CHAPTER 11
1. See Herbert L. Sussman, Victorians and the Machine (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), pp. 4–5.
2. See Hugo A. Meier, “Technology and Democracy, 1800–1860,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 43 (March 1957):633.
3. See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford, 1964).
4. Quoted in Leo Marx, p. 178. Henry David Thoreau said similarly: “We do not ride the railroad; it rides upon us.” See Walden and Other Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York, 1950), p. 83.
5. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958).
6. Ibid., p. 152.
7. Ibid., p. 153. Martin Heidegger makes the same point in his portrayal of the silversmith at work in The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York, 1977), pp. 7–9.
8. See Arendt, p. 145.
9. See Thomas Carlyle, “Signs of the Times,” in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (New York, 1869), 1:465.
10. See Timothy Walker, “Defense of Mechanical Philosophy,” in Readings in Technology and American Life, ed. Carroll W. Pursell (New York, 1969), p. 72 (first published in 1831).
11. See Carlyle, p. 465.
12. Ibid., p. 466.
13. See Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), pp. 230–36.
14. See Carlyle, p. 474.
15. Ibid., p. 468.
16. See Walker, pp. 68 and 72.
17. See, e.g., Robert Dorfman, “An Afterword: Humane Values and Environmental Decisions,” in When Values Conflict, ed. Laurence H. Tribe, Corinne S. Schelling, and John Voss (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p. 160; Laurence H. Tribe, “Technology Assessment and the Fourth Discontinuity: The Limits of Instrumental Rationality,” Southern California Law Review 46 (1973):620–21; Winner, Autonomous Technology, pp. 226–51.
18. See also Tribe’s “Policy Science: Analysis or Ideology?” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1972):66–110; and “Ways Not to Think about Plastic Trees,” Yale Law Journal 83 (1974): 1315–48.
19. See Tribe, “Technology Assessment,” pp. 625–30.
20. See Winner, Autonomous Technology, pp. 234–36.
21. Ibid., p. 229.
22. See Tribe, “Technology Assessment,” pp. 620–23; see “Ways Not to Think about Plastic Trees,” pp. 1323–25.
23. See Tribe, “Technology Assessment,” p. 642.
24. Ibid., p. 641–57.
25. Ibid., p. 651 n. 117.
26. Ibid., pp. 645 and 647–48.
27. Ibid., p. 650 n. 115.
28. See Winner, Autonomous Technology, pp. 232–36.
29. Ibid., p. 234.
30. Ibid., p. 235.
31. Ibid., p. 301.
32. See Walker, “Defence of Mechanical Philosophy,” p. 70. For antecedents see Paolo Rossi, Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans. Salvator Attanasio (New York, 1970), pp. 137–45.
33. See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden, pp. 190–209.
34. See Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1963), pp. 321–63, where Mumford is still eager to see a new order manifest itself in the machine though there is an admixture of doubt even then.
35. See Le Corbusier (Charles Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (London, 1931), p. 1.
36. Ibid., p. 14.
37. Quoted by Reyner Banham in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (New York, 1960), p. 326.
38. Ibid., p. 303.
39. See Percival Goodman and Paul Goodman, Communitas (Chicago, 1947), p. 40. See also R. Buckminster Fuller and Robert Marks, The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller (Garden City, N.Y., 1973), pp. 18–23 and 116–41.
40. See Charles Jencks, Architecture 2000 (New York, 1971), p. 59. See also Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture (New Haven, 1977), pp. 74–75.
41. See Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, pp. 4, 95, 108.
42. See David P. Billington, “Structures and Machines: The Two Sides of Technology,” Soundings 57 (1974):275. Detailed arguments and illustrations in support of the central thesis are provided in Billington’s Structures and the Urban Environment (Princeton, N.J., 1978) which also, on pp. 149–53, contains a summary and extension of the article cited above. Billington’s distinction between structures and machines is foreshadowed by Lewis Mumford’s between utilities and machines. See Technics and Civilization, pp. 9–12.
43. See Billington, “Structures and Machines,” pp. 275–76.
44. But to the external articulation corresponds (intended) internal vacuity.
45. For a discussion of uncertain exceptions see Bloomer and Moore, pp. 131–38.
46. See Robert H. Socolow, “Failures of Discourse: Obstacles to the Integration of Environmental Values into Natural Resource Policy,” in When Values Conflict, ed. Tribe, Schelling, and Voss, p. 14.
CHAPTER 12
1. See David Layzer, “The Arrow of Time,” Scientific American 233 (December 1975):58–59.
2. See F. H. C. Crick, “Thinking about the Brain,” Scientific American 241 (September 1979):222.
3. See Herbert G. Reid and Ernest J. Yanarella, “Toward a Post-Modern Theory of American Political Science and Culture,” Cultural Hermeneutics 2 (1974):91–166; Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (New York, 1976); and Alasdair MacIntyre. After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind., 1981), pp. 84–102.
4. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1970).
5. See Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge, 1970); and Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, pp. 84–93.
6. See Anne C. Minas, “Why ‘Paradigms’ Don’t Prove Anything,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 10 (1977):217–31.
7. Cf, Sheldon S. Wolin’s list of paradigms in “Paradigms and Political Theories,” in Politics and Experience, ed. Preston King and B. C. Parekh (Cambridge, 1968), p. 134.
8. C. B. Macpherson uses “model” in the sense in which I use “paradigm,” and he underscores a model’s lack of explanatory self-sufficiency thus: “The definition of a model depends on value judgments about what are the essentials, and those judgments cannot be defended merely by invoking a definition.” See The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford, 1977), p. 9.
9. For support of this point see Wolin’s article quoted in n. 7 above; Macpherson’s book in the preceding note, pp. 1–9; John G. Gunnell, “Social Science and Political Reality: The Problem of Explanation,” Social Research 35 (1968):159–201; and John Rodman, “Paradigm Change in Political Science: An Ecological Perspective,” American Behavioral Scientist 24 (1980):49–78.
10. For a similar but more elaborate and comprehensive view of the irony in the development of technology see Manfred Stanley, The Technological Conscience (New York, 1978), pp. 18–52.
11. The relation of the increasing prominence of commodities to the increasing unobtrusiveness of machineries parallels and may be taken as a generalized version of the amplification-reduction structure that Don Ihde uncovers in his stimulating analyses of technologically informed instrumentation and perception in Technics and Praxis (Dordrecht, 1979), pp. 3–50, 56–57, 74–77. A generalization and radicalization of this structure allows us, I believe, to tie it to substantive concerns and thus to determine in just what way the structure is “nonneutral” and leads to “significant transformations.” See ibid., pp. 54 and 66. See also my review of Ihde, cited in the note to the Acknowledgments.
12. Commodities are really neither things, nor properties, nor social relations but ontological items of a novel sort. Therefore one might proceed more ambitiously and try to develop the thesis that the traditional world of substantial things is, in the rise of the modern period, being dissolved into functions, that the description of our world in terms of the traditional substances is misleading, and that a new vocabulary of functions, systems, mechanisms, and structures is
required. This is the thesis of Heinrich Rombach, Substanz, System, Struktur: Die Ontologie des Funktionalismus (Freiburg, 1965). I regard this problem, like the problem of the origin of technology touched on in Chapter 8, as significant and challenging but beyond the pale of my present concerns.
CHAPTER 13
1. E.g., Daniel J. Boorstin, Democracy and Its Discontents (New York, 1975); Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, 1975); August Heckscher, The Public Happiness (New York, 1962); Robert L. Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, 2d ed. (New York, 1980); Walter Kerr, The Decline of Pleasure (New York, 1962); Staffan B. Linder, The Harried Leisure Class (New York, 1970); Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy (Oxford, 1976).
2. See The Oxford English Dictionary.
3. See R. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (New York, n.d. [first published in 1969]), pp. 130–31.
4. See W. Norris Clarke, “Technology and Man: A Christian Vision,” in Philosophy and Technology, ed. Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey (New York, 1972), pp. 249–50 and 257–58. See also the anthology Values and the Future: The Impact of Technological Change on American Values, ed. Kurt Baier and Nicholas Rescher (New York, 1969) which proceeds from the assumption that the value question is fundamental.
5. See his “What Is Value? An Analysis of the Concept,” in Baier and Rescher, p. 40.
6. Ibid., p. 38.
7. Ibid., p. 40.
8. Ibid.
9. See Clarke, p. 257.
10. See Baier, p. 48. An example of how general values are and how susceptible to technological specification can be found in the tables of values in Milton Rokeach, The Nature of Human Values (New York, 1973), pp. 57–71.
11. See the anthology edited by Tribe et al., cited in n. 17 of Chapter 11.
12. See, e.g., “America: Out to Eat,” Newsweek, 3 October 1977, pp. 86–89.
13. See Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York, 1976), pp. 31, 42, 52, 54, 190.
14. See G. William Domhoff, The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America (New York, 1971). For the varying numerical estimates of the governing class, see pp. 34, 72, 93, 250, 307. For further discussion of this issue and a review of a later book of Domhoff’s, see Andrew Hacker, “What Rules America?” New York Review of Books, 1 May 1975, pp. 9–13.
15. John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 2d ed. (Boston, 1972), pp. 115–16. See also Hacker’s article of the previous note. On the emergence of the division between ownership and control, see Alfred C. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).
16. See Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), p. 41.
17. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, no friends of the very rich, admit that their conspicuous consumption has decreased. See Monopoly Capital (New York, 1968), pp. 44–45; see also p. 35.
18. According to Baran and Sweezy, capitalists’ consumption has been decreasing as a share of profits and even more so as a share of total output. See Monopoly Capital, pp. 79–81.
19. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, 1964).
20. See Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974).
21. See Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, pp. xvi and 235. On Marcuse’s ambivalence and its resolution, see Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’” in Toward a Rational Society, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1970), pp. 81–122; William Leiss, “Technological Rationality: Marcuse and His Critics,” in The Domination of Nature (New York, 1972), pp. 199–212. On Marcuse’s trust in the perfectibility of technology, see Reinhart Maurer, “Der angewandte Heidegger: Herbert Marcuse und das akademische Proletariat,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 70 (1970):238–59; and Hans Sachsse, “Die Technik in der Sicht Herbert Marcuses und Martin Heideggers,” in Proceedings of the XVth World Congress of Philosophy (Sofia, Bulgaria, 1973), 1:371–75. On the uncritical acceptance of technology by Marxists generally, see Langdon Winner, “The Political Philosophy of Alternative Technology,” in Technology and Man’s Future, 3d ed., ed. Albert H. Teich (New York, 1981), pp. 376–77.
22. There is a last desperate move that Marxists sometimes make, and that is to claim that people’s very consciousness has been appropriated by the capitalists so that people’s consciousness needs first to be freed for liberation. But to regard people as so malleable is to take a dubious view of human nature. On that view reform becomes indistinguishable from manipulation. See Robert L. Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, 2d ed. (New York, 1980), pp. 136–48.
23. See Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, pp. 363–67; Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, pp. xii–xiii and 225–46.
24. See Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 2d ed., pp. 47–49.
25. See Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, pp. 2, 16, 18, 235. New departures can be found in Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension (Boston, 1978) which is an attempt to break away from the technological one-dimensionality, and William Leiss’s The Limits to Satisfaction (Toronto, 1976).
CHAPTER 14
1. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Currin V. Shields (Indianapolis, 1956), title page of the treatise.
2. See Mill’s Autobiography (New York, 1944), pp. 178–80. See C. B. Macpherson, “Democratic Theory: Ontology and Technology,” in Philosophy and Technology, ed. Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey (New York, 1972), p. 166.
3. One should not think that Humboldt expects each individual to develop all possible faculties. Rather each is to be free to develop those capacities in which he or she feels naturally gifted; diversity is achieved and completed socially when we enjoy one another’s developed talents in what John Rawls calls a social union in his A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 520–29. For the original statement see Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen,” in Werke, ed. Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel (Stuttgart, 1960–64), 1:64–69. For further discussion see Chapter 24.
4. See C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford, 1976), p. 1.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 2.
7. See Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” in Public and Private Morality, ed. Stuart Hampshire (New York, 1978), pp. 130–33.
8. See Macpherson, The Life and Times, p. 47.
9. Ibid., p. 99.
10. See Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” p. 127.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 142.
13. See Gerald Dworkin, “Paternalism,” in Morality and the Law, ed. Richard A. Wasserstrom (Belmont, Calif., 1971), pp. 107–26.
14. See Macpherson, The Life and Times, pp. 9–10; and Mulford Q. Sibley, Technology and Utopian Thought (Minneapolis, 1971).
15. See Macpherson, The Life and Times, pp. 10–12.
16. See Daniel J. Boorstin, Democracy and Its Discontents (New York, 1975), p. 28.
17. Ibid., p. 36.
18. Ibid., p. 102. Boorstin speaks very similarly in “The Republic of Technology,” in The Republic of Technology (New York, 1978), pp. 1–12. His thesis must be seen against the background of his detailed study of The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York, 1973). It must also be stressed that Boorstin’s view of democracy or technology is complex. Deep misgivings are woven into his approval and hope.
19. See Christopher Jencks, Who Gets Ahead? The Determinants of Economic Success in America (New York, 1979); and Richard P. Coleman and Lee Rainwater, Social Standing in America (New York, 1978).
20. E.g., Eugene S. Ferguson, “The American-ness of American Technology,” Technology and Culture 20 (1979):3–24; Bertrand de Jouvenel, “Technology as a Means,” in Values and the Future, ed. Kurt Baier and Nicholas Rescher (New York, 1969), pp. 217–32; and Boorstin’s essay quoted in n. 18 above. Scandinavia and Western Europe are better examples of universal if unequal prosperity than the United States.
21. S
ee Gerald Dworkin, “Paternalism,” p. 118.
22. Ibid., pp. 123 and 124.
23. See Irving Kristol, “Pornography, Obscenity, and the Case for Censorship,” in Philosophy of Law, ed. Joel Feinberg and Hyman Gross (Encino, Calif., 1975), pp. 165–71.
24. See Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, 1975), pp. 105–10.
25. See Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” p. 142.
26. Ibid., p. 143.
27. Ibid.
28. That the mind is a dubious fundament for the adjudication of value problems I have argued in “Mind, Body, and World,” Philosophical Forum 8 (1976):68–86.
29. See his “What Liberalism Isn’t,” New York Review of Books, 20 January 1983, pp. 47–50.
30. See his “Why Liberals Should Believe in Equality,” New York Review of Books, 3 February 1983, pp. 32–34.
31. See Dworkin, “What Liberalism Isn’t,” pp. 33 and 34; and “Why Liberals Should Believe,” p. 47.
32. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971).
33. Ibid., pp. 395–97.
34. See, e.g., Adina Schwartz, “Moral Neutrality and Primary Goods,” Ethics 83 (1973):294–307; Michael Teitelman, “The Limits of Individualism,” Journal of Philosophy 69 (1972):545–56; Thomas Nagel, “Rawls on Justice,” in Reading Rawls, ed. Norman Daniels (New York, n.d.), pp. 9–10; Benjamin R. Barber, “Justifying Justice,” in ibid., pp. 292–318.
35. See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 121, 126, and throughout.
36. Ibid., p. 92 and at countless other places.
37. Ibid., pp. 198–99.
38. I am using “opportunities” in a sense that is both broader and more concrete than Rawls’s and includes not only what he calls powers and opportunities, and income and wealth, but also those concrete institutions that inevitably define the opportunities to whose use income and wealth entitle us.
39. See Rawls, “Fairness to Goodness,” Philosophical Review 84 (1975): 536–54.
40. Rawls’s book is admirably circumspect and thoughtful. Hence one can hardly raise an objection to it that Rawls has not considered and to some degree conceded. Thus he grants that the means to pursue a conception of the good may not be neutral (pp. 415 and 416), and he recognizes that wealth beyond a certain point can be distracting and tempt one to lead an empty life (p. 290). But though Rawls acknowledges these problems, he does not pursue them.
Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry Page 42