Technological Criticism
To be unable to criticize technology is to be insane. This particular kind of insanity is the hallmark of modern society.
Allow me to justify the preceding statements.
The Logos of Techne
It is difficult to think of a word for what we call "technology" in any ancient tongue or culture. In fact, it occurred to me recently that the word is rather bizarre in itself--something approaching a contradiction in terms. Logos and techne were fundamental categories to the Greeks and especially the Greek philosophers, but they existed in strong contradistinction to each other. Logos is the realm of knowledge, of discourse, of accounting for a particular reality, whether by means of abstract philosophy, mathematical calculation, or narrative. Techne, in contrast, is the realm of craft, of skilled practice aimed at creation and action.
It is by this time a very old intellectual-history commonplace to point to the connections between magic and technology, even to say, as C.S. Lewis did, that the main or only distinction between magic and technology is that one worked, and the other did not. There is truth in this, but it is nonetheless somewhat deceptive. Techne or craft in the pre-modern sense is in fact closely allied to magic, precisely because by its very nature it defies logos in the sense of pre-determined abstraction and calculation. The magician is a practitioner of a craft, but like many pre-modern craftsman, his craft cannot be neatly set out in a mathematical simulation or technical manual; he operates on a mixture of innate skill, honed practice, habit, planning, improvisation, and technique. Wizardry operates on the guild system, with masters and apprentices; there is no magical proletariat. Books of spells or alchemical texts read much like the Byzantine recipes for paints and metal alloys that I translated earlier this year: succinct sets of directions for already skilled and practiced craftsmen to achieve practical ends, given in imprecise proportions, with many options and lots of freedom to alter and experiment baked in.
Technology, though, is not techne. It is not a skill inhering in a skilled laborer operating on technique and instinct beyond the realms of abstract knowledge and calculation. It is, by its very nature, totally calculated and determined in advance, through the distinctively modern and scientific obsession with applied mathematics.
Neither, though, is technology logos in the general sense of that word. Plato in many of his dialogues provides what could be rather more fittingly described as technologies: that is, rational accounts of techne in general and its particular species, describing their rational ends, the skills involved, and how to become a better practitioner. Technology, while totally calculated, is aimed emphatically at merely practical and immediate ends; it is rarely analyzed in philosophical or moral terms, and no practitioner of technology would regard such analysis as essential to its nature or operation.
What Is Technology?
When we speak of technology, whether in general or particular, we do not mean by that a rational account of a craft practiced by skilled practitioners. We mean, more commonly, something that is very hard to understand in terms of these pre-modern categories: a semi-autonomous product of human rationality, not inhering in a subject as a skill or practice, but operating on its own in a totally calculated, pre-determined way. From this perspective, a technology is a logos in one very extreme way--in that everything relating to technology is supposed to be completely defined by abstract (especially mathematical) calculation, and therefore completely determined and controlled in advance. Technologies do in fact surprise their users, technicians, and even creators--but this is generally imagined to be mere exceptions due to imprecision.
This is the paradox of technology, then: that in being fully and abstractly calculated and determined, it becomes a thing of abstract knowledge in a human mind--but on the other hand it is defined by its ability to operate beyond and apart from and in place of human action.
This paradoxical combination of dependence on and autonomy of the human mind creates most of the characteristic qualities of modern technology. To operate autonomously, technology must operate systematically--must form not so much single objects, as interlocking networks, ecosystems, worlds, acting and interacting according to a common language and serving compatible ends. The standardization and systematization of modern science, engineering, mathematics, technical standards, electricity, codes, languages, etc, is thus more necessary and intrinsic to technology than metal or iron.
On the other hand, precisely because of this systematization, technology remains massively dependent on human beings. To exist as a fully abstract, calculated, controlled way over vast systemic spaces, technology paradoxically requires an enormous amount of human effort, thought, and labor to create, maintain, understand, and carry out its operations. Hence, the characteristically modern figure of the technician, who is not an artisan or craftsman mastering material reality for his own practical ends, but rather a servant of a technology, with vast amounts of calculated, abstract knowledge but little rational understanding or control, who labors to further the ends of the technology without imposing his own.
A cow pulling a plow guided by a farmer does not require much in the way of systemic production or standardization or mathematization: it can be carried out in the manner typical of a techne: approximately, by feel and judgment and intuition and practice, in service of a human end. The cow is a living, natural system, with innate capacities to eat, defecate, procreate, and walk forward in a straight line: it requires care and guidance, but not technical "servicing" by a trained expert.
A modern technological system performing the same task, though, would have to involve an enormous amount of measurement, standardization, and technical labor. The mass-produced implement that will drag the plow will have to be measured, standardized, tested, so as to be capable of being produced by another machine and a large number of unskilled and uninterested laborers on an assembly line. The machine that takes the place of a cow will require technicians to understand its enormously complex operations in depth, repair breakdowns, produce and acquire spare parts, and service it regularly. The rows plowed will have to be measured and specified to a high degree of precision.
Technology and Morality
All this leads to the main distinctive feature of technology as opposed to craft--its much greater degree of impact and domination over human understanding, will, and action. Technology cannot be treated as the creation or possession or tool of a single human mind, or even a collective human mind, in the same way as simpler crafts or implements. To produce and maintain a modern technological system, enormous amounts of technical labor are required; but this labor does not determine, and indeed is hardly concerned with, the overall ends of the technology. Perhaps a single person ultimately gave the technology its ends--perhaps a committee did, or a corporation, or an economic system, or a government policy, or the values of a whole society. In any event, that person, society, corporation, committee, government, is no longer there. Whatever original moral beliefs, goals, or values initially inspired a technological system, it is designed to operate autonomously of them, and has a strong tendency to outlive them. Technology is deathless; it endures through generations; and it has no master.
Then, too, moral ends are not easily translated into the abstract, mathematical language of technological systems. A constant tendency of technical systems is to elevate means over ends: to be aimed at human moral ends, but achieve only a calculated technological facsimile thereof, in the process producing totally unintended consequences and achieving results that would have very much surprised those who originally designed them.
Thus, too, is born the eeriness of many typically modern products, an eeriness exploited by many modern artists of literature in film: a thousand miles, perhaps, or a thousand years from any human being, a creature totally of the human mind, only comprehensible in terms of the human mind, acts on its own, moved by the spirits of dead men and societies, served by people fundamentally unconscious of what they are doing, and why.
The most common misconceptions about technology in the present day derive from a failure to understand its essential features. It is simply not true, as a matter of basic ethics, that technology is merely a set of indifferent tools capable of being easily wielded to good or bad ends entirely based on the intentions of the individual person. Technology, by its very nature, contains and embodies and moral ends and intentions. In the most basic sense, it simply is a reification of the human will. To use technology--or rather, in a more precise sense, to participate in a technological system as either a technician or a consumer or an "end-user"--is to inevitably have one's own will and action structured and directed towards the moral ends and intentions embedded in the technology. This structuring and directing can exist in many ways and to many degrees, from the merely accidental to the merely enabling to the merely aesthetic to the merely influencing to the utterly dominating and enslaving. Yet it is always there, and it always has its effects.
While the belief in technology merely as tool is perhaps more dangerous, the downright silliest belief about technology in contemporary America is the idea that it evolves like a natural system, such that its "progress" can never be resisted, since to reject any piece of technology is to reject the entire natural process that also produced all other technologies on which you rely, and such that any piece of technology would be bound to appear anywhere sooner or later. Technology requires human belief, knowledge, calculation, and intention to be conceived, and enormous amounts of human labor to create and maintain. Hence, each technology is quite different; and no technology is inevitable. The technology of a society in fact tells you an enormous amount about that society--what it values, what it sees as good and laudable ends, what it labors and suffers and works for.
In an unanswerable passage, Chesterton points out that, in flat contradiction to all the beliefs of his contemporaries about the intrinsic goodness of science and technology and the inevitability of their progress, the whole science and technology of torture had been left in an utterly primitive and rudimentary form for centuries by (his) society--had not "inevitably" progressed at all, even though it was certainly capable of vast increases in knowledge, precision, and technological development. (The Book of the New Sun by Chesterton fanatic Gene Wolfe gives perhaps the most vivid possible description of a character and society that has furthered this science and been trained in it.) Chesterton's society had not furthered the technologies of torture, had actually sought to suppress the knowledge and skills and technical data necessary for their creation and maintenance, because of a mere moral qualm about the ends these technologies served. Of course, in the time since Chesterton's death this science has again returned, and brought many technologies with it. We are certainly more rational than they.
No other society in human history, no matter its degree of technical mastery over the materials of nature, would have produced the smart phone. It shows extremely well the goals and intentions and ideals pursued by American society--or at least by the corporate and economic and mass-media systems that dominate it. Distraction, entertainment, information, content, connection: these are worth, to us or at least our rulers, any amount of labor, any amount of calculation, any amount of sacrifice. Much other characteristically modern technology was the product of the World Wars and the military-industrial complex created by them--which shaped technology in service of mass destruction, of mass production, mass transportation, and mass media. The sacrifices and labor and belief and fervor necessary first to create and now to maintain these technologies is unimaginably vast, from the suffering of the soldiers in WW2 to the labor of the engineers to the efforts of child cobalt miners in Africa and their financial masters. As recent supply-chain and financial difficulties have reminded us, this system is by its nature quite fragile, and quite susceptible to even small alterations in human value and action.
I recently wrote in this space about the Lord of the Rings, and the obvious realization I came to upon rereading that it is a story entirely about modern technology, its uses and abuses. Read through the lens of a meditation on modern technology, there is nothing particularly magical or fantastical about either the Elves' "magic" or the One Ring. Both are merely technologies, inevitably embodying the will and intentions and values of those who created them, and thus inevitably operating through and even despite those who wield them. That the One Ring is declared to embody Sauron, his spirit and his goals, such that any one who tries to wield it with a weak will will end up merely serving his ends, and anyone strong enough to be able to wrest it from him will end up merely imitating him by using domination and tyranny to further their own ends, is treated, I fear, by most modern readers as some kind of clever magical fantasy. It could hardly be more prosaic. That a good, moral person cannot easily morally wield a technology whose sole power and purpose is to dominate the wills of other persons, created by a society whose highest value is the domination of other persons, is not a paradox, but a prosaic truth.
In the same way, many modern people are astonished by the idea that there might be no moral way to possess or wield nuclear weapons, a technology whose sole end is to indiscriminately kill enormous numbers of innocent people. In both cases, the ordinary, modern person is insane.
The Necessity of Technological Criticism
All of this might well seem to be a Luddite screed of the highest order--a denunciation of technology as such. It is no such thing. Technology embodies and furthers human ends: technology structures the human will and directs it towards its own ends. Given the nature of human society and the human will, technology can just as well embody and further good ends as bad ones. Indeed, good technology can do, literally, wonders--just as bad technology can work destruction in a way and to a degree and on a scale that can only be described as magical, fantastical, eschatological.
However, what I am most emphatically arguing for is the absolute need of technological criticism for any society, and especially for our society. The sine qua non of a healthy technological society is a citizenry (and ideally, a government, and a Church) that is capable of morally discerning technology--seeing what ends it embodies, to what degree it structures or dominates the human will of those who participate in it, what human effort and labor it requires to maintain--and criticizing it--for embodying bad ends, or for being too powerful in directing human ends or desires and so taking away human responsibility and freedom, or for wasting human labor and effort that could better be applied elsewhere.
Such criticism would generally be less absolutist or black-and-white as practical and prudential. A technological toy that is easily produced and amuses children would be unlikely to fall afoul of any critique greater than the aesthetic--a technological toy that amuses children but requires vast teams of technicians to maintain in operation, technicians who otherwise could apply their skills and labor to feeding the hungry, might find itself in a different position--a technological toy that is easily produced but makes children utterly dependent on itself to the detriment of their healthy development would be different again--as would a technological toy that exposes children to pornography or teaches them to be Naziis. Again, we return to the smart phone.
Such technological critique is not, I strongly and emphatically believe, a luxury for intellectuals and critics, but an absolute, practical necessity for basic societal and individual human health, well-being, and sanity. For an individual, to be able to understand and critique the technologies and systems in which he participates gives him back his basic ability to understand the forces that shape his own life- and therefore some measure of genuine freedom and genuine responsibility for his own acts: the two things most lacking in our technological age. If he must participate in technological systems that are contrary to his ethical ideals and ends, he can do so with eyes open, and precautions taken--and even, perhaps, from time to time, choose not to participate in certain technological systems at all. Indeed, perhaps he, and others with whom he participates in common goods, family members, friends, fellow citizens, can actually succeed in some measure in reshaping, reforming, or destroying the technologies of his society, and creating new ones to embody better ends. In so doing, he can help bring about a true revolution, and change society itself.
In any case, he can choose to not merely passively serve every technology that he encounters. He can choose not to be insane.
I recommend it.
No comments:
Post a Comment