> It gets some response, though. I asked what it was about
> high technology that requires a context of coercion, as many
> participants in this discussion seem to assume. I think that's
> a fundamental moral and political question with some fairly
> serious implications, but no one seems willing to engage it.
> Apparently it's much more rewarding to deride Chuck and Joe as
> primitivists.
What if, as Marx assumes, capitalism is inconsistent with the full development of rational self-consciousness. Employing more modern language, what if there is a significant irreducible aspect of psychopathology in the mentality dominant in it.
This is not inconsistent with the achievement of a great deal of insight into the nature of reality. Newtonian physics, for instance, was obviously powerfully insightful though it came from a deeply disturbed mind. Newton suffered a paranoid psychotic breakdown in 1693. (Keynes, with the express purpose of calling in question the view of Newton and hence of Newtonian physics as the embodiment of "reason," emphasizes this aspect in his biographical essay. Collected Writings, vol. X, pp. 363-74)
If this is so there will be important aspects of modern science and technology that reflect not rationality but psychopathology. Even those features of work that embody science and technology will then not be wholly determined by unalterable features of nature itself but by the particular psychologically constrained ways of thinking about nature and technology characteristic of capitalism. If labour process engineering, for instance, is done by minds driven in important ways by irrational defences against persecutory anxiety the resulting technology will embody an irrationally based need to sadistically and obsessively dominate others, to treat them with contempt ("idiot proofing"), and to "fragment" both the production process as a whole and the individual jobs it involves. Taylorism illustrates this. The lack of individual autonomy and the "specialization and division" characteristic of work would then be to some extent expressions of the psychopathology.
Among other things this would make the technology inefficient in comparison with what would be developed by minds free from these limitations. In particular, a properly designed technology would attempt to facilitate the development and full use of the capacities of the producers - not merely to make the labour process more efficient but also to make it "worthy of [the producers'] human nature." It would also have eliminated those aspects of its view of those capacities that reflect irrational paranoia and contemptuousness. A labour process that developed and made use of these capacities would then, in combination with other social arrangements having the same effect, also set free a great deal of creativity and intelligence that is now stifled by the alienated character of modern work, creativity and intelligence that would find one of its outlets in improving the science and technology embodied in the process.
Ted