Chapter 6 : Technophobia and its Tribulations

Chapter 6: Technophobia and its tribulations

From the eighteenth century onward, enlightened humanism advanced three basic ideals that it identified with progress.

The first and most important of these ideals was a renewed focus on reason: the use of logical thought in dealing with reality. Since the time of the classical cultures of ancient Greece and, to some extent, Rome, reason had been relegated, at best, to a handmaiden of theology. Since that time, social arrangements, not to speak of the natural world, had not been explained in rational terms. Feudal hierarchies and royal power were looked upon as God-given, while social inequities were seen as the unchallengeable dispensation of a deity whose judgment was taken on faith. This outlook was reinforced by the State as well as the Church, indeed by tradition as well as by biblical precept, however much radical heretics and popular uprisings disavowed them from time to time.

The eighteenth-century Enhghtenment stridendy and effectively challenged this theistic view of worldly affairs. It persistendy counterposed rational understanding to unthinking belief in claims to knowledge and truth, be they in the realm of human relationships or in the natural world. In this respect, the Enhghtenment surpassed the Renaissance of a century or two earlier, which invoked Greco-Roman canons of art and rhetoric, revering that highly idealized ancient past rather than an innovative present and a rational future.

Second, and following from its emphasis on reason, the Enhghtenment advanced an increasingly secular view of social reality — of a new polity that enhanced individual freedom and legitimated social institutions rationally, be they part of responsive constitutional monarchies or repubhcs. Voltaire’s famous cry ‘Ecrasez l’infame!’ meant not necessarily a denial of the Church doctrine and institutions but rather its infamous control over political, moral, and civil affairs on the strength of dogma, fear, and tradition. Many of the Enlighteners sought to separate Church from State, leaving the Church with the authority only of a moral force on society.

This demand, to be sure, was more than an attempt to obviate ecclesiastical meddling in the civil life of a polity. As rationalists, the Enlighteners were deeply concerned with the adverse role of superstition, mysticism, and mindless beliefs in determining human behavior. Superstition, in particular, they believed, had to be banished from the way human beings viewed each other, through scientific explanations of reality in strictly naturalistic terms. Even more than Enlightenment ‘mechanists’, whose influence has been deprecated and exaggerated by antihumanists these days, the subder critical thinkers of the time, such as Denis Diderot, stressed the focal importance of the natural world as an arena of human inquiry, indeed, as a guide to human behavior. To equate the Enlightenment’s naturalism with narrow-minded mechanism, without regard for the evolutionary and dialectical theories that were also very much in the air, is to caricature it in support of modern-day mystical and irrational ends.

Last, and very significant, the Enlightenment placed a strong premium on the need to control natural forces on behalf of human material wellbeing. The appalling disparities in wealth in eighteenth-century society; the persistent famines that plagued France; the dire misery of the underclasses in cities and villages (all bucolic images of rural society notwithstanding); the uncertainties of economic life; material scarcity and the necessity for arduous toil, which limited participation in public life — all contributed to the enthusiastic embrace of advances in science and technology, with their potential for extending human freedom and personal dignity.

This point cannot be emphasized too strongly. Although the Enlighteners did not challenge private ownership of land and the means of production — worked mainly by peasants and craftsmen — they were almost one in their commitment to support scientific and technological advances for social purposes — not ideological ‘hubris’ for the purpose of ‘dominating nature’. As the lavish technical illustrations in Diderot’s monumental Encyclopedia indicate, the Enhghtenment celebrated human ingenuity and its promise to produce a sufficiency in the means of life, indeed, to ease labor — with its implicit message of a more participatory polity — not to ‘subdue’ natural forces out of a lust for domination.

If the Enlightenment saw Prometheus as the mythic agent for promoting human welfare, it was not because it no longer respected first nature; indeed, few centuries exhibited a greater devotion to the ‘natural’ than the eighteenth century — be it technologically, behaviorally, educationally, or morally. Rather, the Enhghtenment directly associated the removal of want and toil from humanity with social improvement and a relatively free polity.

The great democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century — particularly the American and French — were predominandy political events, although they had widespread economic ramifications for the redistribution of property ownership. Their greatest long-range achievements were in the realm of personal liberty, upholding the autonomy of the individual in a volatile economic world. The cry of‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ rang somewhat hollow, however, as the great majority of people who had made these revolutions continued to live in material want, toiling on the land and in newly emerging factories from dawn to dusk. ‘Liberty’, without the means of life and the free time to exercise it, seemed merely rhetorical. ‘Equality’, in turn, became a mockery of revolutionary ideals as old privileges based on status differences were replaced with new privileges based on differences in wealth.

In the nineteenth century the focus of radicalism shifted overwhelmingly from exclusively political egahtarianism to material egalitarianism, to a form of equality that allowed not only personal political freedom but also dignity and leisure to all laboring classes, be they on the land, in craft shops, or in factories. More specifically, the various socialisms of the early nineteenth century avowed the need for a cooperative society that would bring not only political but economic egalitarianism to humanity — a society based on the satisfaction of human material needs with minimal toil. If humanity were to achieve a truly democratic polity, working people had to acquire the means of life and sufficient free time to parti cipate in it.

It was in this context that the underprivileged masses of Europe and the Americas viewed technological advances. Despite Luddite opposition to the use of machinery that subverted traditional crafts (a provisional opposition, let me add, that did not challenge technological advance as such, present-day distortions of Luddism to the contrary), the laboring classes viewed the potentialities for human betterment opened by the industrial world with considerable hope and incorporated them into their programs for social change.

Indeed, the resistance to industrialism came mainly from the romantic intellectuals, artists, and mystics who decried the loss of a rural society that they idealized, steeped it in quasi-feudal traditions and a mythopeic mentality. Not only did these romantics damn the patendy harmful effects of capitalist self-interest and exploitative methods of production, they decried reason and the Enlightenment itself Whatever the benign intentions of the nineteenth-century romantic movement, their ideas later fed into a seemingly ‘populist’ movement that culminated in German fascism.

Significantly, Karl Marx, the most influential socialist theorist of the last century, identified the achievement of the material preconditions for a cooperative and free society with the spread of capitalism. He held this view not because he admired capitalist social relations but because he believed that a market economy based on competition would yield vast advances in technological development. Such advances, he contended, would eventually establish the technical basis for achieving the largely political and cultural goals of the Enlightenment as well as the material goals of the emerging socialist movement.

There is a tragic irony in the fact that Marx enshrined a class and exploitative social system — capitalism — as an ‘historically necessary’ stage for achieving an economically emancipated society. Even as capitalism corroded the hereditary ruling stratum of feudalism, it did not challenge domination as such — capitalists were no less domineering than their feudal predecessors. The bourgeois system of domination that they created, however, was harder to define — and hence all the more effective. By creating a myth of individual autonomy — and identifying it with the achievement of the great democratic revolutions — the emerging bourgeoisie could legitimate its de facto rule over society. It made capitalism seem like the result of gritty personal enterprise, parsimony, and ingenuity. Its precept of formal equality — be it before the law or in the name of ‘equality of opportunity’ — concealed the substantive inequality in wealth and influence in society. Indeed, capitalist apologists even denied that capitalism was, properly speaking, a class society at all, inasmuch as ‘anyone’ could become a capitalist if he or she so chose.

Marx was intensely aware of this obscurantist subterfuge and properly designated capitalist social relationships as the most mystified in history: a system whereby class rule was shrewdly concealed by the myth of‘equal opportunity’. This mystification of social relationships remains one of the most compelling facts of modern-day class rule. In the past two centuries, it has greatly conditioned ways of thinking generally toward mystification, from which current antihumanistic ideologies strongly benefit.

Marx’s claim that capitalism provided the technological preconditions for socialism and hence was ‘progressive’, however, raised problems in transforming society that he never theoretically anticipated. How could a society structured around competition lead, even after a social upheaval, to one structured around cooperation? How could a society, sedimented by a long history of class rule, lead, even after a social upheaval, to one structured around substantive equality? These problems were not adequately resolved by the socialist movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth century — and they finger with us to this day.

Yet in many respects, Marx’s emphasis on the impetus that capitalism gives to technological development was prescient.

The market economy that attained predominance in Europe and America during the past two centuries did innovate an industrial apparatus unprecedented in human history. It fostered a broad naturalistic and scientific understanding of the world, greater by far than the mythopeic insights of the past, clouded as they were in naive illusions. At least on a strictly pragmatic and instrumental level, capitalism carried much of the world out of an illusory animism, religiosity, and parochialism — the ‘enchanted’ world so treasured by the romantics — and into a secular world that encouraged human activity and rational inquiry.

At the same time, the capitalist system was a class and exploitative society that was riddled by contradictions and that made for profound social and ultimately ecological instability. From the 1830s to the turn of the century, the ‘progressive’ dimensions often overshadowed its ugly and deeply antihumanistic aspects, although exploited classes waged desperate struggles against them throughout the Euro-American world.

Yet even these conflicts were eventually marginalized by reforms won by trade unions and labor parties of one kind or another. Inevitably, European socialist movements flirted with the idea of sufficiently improving the capitalist order so as to render it more equitable and ultimately more cooperative — perhaps even more socialistic. Even as European and American socialist parties were drenched in the radical rhetoric of the previous century, they made socialism in England, Germany, and France increasingly parliamentary rather than insurrectionary, and they themselves became loyal oppositions rather than revolutionary challenges.

The First World War exploded the myth of a slow, progressive social evolution from a capitalistic society to a cooperative society. Beaten down by four unrelenting years of trench warfare and horrifyingly lethal weapons, soldiers from the mass armies of Europe returned home either to topple an entrenched social order in the East or threaten it menacingly in the West.

It was during the interwar period, between 1918 and 1939, that European society faced its greatest moment of truth: either it would carry out the historically crucial task of replacing a market society with a cooperative one, or it would spin off into an ominous period of terrible reaction. The tragic failure of various socialist movements in this period to achieve the great goals they had elaborated over the nineteenth century served to nourish the epochal crisis opened in August 1914 — a crisis which even the Second World War, bloodier and more destructive than the First, has failed to resolve.

In fact, the Second World War formed a sharp boundary between one era of capitalist development and another. The preindustrial culture of the 1920s and 1930s in America and Europe had not yet been entirely absorbed by the economy; indeed, as dominant as capitalism had become by the end of the nineteenth century economically, it was far from all-pervasive socially. Its system of market relationships — what early twentieth-century social theorists called commodification — had not yet fully penetrated into the largely preindustrial everyday life of family relationships, personal associations, and community ties.

In the years following the Second World War, however, this disparity between culture and economics changed drastically. Starting in the early 1950s the capitalistic market expanded throughout the world, to a point where it is now ubiquitous and ail-penetrating, even by comparison with the capitalism of merely a generation or two ago. It now permeates nearly every facet of ordinary life, from the bedroom to the schoolroom, from the kitchen to the church. This market society, with its defining values of production, consumption, profit, and growth, was only dimly anticipated by Marx in the 1850s, even as his major works unmasked the competitive imperatives of capitalist expansion and its accompanying culture of material acquisition. Consumption for the sake of consumption, or what we now call ‘consumerism’, which Marx could not have foreseen, became the counterpart of what he had denoted as ‘production for the sake of production’ — a driven form of general economic growth that has enveloped the consumer as well as the producer, and has become an end in itself, irrespective of social needs or consequences.

Capitalism, abetted by its ‘progressive’ technological achievements, has thereby acquired a technological persona — a projection of itself as the industrial ‘logic’ of science and technology as such. Thus, added to its selfmystification as a society of ‘individual autonomy’ and ‘political freedom’, it has acquired still another layer of mystification — the myth that science, technology, and even reason constitute its imperative for unrelenting expansion.

This cunning mystification has beguiled nearly all ecomystics and has enhanced the ‘mystery’ surrounding capitalism’s economic and market operations. Not only has the specious sobriquet industrial society become synonymous with capitalism, but today it has virtually replaced it, compounding the mystification that surrounded capitalism from its inception.

This mystification may be the most obstreperous of all, having generated a sizable literature, even a tradition, that assigns uncanny powers to technology apart from the social context that determines its use. It becomes difficult for the ordinary person to see that it is not science and technology that threaten to turn the entire world into a huge market and factory; rather, it is the market and factory that threaten to ‘technologize’, to objectify or commodify the human spirit and reduce the natural world to mere raw materials for capital expansion.

Thus, the dazzling scientific leaps and technological innovations that have occurred since the Second World War are the product of very distinct social relationships and an ever-growing market society. The notion that science and technology are ‘autonomous’ of society, that they themselves are controlling factors in guiding society, is perhaps one of the most insidious illusions of our time. That science and technics conduct lines of research and open visions toward new developments is certainly true, but these developments are rigorously guided by the prevailing market society rather than the other way around.

Although society abets scientific and technological developments, society also aborts the exploration of new techniques, depending upon the needs that guide corporate research. These needs are overwhelmingly economic, centering on corporate profit and expansionary interests, as witness the stimuli given by large enterprises to lines of scientific research that promise to give them economic hegemony, while willfully ignoring others that, although interesting to scientists or engineers, are not considered sufficiently profitable from a business standpoint.

Thus it took years to arouse the interest of business in organic agriculture, solar and wind power, nonpolluting fuels, recycling techniques, and many other inviting technologies. Indeed, with the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s, it was often necessary for scientists and engineers to establish precarious and privately funded institutes in which they could devote themselves to developing ‘environmentally friendly’ technologies that industry obdurately ignored or even disavowed. Where large corporate enterprises and governmental agencies finally undertook research to explore the possibilities of what I have called ‘ecotechnics’, they commonly did so only after considerable public pressure. Even today, various technologies that would improve safety in transportation — alluring as they may be to engineers eager to sophisticate them — still lie woefully on drawing boards because they are either too costly or too unprofitable from a corporate standpoint. Notoriously, the profit-oriented approach guides research in a host of technical areas, including steel-making facilities that, were they put to use, would yield products that are lasting, unlike the ‘planned obsolescence’ worked into appliances, cars, homes, and even tools today.

The factory model around winch capitalism is structured has given social relationships themselves a technological form, just as in the Middle Ages Christianity gave social relationships a religious form. In a sense, every factory is a ‘megamachine’, to use Lewis Mumford’s word for ways of mobilizing labor. Nor are megamachines peculiar to modern societies based on high technology. They existed thousands of years ago, in the Near East and in the Roman world, when tools were hardly more advanced than in the Neolithic period. The pyramids of ancient Egypt, the temples of Mesopotamia, and the roads of Rome were constructed primarily by the brute labor of serfs and slaves. In the early modern period, capitalism simply mobilized labor more mechanically by making the rural cottage worker an appendage to the spinning wheel and hand loom. In time, the two were brought together in the form of a factory that now encompasses society as a whole, not only its economy.

Today, the unbridled expansion of the market transforms nearly all traditional personal relationships into commodity ties, fostering a belief in the merits of consumption and a highly synthetic image of’the good life’. Technological innovation has merely made this commodification of everyday life easier to achieve. To be sure, modern technologies may be used, as in the case of television, to promote the sale of goods, to influence taste, and to create new ‘wants’. Yet by the same token, advertising techniques were always in use, whether in medieval fairs, Renaissance markets, or large precapitalist commercial centers. For centuries, the churches and mosques of precapitalist society were immensely effective networks for promoting ecclesiastical, noble, and royal interests, preaching messages of quiet acceptance of duties, awe toward saints, and deference toward one’s social ‘betters’. Deep-seated social crises were necessary before the captives of clerics could dislodge ecclesiastical control over the minds of the oppressed — a process that is far from completed today, with or without televangelists.

Conversely, even the highly civilized societies of the ancient world regarded technological advances with astonishing indifference at best and active hostility at worst, primarily because servile human labor was cheap and readily available. Not that the steam engine and the paddle wheel were unknown, but they were never put to industrial uses. Ironically, well into the Middle Ages, when Christianity (which technophobes regard as one of the most antinaturalistic of ideologies) reached its height, the powers that be often saw technological advances as demonic, not as an inspiration for pursuing the ‘domination of nature’.

While capitalism has turned to technology with a fervor unknown to any previous society and dressed it in the mystifying garb of an ‘industrial society’, capitalists have notoriously neglected very important technologies and chosen to develop precisely those techniques that benefit its unique imperative for growth and its inflated appetite for profit.

I have examined at some length the extent to which technology is a heteronomous or dependent phenomenon because ecomysticism tends to emphasize its autonomy from society and the mystique of a ‘technological imperative’, crudely obscuring the profoundly social factors that promote or inhibit technological innovation. Given this simplistic view, modern technology and a ‘technological mentality’ become the principal, often the exclusive causes of environmental ills, cultural malaise, and the loss of‘primal’ innocence.

Moreover, contemporary critiques of technology often go hand-in-hand with primitivism and ecomysticism. The sophistication of technics, we are often told, has alienated us from ‘nature’ and our primal’ roots, rendering us merely parts of a vast ‘megamachine’ that threatens not only to destroy the natural world but to diminish our awe before the ‘sacred’ in the biosphere, our ‘feeling’ for life, and our contact with the ‘spiritual’. From the romantics of the last century, to German conservative writers early in the present one, an effluvium of books and periodicals has surfaced, stressing the ‘autonomy’ of technological development and either explicitly or implicitly calling for a return to technically simpler ways of life. The more primitivistic of the recent technophobic writers call for a return to the pristine lives of Paleolithic cave dwellers, Neolithic horticulturists, or medieval serfs and craftspeople.

Whether such views can be accepted at face value is, to put it gently, arguable. Owing to the massive inroads personal computers have made into the lives even of technophobes, who are usually unprepared to sacrifice this highly sophisticated device for the quill, one would think that they are as natural as fruit and thrive in Californian orange groves. Indeed, few of technophobia’s outstanding spokespersons have abandoned the horrors of the civilization they decry to five hermetic lives free from technological subversion; nor do they desist from accepting fees for books and lectures that inveigh against the megamachine and its ‘despiritizing’ impact on the individual and society. Indeed, one primitivistic, technophobic periodical confessed, ‘We got a computer — and we hate it!’[210] Which causes one to wonder: why acquire one at all when the great revolutions of the past were summoned to action by simple handpresses?

If this kind of cant and silliness were all that technophobia produced, it could easily be disregarded. But technophobia raises serious antihumanistic issues that require critical examination.

First, technophobia sets up a misleading enemy for committed environmentalists and culture critics, redirecting their attention away from patently social concerns. Well-meaning people are urged to focus on a problem that cannot be seriously fought — specifically, technology — assuming they agree it is a problem In the first place.

Second, technophobes leave unanswered the strategic question of how a truly democratic society could be possible, if its members lacked the means of life and the free time to exercise their freedoms. Claims that a ‘primitive’ way of life would allow for ‘banker’s hours’, to use Jerry Mander’s expression, are simply fallacious.[211] Mander’s sources, nourished on the 1960s and 1970s craze for the virtues of aboriginal ways of life, are now very questionable, if not completely specious, as we saw in Chap ter 5. Unless people are prepared to give up literacy, books, modern music, physical comfort, and the great wealth of philosophical, scientific, and cultural ideas associated with civilization, the basic decision they face is how to use their vast fund of technological knowledge and devices, not whether to use them.

This decision is of momentous social proportions — and must not be based strictly on a subjective love or distaste for technological innovation. In a better world, humanity might choose to discard many components of its current technological equipment, possibly sophisticate others, and innovate ecologically more desirable ways of producing things. But without a technics that will free humanity from onerous toil — and without values that stress democratic forms of social organization in winch everyone can participate — all hopes for a free society in the future are chimeras.

Technological innovation, in itself, will not increase the free time that is needed for a democratic political culture. Indeed, in class societies the use of technologies to displace labor by machines, to deforest vast areas of tlie planet, to exploit low-wage populations in the Third World — all raise precisely the social issue of the ways in which technology is used.

Nor are all technologies neutral in their impact on social and ecological well-being — or even necessarily desirable. Clearly some technologies, such as nuclear weapons and power plants, should be banned completely. The same can be said for agricultural and industrial biocides, surveillance devices, high-tech weaponry, and a host of o ther socially and ecologically harmful techniques.

But to glibly abstract technology from its social context, to let destructive current uses of technologies outweigh their potentially more rational application in a better society, would deny us the opportunity to choose what technologies should be used and the forms they will take. Various societies use a given technology in radically different ways: some for personally profitable and exploitative ends; others use it restrictively, owing to traditions of parsimony or fears of social instability; and still others might well use it rationally, to advance human freedom, self-development, and an ecological sensibility.

Modern technophobes, especially of the mystical persuasion, tend to confuse social with technological factors. Langdon “Winner, one of the more informed critics of technology, indiscriminately intermingles social with technological factors, an approach that often makes the most specious defenses of technophobia seem almost plausible. Winner observes:

If the experience of modern society shows us anything it is that technologies are not merely aids to human activity ; but also powerful forces acting to reshape that activity and its meaning . Tlte introduction of a robot to an industrial workplace not only increases productivity, but often radically changes the process of production, redefining what ‘work’ means in that setting, When a sophisticated new technique or instrument is adopted in medical practice, it transforms not only what doctors do, but also the ways people think about health, sickness, and medical care. Widespread alterations of this kind in techniques of communication, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and the like are largely what distinguishes our times from early periods of human history. The kinds of things we are apt to see as ‘mere’ technological entities become much more interesting and problematic if we begin to observe how broadly they are involved in conditions of social and moral life.[212]

But how a technology affects social context depends entirely on which new technologies are introduced and the reasons for introducing them. In a cooperative society — unlike the one in which we live today — a robot introduced into a factory environment might remove people from onerous toil and assembly-line drudgery, leaving them free to engage in pleasurable and creative activity. On the other hand, in a market, profit-oriented society like the one in which we five today, a robot would probably intensify the exploitation of workers whose tasks are orchestrated by the presence of a robot and increase the economic problems of diose who are displaced by it. Winner’s unitary statement about the impact of a robot on work, in effect, lacks sufficient social contextuality and tends to be more obfuscatory than illuminating.

Implicit in Winner’s notion of‘technological somnambulism’, in which ‘we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence’, is Iris own social somnambulism.[213] For Winner, the existing society is a given, seemingly unalterable phenomenon, the background for existing and future technological innovation. That technology autonomously orchestrates rather than is orchestrated by the social context in which tools and machines exist is essentially assumed. That the reduction of work by a robot may, in fact, make life easier, indeed richer, that its effects could be minimal or even desirable, is not spelled out in his book, which is tilted toward theorists who see technology as shaping society.

Like many technophobes who are preoccupied with unexplained ‘technological imperatives’ and the psychic effects of technological change, Winner marginalizes the centrality of social issues. Thus, he calls upon his readers to be aware of the ramifications of technological change upon society and its values — a rather foggy request, since the nature of the present society, its conflicting interests, and rational alternatives to the present human condition remain unexplored and are as problematically intermeshed as ever with each other. So are questions about who controls the development of technology. In the harsh, real world, those who decide which new technologies are or are not to be introduced into workplaces, hospitals, offices, and factories are the proprietors of those operations. Not even managers, engineers, and scientists — or what has been loosely called the ‘new class’ — make long-range decisions about the use of technologies in the modern economy. Ultimately, it is the owners and directors of a particular concern — least of all ordinary citizens — who decide what kind of technology will be used in a given enterprise, as the formulation of recent ‘down-sizing’ policies by large corporations throughout the world so clearly reveal.

These owners and directors are concerned less with the social, psychological, and ideological impacts of a new technology than with the profit and competitive advantages it may yield. Less socially visible than the corporate ‘bosses’ of an earlier era, like the old John D. Rockefeller, contemporary ‘bosses’ are often highly professional and well trained in the more complex aspects of business management and engineering. And their authority stems ultimately from dieir power as owners and directors at the apex of the economic pyramid, not merely as knowledgeable technical personnel.

Winner’s outlook tends to conceal the real issues of social power. Much as technology may enhance the operations of a given society, it is a distinct means deployed by self-serving owners and directors to exercise their power and increase their gains. By emphasizing the effects that new technologies have upon people and dieir values, Winner’s book keeps us from clearly understanding that these effects are the results of manipulations by definable social elites whose behavior, in real life, is guided overwhelmingly by economic facts — not by the extent to which ordinary people suffer from ‘technological somnambulism’.

Doubtless, as Winner argues, technological changes ‘affect the texture of modern life’, but social changes affect modern life far more drastically. Thus, a Renaissance banker of some four hundred years ago — say, a member of the Fugger banking family — held a view of the world, possessed an individualized sense of self, and had political values that were much more akin to those of a modern businessman than, say, of an Athenian citizen in Periclean times. Yet Greek and Renaissance technologies were remarkably similar by comparison with Renaissance and modern ones. Both the Fugger banker and the modern banker lived in a calculating, money-oriented, egoistic, and commercial world that for many Greeks would have seemed debasing and asocial. Athenians of the fifth century BC were expected to place the interests of the polis or so-called ‘city state’ before personal considerations and generally viewed commerce as a degrading activity, unfit for an authentic citizen, an attitude that stood in marked contrast to Fugger and modern bankers. Although the technological distance between commercially oriented Renaissance bankers and Athenians was relatively small, the psychological distance between the two was immense.

Winner’s assertion of technological autonomy ultimately becomes technological determinism. If ‘our instruments are institutions in the making’, as he fatalistically declares, and ‘techne has at last become politeia’, then our behavior is determined by technological factors. Nor is there any real hope that the ‘political wisdom of a democracy’ can ‘discipline’ technological innovation, since ‘it would require qualities of judiciousness in the populace that have rarely been applied to the judgment of instrumental/functional affairs.’’[214] His book, The Whale and the Reactor ends with a question: ‘[a]t present our society seems to prefer ... monuments to gigantism, wax, and the overstepping of natural and cultural boundaries. Such are the accomphshments we support with our dollars and our votes. How long will it be until we are ready to do anything better?’[215] Which question sidesteps the issue of how effective voting can be in a political system that is an oligarchy of the powerful and wealthy — a fact that leaves the preferences of ‘our society’ very much in doubt and its exposure to radically fresh alternatives very limited, so say the least.

Among the less sophisticated technophobes, like Jerry Mander, the ambiguities that mark Winner’s treatment of technology become wild sloganeering, laced with appeals to the ‘sacred’ and genuflections before ‘primitives’, whom Mander ecumenically calls ‘Indians’ whether they are native to the Americas or not.

Intellectually, Mander’s In the Absence of the Sacred is a cacophony of wildly discordant arguments that intermingles the social and the technological with a degree of abandon that verges on the embarrassing.[216] Technology, we are told, is all-pervasive. It invades our consciousness and, with each generation of technical development, separates us from the natural world by enfolding us in a purely technological environment. Again, the megamachine image rears its terrifying head: ‘The web of interactions among machines becomes more complex and more invisible, while the total effect is more powerful and pervasive. We become ever more enclosed and ever less aware of that fact. Our environment is so much a product of our invention that it becomes a single worldwide machine. We live inside it, and are a piece of it.’[217] In Mander’s view, this ‘web of interactions’ is almost entirely a product of technology as such and the mentality it breeds.

A director of the Berkeley-based Elmwood Institute, Mander delivers what Kirkpatrick Sale enthusiastically lauds as a ‘skewering critique of modern technology, in which cars, telephones, computers, banks, bio-genetics and television ... all are shown to be part of a mad megatechnology” that is destroying the world’s resources and robotizing its peoples.’[218] The reader cannot help but wonder which of these terrifying technological artifacts are actually used by the Elmwood Institute’s members and associates. Indeed, Mander, who robustly celebrates the fact that he merely uses ‘an old IBM Selectric’, may well be an exception among his associates.[219] In any case, like personal computers, not even old, indeed ancient IBM Selectrics grow on trees.

In a heady passage, Mander celebrates his technologically simple childhood world in the Bronx of the 1930s and 1940s, during which time his mother’s ‘favorite activity was shopping’ and a physician, whose principal pharmaceutical seems to have been aspirin, attended to his family’s health needs. The Mander family of this blissful era had a television in the living room that featured Milton Berle, at a time when broadcasting was happily restricted to seven hours each day. Mander senior’s prize possession was a Buick sedan that he rotated only every three years and the Manders were satisfied with annual family trips to Florida, plus a stay at summer camp for Mander junior.[220]

Yet how free of ‘consumerism’ and ‘technology’ was this halcyon era, forty or fifty years ago? Did Mrs Mander beat the dirt out of her family s clothing with a scrub board and squeeze out the water with rollers, while Mr Mander indulged his passion for new Buicks? Did she clean the floors on her knees? Did she carry heavy shopping bags, filled with food staples, or was she driven to and horn market by Mander senior in a new Buick?

Mander junior does not enter into these trivial details. But having grown up in the same Bronx milieu a generation or so earlier, I feel obliged to protest that the Manders enjoyed eminently privileged middle-class comforts and technological goodies that were entirely unknown to me, my family, and my friends. From the very beginning of the 1920s to well into the 1930s, my own family did not even own even a radio, still less a car, television set, or telephone. Nor were they so privileged as to make trips to Florida or send me to summer camp. At the onset of the Depression, my mother and I did not even have a family physician. Instead, when we were sick, we sat for hours in the clinics of New York City’s public hospitals, hoping to receive any kind of medical attention.

I am not trying to guilt Mander or trade experiences with him. His technophobia is premised on a fairly well-to-do way of life, as is the technophobia of so many baby boomers of late. His deprecation of antibiotics rings hollow at a time when children underwent dangerous mastoid-bone surgery for deadly ear infections and elderly people became seriously ill from even minor wounds. Without antibiotics, I would probably have died of a streptococcus infection in the early 1940s. There is a sickening arrogance in technophobes who, having enjoyed the fruits of middle-class, even wealthy life-styles, condemn appliances that freed women from considerable domestic drudgery, machines that freed workers from mentally debilitating tasks on assembly lines, and opened alternatives to starvation in lands that were once completely at the mercy of ‘Mother Nature’ and ‘Her’ many climatic vagaries.

In extolling the relative technological simplicity of his Bronx childhood, Mander, in fact, is extolling a culture — the Jewish immigrant middle-class way of life — that was preindustrial in many respects, that had not yet been completely penetrated by the marketplace. Its language, values, family structure, and ideals were ultimately eroded not by technology — which, in fact, its members generally prized as much as Mr Mander did his Buick — but by the socially invasive power of capitalism and its commodity orientation.

My own mother, an Eastern European immigrant, welcomed with almost sublime ecstasy her first ‘Frigidaire’ and her access to washing and drying machines. To own a motorized vehicle in my childhood and youth would have been regarded as an unimaginable luxury, indeed a mark of new social status. Summer vacations were hardly common among poor people who had to haggle for lower food prices. As an adult,

I worked as a foundryman and auto worker; to be finally free from that toil was an occupational epiphany of a kind at least as intense as the one Mander himself seems to have experienced after he left his work with advertising agencies and drifted into the Elmwood Institute.

Mander’s careless confusion of the preindustrial cultural roots of his family with the social uses of technology lead to the same ideological disarray that marks Winner’s more sophisticated book. Despite their different levels of discussion, both writers repeatedly confuse the promise of technological innovation in a rational society with its abuses in the present irrational one. With considerable aplomb, we are shown that technology does not, after all, produce more leisure today — as diough ‘today’ were somehow ‘forever’ — or that radicals of past generations did not know that technology can be used for exploitative ends under capitalism, as it can be for liberating ends in a cooperative society.

Worse still, technology creates more work, we are told — with minimal references to society, because people must now hold two jobs instead of one, as a. result of the way an innovation currently yields partial employment and lowered income. That an avaricious class of proprietors and administrators must — and want to — gain a ‘competitive edge’ in the market with unseemly profits and that money leads to exploitation all but eludes Mander, who develops a serious case of social somnambulism. The vested economic interests that use technological innovations to exploit rather than diminish labor are not only freed of their odium, but scented by flamboyant denunciations of technics as such.

Thus, after conceding that medical technology ‘on the whole, aids longer life and that is good’, Mander, as a constrast, then mingles apples with oranges by reminding us that the murder rate in the United States has skyrocketed, that the prison population is bursting, that suicide and drug use have reached epidemic proportions, that 32 million Americans live in poverty, that 13 per cent of the population has no health insurance, that 3 million people are homeless, that 27 per cent are functionally illiterate, and that 28 million American adults suffer from one or another kind of mental disorder.[221] One is obliged to ask — is all this really because of technology?

Finally, having recited more statistics on the extent of environmental degradation, Mander might be expected to deliver a powerful rebuke against a society that permits, indeed fosters, these terrible, patently social, abuses. Instead, we are told: ‘Given that technology was supposed to make life better, and given its apparent failure in both the social and the environmental spheres, shouldn’t reason dictate that we sharply question the wild claims we have accepted about technology?’[222]

Permeated as his book is by social amnesia, the reader often has the feeling that if only people could all get together in a huge encounter group, possibly at the Elmwood Institute, all our problems could be happily resolved. We are, it appears, entranced by a ‘pro-technology paradigm’ that has dazzled us into a belief in the promise of ‘technotopia’. If only we could remove its inherent appeal to our psyches, we might — guided by the ‘sacred,’ as defined by California’s version of native American sensibilities — find our way to self and possibly social redemption.[223]

As to society, Mander’s insights are sparse. The most seminal thought in In the Absence of the Sacred is that ‘corporations are machines’by which he means that corporations constitute a business technology and are the product of a ‘technological mentality’[224] That corporations are impersonal and amoral — hence, machinelike — might make this formulation a reasonably good metaphor, provided that Mander explored their function as sources of profit and capital accumulation. But these basic attributes of any capitalistic enterprise are given minimal attention. ‘The Profit Imperative’ , one of his subheadings, receives four scant lines, and no analysis is given to back up his conclusion that ‘profit is the ultimate measure of all corporate decisions’[225] ‘The Growth Imperative’ , which immediately follows Mander’ s impressively abbreviated discussion of profit, occupies less than half a page, and it too is notable for its lack of serious analysis of the impelling factors in capital expansion. Last, Mander sees ‘Competition and Aggression’ primarily as an internal problem within individual corporations, a form of personal agonistic activity comparable to the behavior of competing professional football players.[226]

Mander’s interpretation of technology is basically obscurantist: conceived as a quasi-mystical ‘web of interactions’ , technology not only takes on an almost psychic and self-generative life of its own, but it is given an overpowering presence in every dimension of human affairs. In Marx’s concept of the ‘fetishism of commodities’ , people who make the things they consume seem under capitalism to be mysteriously ruled by them; so for Mander, technology, which results from interactions between human beings and the natural world, becomes a mysterious ‘autonomous’ force that plays a formative and overriding role in the human condition. To understand the authentic reality of the human condition today, we are thus obliged to strip away not only the fetishism of commodities but also the fetishism of technology. Not only do we five far more within a very real web of commodity relationships than technological ones, but we are justifiably far more afflicted by a market-oriented mentality than by a technological one. We are far more concerned with securing a living than with assessing the extent to which technology affects our psyches. Our thinking is fashioned along quantified fines more because of our attempts to balance a dwindling domestic budget than because of the influence of Cartesian mechanism.

The social amnesia that afflicts technophobes and antihumanists generates an arrogance toward the seemingly mundane problems that people ordinarily face, a New Age arrogance much greater than the arrogance of so-called ‘technotopians’ (a category that seems to include almost everyone who is seriously concerned with human welfare and the achievement of a materially abundant society). Indeed, left to its own devices, the present society might well produce environmental dislocations so profound that humanity will be obliged to five in a ‘technotopia’ , an artificially created environment, and no appeals whatever for a return to the ‘sacred’ , least of all to a contrived ‘Paleolithic spirituality’ , will be able to bring back the ozone layer, restore a breathable atmosphere, undo the damage to basic biogeo chemical cycles, and cleanse a hopelessly poisoned water supply. If such a sweeping ecological regression were ever to occur, future generations might well have to build domes over their cities, create oxygen-making machines, and produce synthetic food.

Such a nightmarish future — with its despotic political consequences — would not be the product of technological innovation or thinking. It Would be the product of a social system that, by its competitive nature — with or without technological innovations — is incapable of placing any limits on growth and limits on the acquisition of profit with which to grow. If the competitive market society continues to expand unopposed, it will be because the serious radical movements for social change of former decades have been supplanted in recent years by antihumanist, mystical, and technophobic cults for selfiredemption and narcissistic epiphanies.

As to Mander s knowledge of the ‘sacred’ , much of the anthropology in In the Absence of the Sacred is questionable, drawn largely from the native ‘Man the Hunter’ school of the 1960s and 1970s.

Mander is characteristic of the more widely read antitechnological writers around these days, and like many of his pop confreres, has nourished a great deal of today’s rising technophobia. But other theorists deal philosophically with technology, in writings that have broad implications for the conflict between enlightened humanism and antihumanism. Jacques Ellul’s Technological Society , one of the ancestral literary sources of present-day technophobia, criticizes not only technology as such but technique; indeed, he gives the term such a broad scope that it can essentially be defined as nearly any means for effectuating a goal today: ‘The term technique, as I use it,’ he writes, ‘does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end. In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.’ It might well be supposed that Ellul is talking as much about human-generated causality in the modern world as he is about tools and machines.[227]

Although Ellul gives us no specific reason to believe that technique as such is good or bad, it clearly becomes degraded when reason and consciousness enter into technical operations. Inasmuch as every technical operation unavoidably involves reason and consciousness, it is hard to believe that technique can ever exclude thought. Thus the two words are functionally interchangeable. Indeed, if Ellul is to be taken seriously, humanity has always been living in a technological age insofar as thought and tools have been operationally interactive with each other.

Claiming that he does “not deny the existence of individual action or of some inner sphere of freedom,’ Ellul notes that “these are not discernible at the most general level of analysis.’[228] This entrance into the ‘inner sphere of freedom’ necessarily renders his book into an interpretive, not merely a factual, work — which means drat we can only ask whether his interpretations are true and his facts accurate. On both accounts, Ellul significandy fails us. In a work that grandly marches from the “primitive’ to the Industrial Revolution and “reports’ on the “characterology of technique’ in general — its “modern characteristics’, its influence on the economy, its interaction with the State, and so on through a host of highly nuanced issues and topics — interpretation, of course, is utterly unavoidable. Indeed, from the moment he enters into a discussion of‘primitive technique’, he expresses views on magic that rest on uncertain and speculative grounds. So too in his discussion of the ancient Mediterranean, Asian, and Christian worlds, during which, apart from a tangential reference to Archimedes, he completely omits the extraordinary technological achievements of the Hellenistic age. But what is at issue, here, is not that Ellul is to be faulted for loading his book with interpretations. Quite to the contrary, the fault lies with his utterly bizarre insistence that he doesn’t do so!

Although Ellul asserts that in bis book he has “deliberately not gone beyond description’ and denies that he is ‘a pessimist’, the conclusions of his considerable tome flagrantly belie these disavowals.[229] In fact, he is a clumsy technological determinist — perhaps not a ‘rigorous’ one, as he puts it, but significantly so. And he is immensely pessimistic. What Ellul does is to formulate a ubiquitous “dialectic’ of technique that inexorably ends in a dictatorial ‘megamachine’. His closing chapter, “A Look at the Future’, which ends with “A Look at the Year 2000’, describes

the monolithic technical world that is coming to be. It is vanity to pretend it can be checked or guided. Indeed, the human race is beginning confusedly to understand at last that it is living in a new and unfamiliar universe. The new [technological] order was meant to be a buffer between man and nature. Unfortunately, it has evolved autonomously in such a way that man has lost all contact with his natural framework and has to do only with the organized technical intermediary which sustains relations both with the world of life and the world of brute matter.[230]

Anticipating Mander and others like him, Ellul declares: Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is “no exit”; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years.’[231]

This prelapsarian vision of an “ancient milieu to which [man] was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years’, the most ragged mydi advanced by primitives, ecomystics, and technophobes, collapses under critical scrutiny. Aldiough the different hominid species were variously vegetarian food-gatherers, scavengers, and — perhaps only within the past 60,000 years — fairly sophisticated hunters, there is even evidence that they began to systematically cultivate food during certain seasons in the Nile valley some 30,000 years ago, when much of Europe was still glaciated and the famous Magdalenian culture was flourishing in southern France and the Pyrenees.

It is important to stress these variations not only because they controvert the fiction of a single ‘Paleolithic sensibility’ but because Ellul, like so many other technophobes, bases his account of ‘why the first steps were taken’ toward a “technological society’ exclusively on ideological and subjective factors. After rejecting the common notion that these “steps’ were the result of scientific progress, “which prepared the way for technical progress, but it cannot explain it’, and noting that it would “exaggerate the force of pBnhghtenment] philosophic ideas and systems’ to give them “the highest place in the history of techniques’, Ellul settles upon “the optimistic atmosphere of the eighteenth century, more than [Enlightenment] philosophy.[232]

This explanation is extraordinary. Relying on Lewis Mumford’s very uneven account of the development of technics — the descriptive vividness of Mumford’s narrations and style can easily be mistaken for a causal account — Ellul concedes that the accretions of small technical advances finally laid the basis for a qualitative leap, together with population increases, a flexible economic life, and, most decisively, ‘the plasticity of the social milieu.’[233]

But as to what made for this ‘plasticity’ and, presumably, the receptivity of ‘people’ to sweeping technological innovations, Ellul gives us a jumble of ideological reasons ranging from the impact of Christianity to the breakup of traditional social groups. To be sure, the bourgeoisie, Ellul concedes, did play a role in catapulting the preindustrial eighteenth century into the highly industrial nineteenth century, ‘but it was not enough to carry the whole of society along with it.’[234] That the bourgeoisie did not need “the whole of society’ to go along with it owing to its economic power seems to elude Ellul. In fact, rather absurdly, Ellul tells us that “Karl Marx rehabilitated technique in the eyes of the workers’ by preaching that it ‘can be liberating’ — as though Marx were that influential in ‘the middle of the nineteenth century’, which Ellul regards as his golden moment — and the industrial proletariat sprang up like mushrooms after a vigorous rain following the publication (barely noticed) of the Communist Manifesto in 1848![235]

Philosophically sophisticated technophobes who find the likes of Mander particularly crude can always turn to the works of Martin Heidegger, who essentially elevates techne (and presumably technology) to a, largely metaphysical category. The tortured complexities of Heidegger’s ontology of Being are beyond the scope of this chapter, nor is it possible, here, to cope in any detail with a philosophy that notoriously followed so many different ‘woodpaths’ and engaged in so many ‘turns’ — to use Heidegger’s own jargon. My account of Heidegger s ‘ontology’ is admittedly selective and focused on its unadorned essentials. I may add that Heidegger, not to speak of his many disciples, was very much at odds with himself from the 1920s to the last years of his life in the 1970s.

Insofar as Heidegger can be said to have had a project to shape human lifeways, it was as an endeavor to resist, or should I say, demur from, what he conceived to be an all-encroaching technocratic mentality and civilization that rendered human beings ‘inauthentic’ in their relationship to a presumably self-generative reality, ‘isness’, or more esoterically, ‘Being’ (Sein). Not unlike many German reactionaries, Heidegger viewed ‘modernity’ with its democratic spirit, rationalism, respect for the individual, and technological advances as a ‘falling’ (Gefallen) from a primal and naive innocence in which humanity once ‘dwelled’, remnants of which he believed existed in the rustic world into which he was bom a century ago.

‘Authenticity’, it can be said without any philosophical frills, lay in the pristine Teutonic world of the tribal Germans who retained their ties with ‘the Gods’, and with later peoples who still tried to nourish their past amid the blighted traits of the modern world. Since some authors try to muddy Heidegger’s prelapsarian message by focusing on his assumed belief in individual freedom and ignoring his hatred of the French Revolution and its egalitarian, ‘herd’-like democracy of the ‘They’, it is worth emphasizing that such a view withers in the light of his denial of individuality. ‘The individual by himself counts for nothing’, he declared after becoming a member of the National Socialist party in 1933. ‘The fate of our Volk in its state counts for everything.’[236]

As a member of the Nazi party, which he remained up to the defeat of Germany twelve years later, his antihumanism reached strident, often blatantly reactionary proportions. Newly appointed as the rector of the University of Freiburg upon Hider’s ascent to power, he readily adopted the Ew/irer-principle of German fascism and preferred the tide Rektor-Fuhrer, hailing the spirit of National Socialism as an antidote to ‘the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth [by technology], the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative.’[237] His most unsavory remarks were directed in the lectures, from which these lines are taken, ‘from a metaphysical point of view’, against ‘the pincers’ created by America and Russia that threaten to squeeze ‘the fardiermost corner of the globe ... by technology and ... economic exploitation.’[238]

Technology, as Heidegger construes it, is ‘no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth.’[239] After which Heidegger rolls out technology’s transformations, indeed mutations, which give rise to a mood of anxiety and finally hubris, anthropocentricity, and the mechanical coercion of things into mere objects for human use and exploitation.

Heidegger’s views on technology are part of a larger Weltanschauung which is too multicolored to discuss here, and demands a degree of interpretive effort we must forgo for the present in the context of a criticism of technophobia. Suffice it to say that there is a good deal of primitivistic animism in Heidegger’s treatment of the ‘revealing’ that occurs when techne is a ‘clearing’ for the ‘expression’ of a crafted material — not unlike the Eskimo sculptor who believes (quite wrongly, I may add) that he is ‘bringing out’ a hidden form that lies in the walrus ivory he is carving. But this issue must be seen more as a matter of metaphysics than of a spiritually charged technique. Thus, when Heidegger praises a windmill, in contrast to the ‘challenge’ to a tract of land from which the ‘hauling out of coal and ore’ is subjected, he is not being ‘ecological’. Heidegger is concerned with a windmill, not as an ecological technology, but more metaphysically with the notion that ‘its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind’s blowing’. The windmill ‘does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it’.[240] Like man in relation to Being, it is a medium for the ‘realization’ of wind, not an artifact for acquiring power.

Basically, this interpretation of a technological interrelationship reflects a regression — socially and psychologically as well as metaphysically — into quietism. Heidegger advances a message of passivity or passivity conceived as a human activity, an endeavor to let things be and ‘disclose’ themselves. ‘Letting things be’ would be little more than a trite Taoist and Buddhist precept were it not that Heidegger as a National Socialist became all too ideologically engaged, rather than letting things be’. when he was busily undoing ‘intellectualism’democracy, and technological intervention into the ‘world’.

Considering the time, the place, and the abstract way in which Heidegger treated humanity’s ‘Fall 7 into technological ‘inauthenticity’ — a ‘Fall’ that he, like Ellul, regarded as inevitable, albeit a metaphysical, nightmare — it is not hard to see why he could trivialize the Holocaust, when he deigned to no tice it at all, as part of a techno-industrial ‘condition’. ‘Agriculture is now a motorized (motorisierte) food industry, in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps,’ he coldly observed, ‘the same as the blockade and starvation of the countryside, the same as the production of the hydrogen bombs.’[241] In placing the industrial means by which many Jews were killed before the ideological ends that guided their Nazi exterminators, Heidegger essentially displaces the barbarism of a specific state apparatus, of which he was a part, by the technical proficiency he can attribute to the world at large! These immensely revealing offhanded remarks, drawn from a speech he gave in Bremen in 1949, are beneath contempt. But they point to a way of thinking that gave an autonomy to technique that has fearful moral consequences which we are fiving with these days in the name of the sacred, a phraseology that Heidegger would find very congenial were he alive today.

Indeed, technophobia, followed to its logical and crudely primitivistic conclusions, finally devolves into a dark reactionism — and a paralyzing quietism. For if our confrontation with civilization turns on passivity before a ‘disclosing of Being’, a mere ‘dwelling’ on the earth, and a ‘letting things be’, to use Heidegger’s verbiage — much of which has slipped into deep ecology’s vocabulary as well — the choice between supporting barbarism and enlightened humanism has no ethical foundations to sustain it. Freed of values grounded in objectivity, we are lost in a quasireligious antihumanism, a spirituality that can with the same equanimity hear the cry of a bird and ignore the anguish of six million once-living people who were put to death by the National Socialist state.