Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry Read online

  Philosophers today try to gain firm ground and act on this ambiguity by turning to the antecedent and enabling conditions of thought, discourse, and argument. Attention is directed not to what is claimed to be shown and seen but to the grounds and possibilities of claims in general. Philosophy is not concerned with theory in the sense of a steady view of the world but with metatheory, the conditions of visibility.3 This seems to be a plausible move beyond the common level of confusion. In fact it turns out to be an inconclusive enterprise. But that does not permit us to set it aside. It is for now simply a fact that the predominant response to ambiguity is not a desire to be open for what speaks with simple and salutary authority but the desire to gain authority over ambiguity by getting hold of its controlling conditions. The pattern and context of this response will become clearer precisely when we first take the metatheoretical turn and then move on to its final analysis where its insufficiency and the region beyond it become apparent.

  There is a spectrum of attempts at taking the measure of our times. At one end are the concerns with immediately pressing and empirically quantifiable issues; at the other we find considerations of a radical and reflective sort. The present study is philosophical in belonging to the latter extreme. Though it pays more attention to substantive and empirical concerns than philosophy typically does, at least in this country, the present study has to draw on many of the concepts, methods, and insights of mainstream philosophy to obtain a reflective and radical view; and to that extent it is philosophical in the currently received sense as well.

  2

  Theories of Technology

  Proponents of science and technology can respond to flamboyant accusations and proposals with superior silence. Modern science provides principled explanations and modern technology effective solutions of the problems that have troubled the human race from its beginning. This, at any rate, is the prevailing view, and it has a measure of accuracy. And from that viewpoint critics and competitors who fail to attain scientific rigor and technological efficacy are disqualified at the start. The strength of this view cannot be overcome by a colorful tour de force. One must at least begin by meeting it punctually and carefully. To be sure, one cannot overtake science and technology by their own standards. But care and precision of argument can make an opening for a truly alternative and viable kind of discourse, and in that universe of discourse deeper concerns can come to the fore which are eclipsed by science and technology. It is for the sake of these final aspirations that this essay sets out in what may seem an overly painstaking way.

  Before a theory of technology as a vision of the world can be advanced, then, we must reflect on the possibilities of such a theory. They are best approached by starting from the theories of technology that have been developed in the literature. Each of these theories is guided by a certain sense of technology. The most common can be circumscribed as applied science and engineering. It designates an area of much sober and salutary work whose practitioners are entitled to fair and judicious treatment. If the word is not used in this sense, that must be made clear.1 In fact, technology as applied science and engineering is not a suitable title and guide for a theory of technology.2 To begin with, the subject matter covered by that title suffers from an overarticulation of its parts and seems to leave no areas for fruitful philosophical inquiry.3 It is the result of singularly principled and systematic efforts. No sorting out seems to be necessary. Take the case of medical technology. It would be nonsensical to ponder the laws and methods that surgical procedures, for instance, are based on. At best one would come back to the explicit knowledge of anatomy, biology, chemistry, and so forth from which surgical techniques derive in the first place. On the other hand, the reduction of a practically successful but theoretically opaque procedure to scientific laws, say, in metallurgy, is doing technology; it is not philosophical reflection about technology. The same holds true when we turn to the narrowly technological context of medical technology. There is voluminous and explicit knowledge on how medicine by way of insurance is connected to the economy, how by way of medical schools to the educational establishment, how by way of the AMA to politics, and so on. All these problems are at least attended to by well-trained specialists, and no field of inquiry is left for the philosopher.

  At the same time, there is a common intuition that the realm of research and development and of machines is characteristic of our era. Any fundamental investigation that ignores that part of our world must appear quaint. But to bring out the significance of technology in this larger sense one must turn to a larger context, to the antecedents and consequences of applied science and engineering. Often technology is kept as a designation for that wider field of study and its findings. Technology in this broader and stronger sense competes with other titles that attempt to catch the character of our times.4 As said before, the contest of titles should be decided by the criterion of fruitfulness.

  Philosophy at its best has always been concerned to provide an ontology, a vision of reality in its decisive features. One would therefore expect contemporary philosophy to have taken up the challenge of technology, to have inquired into the origin and fundament of the age of applied science and engineering, and to have furnished theories of technology in the wider sense. But most such theories have come from the social sciences. The philosophy of technology is just beginning to develop as a discipline. A theory, however, needs no philosophical hallmark to be appropriate. Let us look, then, at the theories themselves to examine their adequacy. Such a survey has scholarly precedents and can benefit from them. What follows here is not intended as a survey of all surveys of theories of technology. The intention is rather to gain entry to the problem of a theory of technology by way of looking at a few summaries of such theories.

  These summaries distinguish a multitude of approaches, but all distinctions fit well one of three essential types: the substantive, the instrumentalist, and the pluralist views of technology. In the substantive view technology appears as a force in its own right, one that shapes today’s societies and values from the ground up and has no serious rivals.5 Hence that view is sometimes called the “sociological approach” or “technological value determinism.”6 The explicit proponents of the substantive view usually depict technology as a pernicious force, and so their position can be labeled “antitechnologist.”7 Implicitly, however, all the writers who speak of the “imperatives of technology” are committed to the substantive position though there is much inconsistency as regards such commitments.8

  The substantive view is theoretically inviting because of its ambition and radicality. It seeks to give a comprehensive elucidation of our world by reducing its perplexing features and changes to one force or principle. That principle, technology, serves to explain everything, but it remains itself entirely unexplained and obscure. The most important example of this approach is given by Jacques Ellul. He paints the most comprehensive and somber picture of the omnipotence of what he calls the technical phenomenon which establishes itself through various techniques.9 But his terminology is tellingly shifting.10 Though the technical phenomenon is initially described as something very close to the essence of modern technology and a technique is defined merely as any methodical procedure to achieve an end, technique, nevertheless, comes to carry the entire explanatory burden, “technique” (sometimes qualified as “modern”) is invoked as the autonomous and irresistible power that enslaves everything from science to art, from labor to leisure, from economics to politics.11 How can technique, so generally defined, accomplish this? Ellul mentions two additional factors that must enter technique or technical operations to produce the technical phenomenon, namely, consciousness and judgment.12 These are presumably human factors. But Ellul devotes the concluding part of his book to showing that humanity has lost control over technique and is overwhelmed by it. If that inconsistency were resolved, the qualified concept of technique would still suffer from a debilitating generality. A consciously applied method may be more powerful than a
n implicit one, but to what ends will it be applied? For Ellul the answer is provided by the notion of efficiency.13 But efficiency is a systematically incomplete concept. For efficiency to come into play, we need antecedently fixed goals on behalf of which values are minimized or maximized. Those goals remain in the dark. From the omnipotence of technique we can infer, however, that whatever the goals may be they cannot be forces in their own right which could give guidance to technical developments. Technique is presumably its own end, and this is what the description of the characteristics of modern technique suggests.14 But now we have come full circle in our search for the explanatory base of Ellul’s analysis. Modern technique, a power in its own right, is put forward by Ellul as its own unexplained explanation.

  Talk of such an obscure and pernicious power is easily dismissed as a demonizing of technology.15 Ellul’s important and fruitful observations are then lost along with his pivotal concept. Although he had anticipated the major points of Galbraith’s The New Industrial State,16 Ellul’s theses found little resonance because the central obscurity of Ellul’s book made them so easy to ignore.17 That ease is accommodated by the availability of a much more familiar and seemingly more perspicuous view of technology, namely, instrumentalism. There is a continuous historical thread that leads from our ensemble of machines back to simple tools and instruments. We may think of both machines and tools as affording possibilities of which we can avail ourselves for better or worse. The extension of human capacities through artifacts is as old as humankind itself. A human being is, simply, a toolmaker and a tool user. Hence the instrumentalist view of technology is sometimes called the anthropological approach. A variant of the anthropological perspective is the epistemological view.18 Here the focus is not on the development of humans and their tools but on the methodology that modern technology embodies as a way of taking up with reality, particularly in distinction to scientific procedure.19 If technology is at bottom a mere instrument, the inquiry of what guides technology becomes a task in its own right. The determination of the guiding values is sometimes held to be a matter of rational inquiry. “Rational value determinism” is therefore by implication a species of instrumentalism.20

  The notion of technology as a value-neutral tool or instrument is congenial to that liberal democratic tradition which holds that it is the task of the state to provide means for the good life but wants to leave to private efforts the establishment and pursuit of ultimate values.21 In that view, technology appears to have a well-defined place in public policy. Radical critics generally accept the instrumentalist view of technology but claim that it is naive at best to disregard the ends technology serves in Western democracies. Those ends are said to be the welfare of the ruling elite and the exploitation of the working class. To ignore these issues is to cast a technological veil over social reality.22 A penetrating inquiry of technology must inevitably be a social critique. This approach, sometimes called “politicized technology,” is an important kind of instrumentalism.23 Indeed, if one is persuaded that the political dimension is decisive in human endeavors, any analysis of technology can be evaluated as to its political salience, and it becomes possible to give an array of prominent analyses from left to right.24

  The instrumentalist approach is in one way unassailable. Any concretely delimited piece of technology can be put forward as a value-neutral tool. But it is a shortsighted view. The availability of mere means is itself a remarkable and consequential fact. Historically, it is just in modern technology that such devices become available. As I will show later, it is an equivocation to speak indifferently of tools in a modern and in a pretechnological setting. A means in a traditional culture is never mere but always and inextricably woven into a context of ends.

  If it is true that the presence of mere instruments in modern technology is consequential, then it must be misleading to continue to speak of ends and goals in a traditional manner. Putting technology in the context of political purposes is itself naive if one fails to consider trenchantly the radical transformation of all policies that technology may bring about. Indeed, Ellul and Galbraith who have been assessed and criticized within the political framework have forcefully challenged the adequacy of that framework, a challenge not always sufficiently met by their critics. The challenge, briefly, urges that traditionally radical distinctions, say, between socialism and capitalism, between union and management, have been eroded by modern technological or economic developments. Politics, then, is no longer the undisputed master science; it may well be in the thrall of a radically new and different force.

  These questions will occupy us throughout this book. The present considerations suffice to show that in the instrumentalist view technology does not come fully into relief. Instrumentalism does not constitute a proper theory of technology. The failure that ambition suffers in the substantive view of technology and the obstacles that constrain common sense in the instrumentalist school of thought invite a more cautious and circumspective approach, one that takes account of the various evolving trends and complexities and of the many interacting forces. It has been called the “evolution and interaction” approach.25 Essentially, it is a form of pluralism in that it meets all comprehensive approaches with reminders of counterexamples, unresolved problems, and disregarded evidence. The pluralist sees it all, the entire complex web of numerous countervailing forces. Against this picture any proposal of a great and consequential scheme must appear as a falsification of reality. Ironically, the pluralist view does very well with opposing theories, but it fails reality. Technology, in fact, does not take shape in a prohibitively complex way, where for any endeavor there are balancing counterendeavors so that no striking overall pattern becomes visible. It is intuitively apparent that in modern technology the face of the earth is transformed in a radically novel way; and that transformation is possible only on the basis of strong and pervasive social agreements and by way of highly disciplined and coordinated efforts. These crucial matters escape the pluralisms minute and roving scrutiny. The pluralist view is at bottom a learned reflection of the ambiguity we noted in Chapter 1.

  Clearly, the theory of technology that we seek should avoid the liabilities and embody the virtues of the dominant views. It should emulate the boldness and incisiveness of the substantive version without leaving the character of technology obscure. It should reflect our common intuitions and exhibit the lucidity of the instrumentalist theory while overcoming the latter’s superficiality. And it should take account of the manifold empirical evidence that impresses the pluralist investigations and yet be able to uncover an underlying and orienting order in all that diversity. It is the purpose of the paradigmatic explanation of technology to provide such an illuminating theory of technology. To avoid misunderstanding, let me repeat that my concern is with modern technology and its character. I will at times use the appropriate qualifier as a reminder. But often, in what follows, I will simply speak of technology when I mean modern technology. Now although the actual development of a fruitful theory of technology is a difficult task and of uncertain success, the program can be clearly laid out. It is a matter of discovering a basic pattern or paradigm that has been serving us since the beginning of the modern era as a blueprint or template for the transformation of the physical and social universe. If the pattern turns out to be clear and remarkable, it can serve as the pivot of a helpful theory of technology, one that would tell us more clearly what our goal has been, to what extent we have achieved it, and where we ought to turn should our achievements appear dubious to us. Perhaps such an ambitious goal is unattainable. It will be prudent in any case to take the first steps toward it carefully and to raise from another angle the question of what should guide the choice of a theory of technology.

  3

  The Choice of a Theory

  Is it a sufficient recommendation for the classification proposed above that it is able to subsume so many others? It is easy to devise an equally or more inclusive scheme, either by moving to a higher concept
ual level or by setting up sufficiently broad categories of classification. How is one to choose among competing classifications? All of them must meet the condition of internal consistency and of applicability to their subject area. But many will pass these tests, and there cannot be a sufficient condition of adequacy; for no classifying scheme can be exhaustive in taking explicit account of all properties and relations of an area. A classification orders an area in certain regards. It highlights certain features and obscures or suppresses others. It is necessarily selective; and once one is assured that a classification is consistent and applicable, one can pursue the question of adequacy only by asking, What are the concerns that have motivated the particular selection of features that are highlighted by the present classification?

  We have touched on these methodological problems in Chapter 1, and we will have to return to them again. For now I want to put the question above to the classification system developed in the preceding chapter to characterize more closely the orientation of this investigation. We will obtain a tentative answer by comparing the present classification with one developed by Carl Mitcham.1