33. Ibid., pp. 517–19.
34. Ibid., pp. 532 and 533. Joe Weizenbaum, in a reply to Bell, stresses that while the (narrowly) technological dream has been realized, “the cultural dream was cruelly mocked in its realization.” See his “Once More, the Computer Revolution,” in The Microelectronics Revolution, ed. Forester, pp. 550–70, p. 553 in particular.
35. Ibid., pp. 525–26.
36. Ibid., p. 539.
37. Ibid., p. 545.
38. Ibid.
CHAPTER 20
1. See R. R. Wilson, “The Humanness of Physics,” in Being Human in a Technological Age, ed. Donald M. Borchert and David Stewart (Athens, Ohio, 1979), p. 31.
2. Ibid., p. 4.
3. See John Noble Wilford, “Space and the American Vision,” New York Times Magazine, 5 April 1981, p. 53.
4. See “In Space to Stay,” Newsweek, 27 April 1981, pp. 22 and 24.
5. See Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York, 1976 [first published in 1957]); and Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral (Princeton, N.J., 1972 [first published in 1956]).
6. See Ronald Weber, “The View from Space,” Georgia Review 33 (1979):281.
7. See Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (New York, 1974).
8. See Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York, 1953).
9. See Pirsig, p. 26.
10. Ibid., pp. 12–14, 27–28.
11. Ibid., pp. 18–26 and passim.
12. Ibid., pp. 32–35.
13. Ibid., pp. 97–104.
14. Ibid., p. 102.
15. Ibid., pp. 54–93.
16. Ibid., pp. 174–241.
17. Ibid., p. 255.
18. Ibid., pp. 274–326.
19. Ibid., p. 297.
20. Ibid., pp. 399–412.
21. This distinction and its pivotal status have been discovered and discussed by environmentalists. But the debate has become too intricate and ramified for fruitful reference in our context. A survey of the discussion has been provided by George Sessions, “Shallow and Deep Ecology,” in Ecological Consciousness, ed. J. Donald Hughes and Robert C. Schultz (Washington, D.C., 1981).
22. See Alvin M. Weinberg, “Can Technology Replace Social Engineering?” in Technology and Man’s Future, 3d ed., ed. Albert H. Teich (New York, 1981), pp. 30 and 34. The essay was first published in 1966.
23. Ibid., p. 35. Weinberg’s suggestion springs from more than a little social pessimism. See ibid., p. 32.
24. Ibid, pp. 31–33.
25. Ibid., pp. 33–36.
26. Ibid., p. 35.
27. Ibid., p. 36.
28. See Amory B. Lovins, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Foreign Affairs 55, no. 1 (October 1976): 65–96.
29. See Warren Johnson, Muddling toward Frugality (Boulder, Colo., 1979), p. 14.
30. See E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful (New York, 1973); and Good Work (New York, 1979). He remarks specifically on the terminology of “intermediate” vs. “appropriate” in Good Work, pp. 130–31. For discussion of the terminology, see J. van Brakel, “Appropriate Technology: Facts and Values,” Research in Philosophy and Technology 3 (1980): 385–402.
31. See, e.g., the proposals in Energy Future, ed. Robert Stobaugh and Daniel Yergin (New York, 1979), pp. 287–304. For discussion, see Langdon Winner, “The Political Philosophy of Alternative Technology,” Technology and Man’s Future, ed. Teich, pp. 369–85, pp. 377–83 in particular.
32. A monument to such efforts is Where We Agree: Report of the National Coal Policy Project, Summary and Synthesis (Washington, D.C., n.d.) which issued from a meeting of industrialists and environmentalists.
33. See Schmacher, Small Is Beautiful, pp. 21, 112, 156.
34. Ibid., pp. 23, 93, 101, and passim; Johnson, pp. 13, 187, 233–34; Lovins, p. 94; Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York, 1973), p. xiii; Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity (New York, 1981).
35. See Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, pp. 155–57; and Johnson, p. 9.
36. See Illich, p. 13; Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, p. 34; Johnson, p. 12; Elgin, pp. 162–215.
37. See Illich, pp. xii–xiii.
38. Ibid. See also p. 11.
39. See ibid., pp. 23 and 69.
40. Ibid., p. 69.
41. Ibid., pp. 39–42.
42. See Barry Cohen, “Future Bikes,” New York Times Magazine, 10 August 1980; and Albert C. Gross et al., “The Aerodynamics of Human-powered Land Vehicles,” Scientific American 249 (December 1983): 142–52.
43. See Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, p. 95.
44. Ibid., pp. 96–101.
45. See Johnson, p. 182.
46. Ibid., pp. 218–19. Village life is similarly appreciated by Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost (New York, 1965), pp. 53–80; and by Lewis Mumford in The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York, 1967), pp. 156–62.
47. See Fred Hirsch’s reminders of how cloying and oppressive close association can be in Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 81–82 and 139–40.
CHAPTER 21
1. See Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York, 1975), p. 7.
2. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind., 1981), p. 112.
3. Ibid., p. 33.
4. See Manfred Stanley, The Technological Conscience (New York, 1978), pp. 40 and 42.
5. Ibid., p. 42.
6. Ibid.
7. See MacIntyre, pp. 6–7 and 227–37.
8. See this exchange:
“We can’t be a pitiful helpless giant. We gotta show ’em we’re number one.”
“Are you number one?”
A pause. “I’m number nothin’.”
In Studs Terkel, American Dreams: Lost and Found (New York, 1980), p. xxv.
9. MacIntyre says of emotivism, a version of this seemingly unbounded freedom, “that to a large degree people now think, talk and act as if emotivism were true, no matter what their avowed theoretical stand-point may be.” (See p. 21 of After Virtue.) I agree that people talk that way; but they think and act according to a definite pattern.
10. See “Big Game Farms Booming in Montana,” Missoulian, 4 November 1979, p. 1.
11. Ibid.
12. A fine example can be found in the New York Times Magazine, 20 February 1983, p. 3, where we read: “All these years you’ve been doing for others. Summer camp. Orthodontists. Ballet lessons. Tuitions. Now it’s time to do something for you . . . the two of you. A beautiful 1983 Cadillac! And it’s all you hoped it would be . . . in comfort . . . ride . . . and luxury. Isn’t it time you did something just for you?”
13. The reproving part of the appropriate idiom has been furnished along with the critique of technology and includes such terms as “disengagement,” “distraction,” “loneliness,” “disorientation,” “domination,” “procurement,” “debilitation,” “shallowness,” “complicity,” etc. The approving part is provided in Chapters 23 and 24 and contains terms such as “engagement,” “skill,” “discipline,” “fidelity,” “celebration,” “resolve,” etc., and the terms of traditional excellence in a revived sense. The terms of deictic discourse, presented in this chapter, also belong to the approving part. Any one of this idiom’s terms is of course unintelligible or ambiguous outside of the context of the overall argument.
14. See Stanley, p. 42.
15. See John Stuart Mill, “Utilitarianism [1863],” in Ethical Theories, ed. A. I. Melden (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1967), pp. 391–434, p. 403 in particular.
16. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), pp. 17–22 in particular. The point needs more qualification; but Rawls’s intention to make “the original position” as reasonable and uncontroversial as possible is clear.
17. See Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Victor Giraud (Paris, 1935), pp. 95–98; and Anselm of Canterbury, “Proslogium,” in Basic Writings, 2d ed., trans. S.
N. Deane (La Salle, Ill., 1962), pp. 9–10. It is remarkable that both of these attempts at cogent discourse are embedded in deictic discourse of the first order. But even if we could convict people of inconsistency, we might, as Robert Nozick has pointed out, achieve a hollow victory since one may gladly live (with) an inconsistency. See Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), pp. 405–9.
18. Some of what follows is akin to and informed by Paul Tillich’s concept of ultimate concern. But it will also be clear from the sequel that I cannot accept the ahistorical and abstract sense of Tillich’s notion. See his Dynamics of Faith (New York, 1958).
19. Deictic discourse has a kinship too with Habermas’s communicative competence. But an ideal and abstract character distinguishes the latter from the former. For discussion and references, see Chapter 14, n. 57 in particular.
20. Enthusiasm is related to what Nozick calls ethical push, tolerance to ethical pull; sympathy is balanced between the two. See his Philosophical Explanations, pp. 399–504. These relations allow one to see how the suggestions above connect with traditional ethics. An alternative but congenial and much more circumspect account of the contestability and legitimacy of discourse on ultimate concerns has been given by Manfred Stanley, pp. 83–135.
21. See Tillich, pp. 16–22.
22. See Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 81–82 and 139–40.
23. See Chapters 5 and 12 above.
24. See Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral (Princeton, N.J., 1974), pp. 162–63.
25. See Norman Malcolm, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations,” Philosophical Review 63 (1954): 543–47.
26. The distinction between active and declarative assent parallels John Henry Newman’s between real and notional assent in A Grammar of Assent, ed. Charles Frederick Harrold (New York, 1947).
27. Robert Nozick has recently urged that philosophical explanations should not be coercive and has refused to furnish a coercive argument in support of his suggestion. But I believe we can take the issue further than he does. See his Philosophical Explanations, pp. 4–8.
28. See MacIntyre, pp. 54–57. We can also say, with Holmes Rolston III, that “an ‘ought’ is not so much derived from an ‘is’ as discovered simultaneously with it.” See his “Is There an Ecological Ethic?” Ethics 85 (1975): 101.
29. The reader who wants to see a picture of deictic explanation will find a striking one in Steve Dunwell and David McCord, Harvard (Little Compton, R.I., 1982), p. 48.
CHAPTER 22
1. On the definition of wilderness and on the origin of the concept, see John C. Hendee, George H. Stankey, and Robert C. Lucas, Wilderness Management (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1978), pp. 9–10.
2. See Daniel J. Boorstin, “From the Land to the Machine,” in The Republic of Technology (New York, 1978), pp. 37–48.
3. See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964), pp. 36–40. For the late medieval tradition of the pastoral ideal, see J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Garden City, N.Y., 1954 [first published in 1924]), pp. 128–38.
4. See Leo Marx, pp. 75–86.
5. See Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 2d ed. (New Haven, 1978), pp. 8–43.
6. See Nash, “International Concepts of Wilderness Preservation,” in Hendee, Stankey, and Lucas, pp. 43–59.
7. It gathered momentum from the end of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century and then reached its take-off point. See Leo Marx, pp. 145–226; and Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), pp. 75–78.
8. See Eugene S. Ferguson, “The American-ness of American Technology,” Technology and Culture 20 (1979): 4–6; and Frederick Jackson Turner’s celebrated essay on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (New York, 1958), pp. 1–38.
9. See Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (New York, 1978), pp. 3–48.
10. See Ferguson, pp. 7–14.
11. For the contemporary result of these developments, see Vance Packard, A Nation of Strangers (New York, 1972); and Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York, 1974), pp. 7–181.
12. See Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, pp. 44–83.
13. See Aldo Leopold, “Wilderness,” in A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (London, 1968), pp. 188–201.
14. See Christopher D. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? (Los Altos, Calif., 1974), p. 43.
15. See Robert H. Socolow, “Failures of Discourse: Obstacles to the Integration of Environmental Values into Natural Resource Policy,” When Values Conflict, ed. Laurence H. Tribe et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 20–21.
16. See Tribe, “Ways Not to Think about Plastic Trees,” Yale Law Journal 83 (1974): 1330–31; and John Rodman, “The Liberation of Nature?” Inquiry 20 (1977): 83–84.
17. See “Public Participation in Outdoor Activities and Attitudes toward Wilderness—1977,” Research Recap (of the American Forest Institute), no. 10 (December 1977): 1–4.
18. See Rodman’s reference to Peter Singer, “a moral philosopher who hopes to lead us, not ‘by sentimental appeals for sympathy’ but by vigorous [rigorous?] moral reasoning, to make ‘a mental switch’ in our ‘attitudes towards a very large group of beings: members of species other than our own.’” See Rodman, p. 84.
19. See Rodman, pp. 115 and 117.
20. See Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity (New York, 1981), pp. 21, 35, 37, and 41.
21. See, e.g., Holmes Rolston III, “Is There an Ecological Ethic?” Ethics 85 (1975): 106 and 108.
22. See Colleen D. Clements, “Stasis: The Unnatural Value,” Ethics 86 (1976): 136–44.
23. See Henry G. Bugbee, The Inward Morning (State College, Pa., 1958), p. 86.
24. See Leo Marx, p. 364.
25. See Rodman, p. 111.
26. One should note that Leopold actually pleaded for the preservation of museum pieces and saw a self-defeating tendency only in the destructive crowding of wilderness lovers.
27. See Leopold, pp. 189–92.
28. Sometimes it is suggested that the minimal size of a wilderness area is one that would allow or require a hiker to camp in it. See Hendee, Stankey, and Lucas, p. 9.
29. Since, in what follows, I will be drawing heavily on Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane (New York, 1961) I must say a word to distinguish my view from Eliade’s. It differs in two respects. First, it seems to me that Eliade overstresses the discontinuity (“solution of continuity” as he calls it, pp. 25 and 68) between the sacred and the profane. Though the realms are clearly separated, they do not in general, I believe, deny one another but rather complement each other. The holy sanctifies the profane; the profane surrounds the holy with an allowance for human distraction and fallibility. Eliade, in fact, often points up bridges across the gap between the two realms, especially in regards to time (pp. 68–113). Second, it seems to me that Eliade is to some extent an unwitting hostage to the metaphysical distinction between the phenomenal and the ideal, the material and the spiritual, the immanent and the transcendent, and to other versions of it. Though mythic people certainly distinguished different realms and realities, they saw an interpenetration of them that we easily mistake metaphysically. This metaphysical mistake informs, I believe, Eliade’s rejection of what he calls “naturism” (pp. 118 and 121), the claim that a natural object is divine in being natural.
30. See Eliade, pp. 29–30.
31. See Leo Marx, pp. 180–226.
32. Ibid., p. 54.
33. See Eliade, pp. 45–47. An eminent disclosure of this kind has been given by Black Elk in Black Elk Speaks (Lincoln, Neb., 1961), pp. 20–47 and 166–80. And, in general, much is to be learned from the Native Americans as regards the eloquence of nature on this continent.
34. See Eliade, p. 165.
35. Ibid., pp. 58–62.
36. Ibid., pp. 2
1–26.
37. See Rodman, p. 100.
38. Ibid., p. 94.
39. Ibid., p. 113.
40. See Stone, pp. 42–54.
41. Human existence, as the anthropic principle has it, also may be at the center of the universe in the sense that the character or specificity of the cosmos comes to be focused in humanity; more particularly, among all the physically possible worlds, the peculiarity of the actual world is most evident from the specific requirements it has met to make possible the evolution of intelligent life. For exposition, see George Gale, “The Anthropic Principle,” Scientific American 245 (December 1981): 154–71; for discussion, see John Leslie, “Anthropic Principle, World Ensemble, Design,” American Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1982): 141–51; see also Eric Chaisson, “The Broadest View of the Biggest Picture,” Harvard Magazine (January-February 1982):21–25.
42. See the Stone, Rodman, and Rolston essays; and Arne Naess’s seminal sketch, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement,” Inquiry 16 (1973): 95–100.
43. See Rolston, p. 104.
44. See Rodman, pp. 104–5.
45. See Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung (Frankfurt am Main, 1979).
46. Cf. Leopold, p. 101; and Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, pp. 263–73.
CHAPTER 23
1. See Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (Stuttgart, 1893–1963), 15:615–17; See also Fustel de Coulanges, “The Sacred Fire,” in The Ancient City, trans. Willard Small (Garden City, N.Y., n.d. [first published in 1864]), pp. 25–33.
2. See Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture (New Haven, 1977), pp. 2–3 and 50–51.
3. See Jeremiah Eck, “Home Is Where the Hearth Is,” Quest 3 (April 1979):12.
4. Ibid., p. 11.
5. See The Oxford English Dictionary.
6. See Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1971), pp. 15–87.
7. See Vincent Scully, The Earth, the Temple, and the Gods (New Haven, 1962).
8. See my The Philosophy of Language (The Hague, 1974), pp. 126–31.
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