Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry

by Albert Borgmann

  41. See Rawls, “A Kantian Conception of Equality,” in Property, Profits, and Economic Justice, ed. Virginia Held (Belmont, Calif., 1980), p. 201; and A Theory of Justice, p. 259.

  42. See Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 328–29; and “Fairness to Goodness,” p. 544.

  43. See Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy, p. 99; see also his “Democratic Theory,” pp. 168–70.

  44. See Macpherson, The Life and Times, p. 100.

  45. Ibid., pp. 102–8.

  46. In “Democratic Theory: Ontology and Technology,” Macpherson’s unresolved difficulties in his view of democracy and technology are plain. He suggests that technology can serve as an instrument in advancing the liberal democratic ideal of self-development for all. But the facile instrumentalist approach is not open to Macpherson because he takes the notion of the person as the consumer, derived from capitalism, as opposed to truly liberal democracy. Thus technology can aid self-development only through the reduction of labor (p. 169). Macpherson sees clearly that in the sphere of leisure improved technology will lead to increased consumption, a counterforce to liberal democracy in his sense (p. 170). Thus technology turns out to be both the servant and the enemy of liberal democracy.

  47. See Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’” in Toward a Rational Society, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston, 1970), pp. 103, 112, 113. Again I cannot do justice to the continuously evolving thinking of Habermas. I am concerned here merely with some striking and helpful objections from Habermas’s pen.

  48. Ibid., p. 90.

  49. Ibid., p. 91. “Choice” may suggest that work establishes ends as well as it employs means. But Habermas makes it clear that work proceeds only from given ends or preferences. Work is essentially instrumental. In Legitimation Crisis, p. 141, the rationality of work is treated in more detail, being distinguished into purposive and systems rationality. The distinction is not crucial to what follows.

  50. See Habermas, “Technology and Science,” p. 92.

  51. Ibid., pp. 94–95.

  52. Ibid., pp. 98–99; see Legitimation Crisis, pp. 17–26.

  53. See Habermas, “Technology and Science,” p. 99.

  54. Ibid., p. 104. This point has been developed carefully by Mario Bunge in “Toward a Philosophy of Technology,” in Philosophy and Technology, ed. Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey (New York, 1972), pp. 62–76.

  55. See Habermas, “Technology and Science,” pp. 106–7.

  56. Ibid., pp. 119–20.

  57. See Habermas, “Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence,” Inquiry 13 (1970):371–72. A similar set of conditions has been set down by Milton R. Wessel under the heading of The Rule of Reason: A New Approach to Corporate Litigation (Reading, Mass., 1976), pp. 19–24. The fact that Wessel urges acceptance of the rule of reason because it “is essential to corporate success and even corporate survival in its present form” and “must be adopted as a matter of sound business practice and economic well-being” shows how ambiguous and subvertible Habermas’s suggestion is.

  58. See Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (New York, 1978), pp. 223–24.

  59. Ibid., pp. 224–25.

  60. See Chapter 11 above for discussion and nn. 5–8 in that chapter for reference.

  61. See Habermas, “Technology and Science,” p. 94; see also p. 114.

  62. See Otto von Simson’s account of the construction and dedication of the abbey of St. Denis in The Gothic Cathedral (Princeton, N.J., 1974), pp. 61–141. See William Leiss, “Needs, Exchanges and the Fetishism of Objects,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 2 (1978):27–48, on the discontinuities of norms in pretechnological cultures and also on the danger of overemphasizing them.

  63. See Habermas, “Technology and Science,” p. 98.

  64. Ibid., pp. 100–101, 119, 120; see Legitimation Crisis, pp. 36–37 and passim.

  65. See Habermas, “Technology and Science,” pp. 102–3; and Legitimation Crisis, pp. 60, 61, and 135.

  66. See Habermas, “Technology and Science,” pp. 107–10.

  67. Ibid., p. 109; and Legitimation Crisis, p. 73.

  68. See Habermas, “Technology and Science,” p. 107.

  69. Ibid., pp. 118–19.

  70. This is so if we take the outline of communicative competence as the specification of necessary conditions for a desirable society.

  71. See Habermas, “Technology and Science,” pp. 113 and 119; and Legitimation Crisis, pp. 142–43.

  72. This would be so even if discussions were not merely unrestrained but took place “under conditions of individuation” and achieved “full complementarity of expectations.” See “Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence,” pp. 371–72. Kai Nielsen recognizes how thin the norms of communicative competence are and seeks to strengthen them through additional features. This shows that there is still a common fund of values and experiences that we can tap in speaking of fairness, solidarity, reasonableness, and finally perhaps of communicative competence. In Chapter 11 I have tried to explain my reservations about values as fundaments of reform. See Nielsen, “Technology as Ideology,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 1 (1978):143–46.

  CHAPTER 15

  1. See Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), p. 46. William Leiss also criticizes frequent inconsistencies in the scholarly concepts of technology in “The Social Consequences of Technological Progress,” Canadian Public Administration 13 (1970):246–62.

  2. For elaboration see my “Freedom and Determinism in a Technological Setting,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 2 (1979):79–90. The notion of “capacity for significance” is similar to Manfred Stanley’s concept of human dignity. See The Technological Conscience (New York, 1978), pp. 53–75.

  3. For the scholarly setting in which such a view of the basis of the social order is to be located, see Stanley, pp. 101–5.

  4. For evidence of people’s sense of loss and grief in the face of the social changes that accompany technological progress, see Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules (New York, 1982), p. 103. For a discussion of those changes see Chapter 18. As regards the growing uneasiness in people’s complicity with technology, see Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity (New York, 1981), pp. 126–34.

  5. See Irene Taviss, “A Survey of Popular Attitudes toward Technology,” Technology and Culture 13 (1972):609; Todd R. La Porte and Daniel Metlay, “Technology Observed: Attitudes of a Wary Public,” Science 188 (April 11, 1975):123; see also the same authors’ “Public Attitudes toward Present and Future Technologies: Satisfactions and Apprehensions,” Social Studies of Science 5 (1975):375, 379, 397.

  6. See La Porte and Metlay, “Technology Observed,” p. 123.

  7. Ibid., p. 121; Taviss, p. 607; La Porte and Metlay, “Public Attitudes,” pp. 373, 375, 396; and Yankelovich, p. 103.

  8. See Taviss, p. 609; La Porte and Metlay, “Technology Observed,” p. 123.

  9. See Taviss, p. 608; La Porte and Metlay, “Technology Observed,” pp. 123–24; and “Public Attitudes,” p. 379.

  10. See Richard A. Easterlin, “Does Money Buy Happiness?” Public Interest, no. 30 (1973):3–10; and “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?” in Nations and Households in Economic Growth, ed. Paul A. David and Melvin W. Reder (New York, 1974), pp. 89–125.

  11. See Lee Rainwater, What Money Buys: Inequality and the Social Meanings of Income (New York, 1974), pp. 88–93; Easterlin, “Does Money Buy Happiness?” p. 10.

  12. See La Porte and Metlay, “Public Attitudes,” pp. 393 and 396.

  13. See Albert H. Cantril and Charles W. Roll, Jr., Hopes and Fears of the American People (New York, 1971), pp. 19 and 23; Nicholas Rescher, “A Questionnaire Study of American Values by 2000 A.D.,” in Values and the Future, ed. Kurt Baier and Rescher (New York, 1969), p. 136.

  14. See Taviss, pp. 613 and 621. For evidence that confidence in technology has recently been decreasing, see Yankelovich, “Changing Publi
c Attitudes to Science and the Quality of Life,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 7, no. 39 (Spring 1982): 25.

  15. E.g., Rainwater’s study, referred to in n. 11 above; and Lillian Breslow Rubin, Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working Class Family (New York, 1976).

  16. See Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York, 1973).

  17. Ibid., p. 107.

  18. Ibid., p. 110.

  19. Ibid., p. 117.

  CHAPTER 16

  1. See Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, 1975), pp. 60, 61, 135.

  2. Ibid., pp. 64 and 68.

  3. See John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 2d ed. (Boston, 1972), pp. 1–10.

  4. See Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York, 1958 [first published in 1932]); Manfred Stanley, The Technological Conscience (New York, 1978), pp. 39–42.

  5. Cf. Todd R. La Porte and Daniel Metlay, “Public Attitudes toward Present and Future Technologies,” Social Studies of Science 5 (1975):382 in particular.

  6. See Normal H. Nie, Sidney Verba, and John R. Petrocik, The Changing American Voter (Cambridge, Mass., 1976).

  7. See Arthur T. Hadley, The Empty Polling Booth (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,; 1977), pp. 15–26.

  8. They constitute 35 percent of those who refrain from voting; the poor and uneducated represent 13 percent, the alienated 22 percent.

  9. See Donald J. Devine, The Attentive Public: Polyarchical Democracy (Chicago, 1970); and La Porte and Metlay, “Technology Observed,” Science 188, 11 April 1975, p. 125.

  10. The force of the democratic call for equality makes itself felt in cycles as Samuel P. Huntington has pointed out in The Crisis of Democracy, by Michael Crozier, Huntington, and Joji Watanuki (New York, 1975), pp. 59–118, p. 112 in particular.

  11. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, 1959), pp. 51–53. See Andrew Hacker, “Creating American Inequality,” New York Review of Books, 20 March 1980.

  12. See Lester C. Thurow, “Tax Wealth, Not Income,” New York Times Magazine, 11 April 1976; and The Zero-Sum Society (Middlesex, 1981), pp. 168–69.

  13. See Richard A. Posner, “Economic Justice and the Economist,” Public Interest, no. 33 (1973):116–18.

  14. Equality has equal rights as necessary or formal conditions. But the substantive degree (or the sufficiency of the conditions) of equality is measured by income (or wealth). Societies are of course conceivable where equality of wealth or income is not correlated with equality of one’s standing in society, and there is some slack in this country between income or wealth and one’s life-style and prestige. Education and occupation are differentiating factors independent, to some extent, of income. But their force seems to be declining while that of income seems to be rising (see Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules [New York, 1982], pp. 142–43; and Richard P. Coleman and Lee Rainwater, Social Standing in America [New York, 1978], pp. 18, 24, 26, 28–46).

  15. See Thurow, “Toward a Definition of Economic Justice,” Public Interest, no. 31 (1973):56–63; and Posner, pp. 114–16.

  16. See Thurow, “Toward a Definition,” p. 77.

  17. See Hacker, “Creating American Inequality,” p. 21. The families whose income is $50,000 or higher constitute, as said before, 3.6 percent.

  18. See Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York, 1965); Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford, 1977), pp. 9–43; Thurow, “Toward a Definition,” pp. 68–69.

  19. See Hacker, “Creating American Inequality,” p. 21; and Thurow, “Tax Wealth, Not Income,” p. 32.

  20. See Thurow’s puzzlement in “Tax Wealth, Not Income,” pp. 102–3.

  21. See Hacker, “Creating American Inequality,” pp. 20–26.

  22. See Thurow, “Toward a Definition,” pp. 75–77; and The Zero-Sum Society, p. 168.

  23. See Easterlin’s studies, referred to in n. 10 of Chapter 15; and Thurow, “Toward a Definition,” pp. 65–67.

  24. See Thurow, “Tax Wealth, Not Income,” pp. 102–3.

  25. This diachronic equality of affluence has also been called “dynamic egalitarianism.” See Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 166–67.

  26. On the shifting line of poverty see Lillian Breslow Rubin, Worlds of Pain (New York, 1976), pp. 8, 29–31, 47–48, 169–70, 206. On the gradation and acceptance of inequality see Coleman and Rainwater, Social Standing in America, pp. 24, 119–221; and Yankelovich, New Rules, pp. 134–43. In a socialist country, almost everyone is affected by an economic decline. Hence, Heilbroner to the contrary, it seems that capitalist countries are structurally better able, in the short run at least, to cope with economic and energy crises. See Robert L. Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, 2d ed. (New York, 1980), pp. 77–111.

  27. See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York, 1964), pp. 229–318.

  CHAPTER 17

  1. See Georges Friedmann, “Leisure and Technological Civilization,” International Social Science Journal 12 (1960):509–21; and E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, no. 38 (1967): 60–61.

  2. The present work-labor distinction is not to be confused with Arendt’s that was touched on in Chapter 11. See nn. 5–8 in that chapter. Even prior to the advent of modern technology, work was sometimes taken as a mere means in an attitude of instrumentalism. See Alasdair Clayre, Work and Play (New York, 1974), pp. 103–12. But one must distinguish between subjective and objective instrumentalism. The former is a matter of attitude and individual disposition, the latter is built into the work process. The former can be changed through an improvement of individual attitude. The latter can be concealed or ignored through the thinking of pious thoughts, but it can never be overcome by an individual.

  3. See Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure (New York, 1964), pp. 75, 189, 300–302. The loss of good work is chronicled in part by Thompson (see n. 1 above) and by Herbert G. Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” American Historical Review 78 (1973):531–88.

  4. See George Sturt, The Wheelwright’s Shop (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 12, 14, 15, 31, 47.

  5. See William H. Form, “Auto Workers and Their Machines: A Study of Work, Factory, and Job Satisfaction in Four Countries,” Social Forces 52 (1973):2. A historical account of work from the grim viewpoint has been given by Melvin Kranzberg and Joseph Gies, By the Sweat of Thy Brow: Work in the Western World (New York, 1975).

  6. See Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York, 1937), pp. 3–21.

  7. See Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974), pp. 75–77. See also Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), pp. 123–26.

  8. See John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 2d ed. (Boston, 1972), pp. 59–71.

  9. See Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (New York, 1969), pp. 79–96.

  10. See Adam Smith, pp. 7–10.

  11. See Braverman, pp. 169 and 185–87; and Bernard Gendron and Nancy Holmstrom, “Marx, Machinery, and Alienation,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 2 (1979):120.

  12. See Giedion, pp. 96–106; and Braverman, pp. 85–123.

  13. See Giedion, pp. 130–246.

  14. See Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York, 1973), pp. 91–100, 173–87, 263–67, 309–36, 546–55.

  15. Beyond the suggestions in the text, the challenge of showing how the device paradigm fits organizations is one that I cannot take up in this essay. Pertinent work in this direction has been devoted to the analysis of bureaucracy. See especially Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 3 vols. (New York, 1968), 3:956–1005; and also Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York, 1976), pp. 145–90, particularly pp. 170–74; and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
(Notre Dame, Ind., 1981), pp. 33 and 68.

  16. “Division” and “device” are etymologically cognate; but that is a mere curiosity today.

  17. See Giedion, pp. 152–55, 222–28, 452–67; and Boorstin, pp. 175–80, 309–16; Caroll W. Pursell, Jr., “Cyrus Hall McCormick and the Mechanization of Agriculture,” in Technology in America, ed. Pursell (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 71–79.

  18. See Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1963), pp. 173–74.

  19. See Braverman, pp. 155–68 and 236–48.

  20. See De Grazia, pp. 1–56. Adina Schwartz, in “Meaningful Work,” Ethics 92 (1982):634–46, has rightly argued that we have a moral obligation to provide good work for all. But her reform proposal, which resembles Lauterburg’s, discussed below, does not go far enough.

  21. See Eugene S. Ferguson, “The American-ness of American Technology,” Technology and Culture 20 (1979):16.

  22. See Boorstin, Democracy and its Discontents (New York, 1975), pp. 112–14. Fred Hirsch similarly reminds us that going to the barber can be more than a mere means of being shaved; see his Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 73–74.

  23. See Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience, pp. 347–51, for the need and benefits of modern water supply systems.

  24. Quoted by Braverman on p. 424 where further illustration is provided.

  25. Ibid., pp. 426–35.

  26. Ibid., pp. 430 and 433–34.

  27. See Hirsch, pp. 45–51.

  28. See Braverman, pp. 438–39.

  29. See Randall Collins, The Credential Society (New York, 1979).

  30. See Eli Ginzberg and George J. Vojta, “The Service Sector of the U.S. Economy,” Scientific American 244 (March 1981):48–49.

  31. Ibid., p. 50.

  32. Ibid., pp. 50–51.

  33. See Braverman, pp. 330–38.