Re: technologies, see this book blurbed by Jim O'Connor by Andrew Feenberg, Preface, and Chapter 1 of Critical Theory of Technology] and, http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/feenberg/PREF.HTM "Questioning Technology." http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/feenberg/CRITSAM2.HTM
INTRODUCTION: THE PARLIAMENT OF THINGS
Technology and the End of History
It is widely believed that technological society is condemned to authoritarian management, mindless work, and equally mindless consumption. Social critics claim that technical rationality and human values are contending for the soul of modern man. This book challenges such cliches by reconceptualizing the relation of technology, rationality, and democracy. My theme is the possibility of a truly radical reform of industrial society.
I argue that the degradation of labor, education, and the environment is rooted not in technology per se but in the anti-democratic values that govern technological development. Reforms that ignore this fact will fail, including such popular notions as a simplified lifestyle or spiritual renewal. Desirable as these goals may be, no fundamental progress can occur in a society that sacrifices millions of individuals to production.
A good society should enlarge the personal freedom of its members while enabling them to participate effectively in a widening range of public activities. At the highest level, public life involves choices about what it means to be human. Today these choices are increasingly mediated by technical decisions. What human beings are and will become is decided in the shape of our tools no less than in the action of statesmen and political movements. The design of technology is thus an ontological decision fraught with political consequences. The exclusion of the vast majority from participation in this decision is the underlying cause of many of our problems.
I will show that only a profound democratic transformation of industrial civilization can resolve these problems. Historically, such a transformation has been called "socialism," but ever since the Russian Revolution that term has described a particularly undemocratic version of our model of industrial civilization. The recent breakdown of these communist regimes and their Marxist orthodoxy creates an opportunity to revive interest in democratic socialist theory and politics. Yet this opportunity may be missed by many who, regardless of their evaluation of the Soviet regime, interpreted its stubborn resistance to capitalism as the chief symbol of an open-ended future. Today, as that resistance fades, the "post-modern" decade of the 1980s reaches a fitting climax in the "end" of history.
The end of history: the radical critique of modern societies is mere speculation; progressive development is a narrative myth; alienation is an outmoded literary conceit. Salvation is to be found in irony, not revolution; the fashionable politics, even on the left, is deregulation, not self- management.
This mood is shaped by the consensus which links much of the left with the establishment in celebration of technological advance. But technology has become so pervasive that the consensus leaves little of practical import to disagree about. The struggle over a few emotionally charged issues of human rights, such as abortion, disguises the hollowness of public debate, the lack of historical perspective and alternatives. There seems to be room only for marginal tinkering with an ever diminishing range of problems not inextricably bound up with technique. This outcome was anticipated more than a generation ago by Karl Mannheim:
It is possible, therefore, that in the future, in a world in which there is never anything new, in which all is finished and each moment is a repetition of the past, there can exist a condition in which thought will be utterly devoid of all ideological and utopian elements. But the complete elimination of reality- transcending elements from our world would...bring about a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing....Thus, after a long tortuous, but heroic development, just at the highest stage of awareness, when history is ceasing to be blind fate, and is becoming more and more man's own creation, with the relinquishment of utopias, man would lose his will to shape history and therewith his ability to understand it.1
In Mannheim's terms, the problem we confront today is how to sustain a faith in historical possibility without messianic hopes. Can a sober reflection on the future find anything more than a mirror of the present? I believe it can, and have done my best to awaken a sense of the choices that lie before us through an analysis of our disappointment with the largely fulfilled promise of technology. To this end I reopen the debate over socialism in confrontation with various technical and practical objections, and suggest a coherent alternative that would preserve and advance our threatened democratic heritage.
That heritage is endangered today by the growing gap between the intellectual requirements of citizenship and work, and the frozen opposition of market and bureaucracy. Can we conceive an industrial society based on democratic participation in which individual freedom is not market freedom, and in which social responsibility is not exercised through coercive regulation? I will argue that a democratic politics of technology offers an alternative and overcomes the destructive relation of modern industrialism to nature, both in human beings and the environment.
Instrumental and Substantive Theories of Technology
In the pages that follow I present this position as an alternative to several established theories of technology. These fall into two major types: instrumental theory, the dominant view of modern governments and the policy sciences on which they rely; and substantive theory, such as that of Jacques Ellul.2 The former treats technology as subservient to values established in other social spheres, e.g. politics or culture, while the latter attributes an autonomous cultural force to technology overriding all traditional or competing values. Substantive theory claims that what the very employment of technology does to humanity and nature is more consequential than its ostensible goals. I will review these theories briefly before introducing a critical theory of technology which, I believe, preserves the best in both while opening the prospect of fundamental change.
Instrumental Theory
Instrumental theory offers the most widely accepted view of technology. It is based on the common sense idea that technologies are "tools" standing ready to serve the purposes of their users. Technology is deemed "neutral," without valuative content of its own. But what does the notion of the "neutrality" of technology actually mean? The concept usually implies at least four points:
1. Technology, as pure instrumentality, is indifferent to the variety of ends it can be employed to achieve. Thus, the neutrality of technology is merely a special case of the neutrality of instrumental means, which are only contingently related to the substantive values they serve. This conception of neutrality is familiar and self-evident.
2. Technology also appears to be indifferent with respect to politics, at least in the modern world, and especially with respect to capitalist and socialist societies. A hammer is a hammer, a steam turbine is a steam turbine, and such tools are useful in any social context. In this respect, technology appears to be quite different from traditional legal or religious institutions, which cannot be readily transferred to new social contexts because they are so intertwined with other aspects of the societies in which they originate. The transfer of technology, on the contrary, seems to be inhibited only by its cost.
3. The socio-political neutrality of technology is usually attributed to its "rational" character and the universality of the truth it embodies. Technology, in other words, is based on verifiable causal propositions. Insofar as such propositions are true, they are not socially and politically relative but, like scientific ideas, maintain their cognitive status in every conceivable social context. Hence, what works in one society can be expected to work just as well in another.
4. The universality of technology also means that the same standards of measurement can be applied in different settings. Thus technology is routinely said to increase the productivity of labor in different countries, different eras and different civilizations. Technologies are neutral because they stand essentially under the very same norm of efficiency in any and every context.
Given this understanding of technology, the only rational stance is unreserved commitment to its employment. Of course, we might make a few exceptions and refuse to use certain devices out of deference to moral or religious values. Reproductive technologies are a case in point. Even if one believes that contraception, abortion, test tube babies are value-neutral in themselves, and, technically considered, can only be judged in terms of efficiency, one might renounce their use out of respect for the sacredness of life.
This approach places "trade-offs" at the center of the discussion. "You cannot optimize two variables" is the fundamental law of the instrumental theory of technology. There is a price for the achievement of environmental, ethical or religious goals, and that price must be paid in reduced efficiency. On this account, the technical sphere can be limited by non-technical values, but not transformed by them.3
The instrumentalist understanding of technology is especially prominent in the social sciences. It appears to account for the tensions between tradition, ideology and efficiency which arise from socio- technical change. Modernization theory, for example, studies how elites use technology to promote social change in the course of industrialization. And public policy analysis worries about the costs and consequences of automation and environmental pollution. Instrumentalism provides the framework for such research.
Substantive Theory
Despite the common sense appeal of instrumental theory, a minority view denies the neutrality of technology. Substantive theory, best known through the writings of Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger, argues that technology constitutes a new type of cultural system that restructures the entire social world as an object of control.4 This system is characterized by an expansive dynamic which ultimately overtakes every pretechnological enclave and shapes the whole of social life. The instrumentalization of society is thus a destiny from which there is no escape other than retreat. Only a return to tradition or simplicity offers an alternative to the juggernaut of progress.
Something like this view is implied in Max Weber's pessimistic conception of an "iron cage" of rationalization, although he did not specifically connect this projection to technology. Ellul makes that link explicit, arguing that the "technical phenomenon" has become the defining characteristic of all modern societies regardless of political ideology. "Technique," he asserts, "has become autonomous."5 Heidegger agrees that technology is relentlessly overtaking us. We are engaged, he claims, in the transformation of the entire world, ourselves included, into "standing reserves," raw materials to be mobilized in technical processes.6 Heidegger asserts that the technical restructuring of modern societies is rooted in a nihilistic will to power, a degradation of man and Being to the level of mere objects. <snip>
On Heidegger see, http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/6238.html Michael E. Zimmerman Contesting Earth's Future Radical Ecology and Postmodernity