automated sector of the economy will retain three tasks. The first is the maintenance and improvement of the infrastructure of transportation, utilities, and communication. The second is the production of certain goods and services such as machine tools, cars, appliances, raw materials, insurance, and finance. The third is research and development. In this sector we affirm and advance today’s inevitably technological setting of the human condition. But technology should be taken here as the context, not the rule or center, of life. Thus we have to strive in the large for the perfection and simplification of technology that a person, engaged in a focal practice, will effect in the private sphere.
These hints raise as many questions as they answer. The divisions that have been drawn leave parts of the economy between the two sectors. There are problems of foreign trade and of internal, regional imbalances, problems of transition, coordination, and feasibility. Perhaps they are insuperable. They should, however, not be thought so because of the supposed court of last appeal to which mainstream economists are wont to resort: the costs of such changes and people’s unwillingness to change. The arguments that have been put forward about the definiteness and vacuity of the good life that technology has procured, about people’s uneasiness regarding technology, about their readiness for an engaging way of life, about the economic discretion that wealth provides as opposed to affluence, all these arguments may be flawed; but they have to be met in their own right before the possibility of reforming technology publicly and economically can be rejected.
We can summarize the character of the world in which technology has been reformed by adapting remarks of Duane Elgin’s which in turn have been inspired ecologically. He has proposed a world that is balanced between differentiation and integration or diversity and connectedness and so avoids both monotony and chaos.41 Clearly, the local and labor-intensive industry would serve the former goals and the centralized and automated industry the latter. But this summary, along with the previous features, still lacks consideration of two crucial public problems: the fate of the large cities and of social justice. Here, as in the case of the economy, the tasks are limited: to show how from the viewpoint of technology and engagement paths become visible toward more vital cities and a more just society.
The big cities constitute the eminently technological spaces. They grew up with modern technology as the standard human dwelling places. Technology made them possible and needs them. They contain the greater and, globally, a still growing share of the population. They harbor the inventive and productive forces of technology. They exhibit most starkly the division between labor and leisure with its gigantic daily transition of commuting. Life in the big cities is marked, as Louis Wirth has emphasized, by the “superficiality, anonymity, and the transitory character of urban social relations,” and so manifests paradigmatically what we found disturbing about the rule of technology.42
The components of the currently perfect technological city are obvious. The leisure area is composed of suburbs where, as remarked in Chapter 22, we find a natural veneer of cedar shakes and lawns layered over a thoroughly technological substructure. Labor is most typically housed in the downtown high-rise office buildings which, as noted in Chapter 11, constitute imposing and disengaged containers of technological space. The realms of leisure and labor are connected by a rapid and convenient transportation link. But the technological version of the city is unstable in principle and in fact. It is so in principle because, so we saw in Chapter 10, the consumption of commodities can be stylized, to be sure, in the image of the household in the manor or on the ranch. But consumption needs neither household nor family and fits, when suitably refined and attenuated, into an apartment as well as a single family home. And the machinery of labor can change radically in size and location as more efficient modes of procurement are discovered and developed. The technological city is unstable in fact because nowhere has technology failed its own standards more obviously and painfully than in the overall organization of the urban setting. That is particularly true in this country. Acting technologically, we have failed for the most part to procure clean air, security, and ease of transportation for ourselves. And the cities contain in the starkest and most concentrated forms the people with whom the broad middle class has been unconcerned to share the standard blessings of technology.
These instabilities and imbalances, however, are less than scandalous from the technological point of view. We have seen in Chapter 18 that consumption has an intrinsic tendency toward privacy, and so the decay of civility and of the public realm is not thought to be a crucial danger as long as it does not threaten the integrity of private consumption and the functioning and expansion of the productive machinery. When a point of such danger is approached, the metadevice of politics comes into play and initiates the necessary repairs. But these instabilities of principle and fact do scandalize one who is concerned about the loss of the public and bodily dimensions of our lives. A corresponding reform must wrest public spaces that can be bodily inhabited from crime and from technology. Violent crime can be combated technologically through the establishment of more or less private fortresses and thus only through the surrender of the public domain. If the latter is to be regained for civility, it is not enough to ward off the forces of crime; they must be reconciled with the body politic, and that involves the question of social justice to which I will turn in a moment.
The big cities still contain public places. But most of them are bequests of early modern or pretechnological times. Surprisingly, however, the large technological structures that shape the urban setting have a native countertendency to technology. David P. Billington, as we saw in Chapter 11, contrasts their enduring, massive, site-specific, and slowly evolving nature with the machines that have the transient, mobile, and ubiquitous character of technological devices. But as Billington also points out, structures can be standardized, thoughtless, and impenetrable, impressive in a brute and imposing manner that repels inhabitation and appropriation.43 The curtain-wall skyscraper is the archetype of this kind of structure. It makes space technologically available. It is essentially a device for human storage. The all but overwhelming tendency in the way the inner cities change is toward the expansion of the machinery that furnishe
s technologically available space. To counteract this tendency and to recover public and inhabitable spaces in the city, three linked turns must be taken.
The first consists, as Billington urges, in opening up structures such as “roads, bridges, terminals, dams, harbors, waterworks, power plants, office towers, and public housing blocks.”44 To open them up is to give them an intelligible design, to adjust them to their location, and above all to invite humans to walk along, across, and through them, to rest and linger in them, and to allow people to comprehend the structures from various angles and at various levels. This provides for an appropriation of structures which, like running, is both simple and profound. It is a minimal requirement to demand of a structure that it welcome us as bodily creatures, moving about and perceiving things in our own right. Yet measured and attentive walking has since the beginning of architecture been the appropriate human response to great buildings.
But an aggregate of intelligible and accessible structures is not yet a city in the eminent sense. As Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore point out, a city is a memorable place if it is oriented by nature, history, divinity, or a great and common task.45 A memorable place is a focal thing writ large. It gathers and focuses the crucial dimensions of the world. Orientation in the inner cities does not have to be invented or produced; it needs discovery and nurture, the restoration of historic buildings and the preservation of open space around them, the recovery of green areas along river banks and lake shores, and the connection of these focal points through pleasant walkways. But especially in places where this second turn has been taken with care and on a grand scale it leaves one vaguely dissatisfied. Why? There are cities, especially in Europe, where the churches, palaces, city gates, and convents have been restored with lavish attention, where the inner city has been made a pedestrian enclave and adorned with paintings, benches, varied pavements, bridges, and fountains. People are milling and sitting about, visiting museums, admiring cathedrals, taking pictures, eating, shopping, going to concerts and plays. Is this not an excellent life and urban culture at its best? It would be zealotry to deny the real pleasures and profound experiences that are to be had in such a setting. Still, it has a passive and distracting air about it. To see it more clearly one must distinguish between culture as scenery and culture as enactment. Culture as scenery is something that is taken in by looking or listening. However different the circumstances from which buildings, paintings, and concertos have arisen, they are just so many cultural values or attractions. They have different rankings as established by art history and tourism, but they are all “taken in” the same inconsequential way. A Greek temple, a medieval castle, a baroque orchestral suite were created and appropriated in totally different but equally engaging ways, that is to say, they were enacted as culture. They are now enjoyed in one and the same passive manner. They have congealed into magnificent stages on which nothing of consequence is enacted. The final turn then that we must take toward a life of public excellence is one that encourages the enactment of culture. As said before, this cannot be done as an affair of the state. What we can do is to reshape our cities so that they provide prominent and thoughtfully designed places for the exercise of the various focal practices that have engaged us, for sports, music, the arts, worship, and engaging work.46
Finally, we come to the problem of social justice. Unlike focal practices that are presently confined to the margins and shadows of the technological society, social justice needs no special recollection and affirmation. It is a clear and central concern of the liberal democratic tradition. What the reform of technology has to contribute to this problem is the consideration of the obstacles and opportunities that come into relief once the pattern of technology and its decisive counterforces are recognized. The crucial obstacle or, better, deflection of social equality derives from the fact, first, that liberal democracy allowed technology to specify the kind of life to be secured for all, and, second, that technology, once its rule was unchallenged, put the historically given inequality in the service of its stability and advancement. More specifically and less misleading, once the broad middle class that should have been the basis of social reforms had agreed upon the technological approach to reality, its members thought, mistakenly, that a hierarchy of inequality would provide for them individually the ladder to the fullest blessings of technology. That was the argument of Chapters 13–16. Only a cataclysmic turn of economic events would be able to rupture the tie between technology and inequality that we find in Western democracies.47 The energy crisis might bring about such a turn, but it is not likely as suggested in Chapter 19. However, instead of seeing the hold that technology has on the social structure being broken through an external and violent blow, we may loosen it by revoking from within our allegiance to technology. Equality then becomes accessible in a new way. And such an emancipation from technology is of course the goal of reform.
What does that mean concretely? If we center ourselves in focal practices, the worth of our lives will no longer be measured by the standard of living. The standard of excellence is now wealth of engagement. Thus the standard of living loses both its constricting and invidious forces. In losing the former, it frees the means for social reform; in losing the latter it yields to an ideal of excellence that is more generally affordable and attainable. The culture of the table in the early modern period used to be the property of all people, and the contributions of the relatively poor to this heritage are as noble as those of the rich.48 Running is open to everyone; so is gardening, music, and poetry. Wealth, of course, requires a certain level of affluence, one that is denied at least to those that the government recognizes as poor. To provide for them the standard of living that is needed for an engaging life, affluence must be shifted from the middle to the lower class. This can only be done if enough of us have come to understand the good life as one of wealth so that we gladly let go of the affluence that is in excess of wealth and a distraction to it. And as suggested in Chapter 21, the focal thing that graces our lives with wealth and enthusiasm will issue in sympathy as well. Thus the reduction of affluence in one’s life springs not only from a concern to strengthen one’s personal focal practice but also from a desire to share that possibility with others. Those others are the people in this country, but they are the poor around the globe as well.
These suggestions, drawn from the analysis of technology and the experience of engagement, are mere hints, of course. But they shed new light, I believe, on a problem that has become puzzling and untractable within the liberal democratic tradition. They are essentially consonant, however, with the proposals to achieve greater social justice as they have been formulated by the best proponents of that tradition, for example, Rawls, Thurow, Galbraith. They bring into relief the center or pivot that remains indistinct in the liberal design. As in the case of the two-sector economy, the renewal of the cities and the advancement of social justice must proceed in an interplay of collective affirmation and legislation. Here too a collective affirmation must provide the basis for the experiments and trials that we must pass through to attain a political affirmation of the truly civic and just society.
26
The Recovery of the Promise of Technology
The promise of technology was one of liberty and prosperity. But the brilliance and joy of life that are implied in the promise have not come about in spite of two centuries of gigantic efforts. The technological measures that have freed us from hunger, disease, and illiteracy have become part of the inconspicuous periphery of everyday life. The commodities that fill the center of our lives with entertainment and diversion gratify us in a passing and shallow way. We take justified pride in the intricacy and power of the technological machinery that we have constructed and continue to improve. But this confidence about the means goes hand in hand with great diffidence about the ends in which they issue.
There is no doubt that modern technology has brought forth the most complex and the most imposing creations in human history. The in
genuity, coordination, and devotion that have come to be embodied in the technological achievements are of epochal rank and deserve admiration. One who plays an authentic role in these accomplishments can, as did the engineers of Tracy Kidder’s story, take satisfaction simply in the completion of a singularly demanding task. But to be human is to recognize and appropriate one’s world. Hence the context of the uses to which technological work is devoted cannot in the end be denied. There is satisfaction to be had in this wider scope as well. Medical technology provides healing and wholeness where otherwise there would be insufferable pain and crippling disfiguration. Media technology allows us to consider all things and to be enlightened about the world in an intelligent and compassionate way. But once restored to health and well informed, we are now able to take up life. And here it is no good to cling to the preparatory and the exceptional. Rather we must ask: What kind of life have we secured for ourselves typically and willingly? Can engineers, managers, lawyers, and all the other members of the technostructure be content in their work if they must admit that it serves a life that often is ruled at its center by triviality and frivolity? Sometimes there is a temptation to embrace openly and proudly what Langdon Winner has called the rule of instrumentality.1 One wants to elevate the machinery to the central and crucial position and reduce the so-called ends to mere obstacles and occasions for the development and celebration of technological devices. We would then welcome accidents and premature deaths because they allow us to maintain and improve an impressive insurance industry which in turn would give us a reason to construct something as breathtaking as the Sears Tower. We would be glad of the boredom that quickly overtakes the latest video games because it is the spur to designing still more sophisticated games which in turn permits us to search for more sophisticated computer technology. Cancer would be considered a blessing because it occasions an admirable medical technology. But at least in our reflective moments we hold to the traditional understanding of means and ends.2