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Technology, Politics, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals
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12226 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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2 / 1987 |
5,582 Words |
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David J. Levy
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We live today in a technological age. The term is used by so many people in so many different contexts that we have come to take for granted that we know what it means. At a certain level, we do. We inhabit a world where the effects of human technology are everywhere to be seen, and not only seen but also used and relied upon. As once men conceived the limits of their lives to be defined by the presence and pressures of implacable nature - a realm not made by man and ultimately beyond his control - so their descendents have come to see technology itself as representing the new and intrinsically unlimited horizon. On the scale of the individual and the human race alike, the level of technology achieved and about to be achieved expands the range of man's possibilities into hitherto unprecedented ways. This expansion of possibilities is obviously a human achievement, the result of human efforts and thus, in principle, within the range of human responsibility. And yet the technologically defined world of modernity is, as much as the natural world, experienced as subject to dynamics of its own - tending to move in a fixed direction toward an unknown and uncertain end. The careful calculation of appropriate means to chosen ends, characteristic of each individual technological project, plays little or no part in the process of technology as a whole. This process of technological change advances ever outward, expanding human powers without regard to what the consequences may be.
Thus, people today tend to think of the sphere of technology with the same ambivalence with which they once regarded nature. Technology is the object of both their hopes and their terrors. It promises the material for a life of happiness and ease and is, at the same time, sensed to be pregnant with apocalyptic possibilities. It is simultaneously worshipped, cultivated, and feared as an inescapable and dominant reality in the life of the species. Those who claim to know its secrets are, like the magicians of old, consulted without ever really being trusted - not because they are thought to be any less trustworthy than the rest of mankind but because they are suspected of meddling with forces ultimately beyond their control in ways whose consequences cannot be foreseen.
This ambivalent attitude about the power of technology is characteristic of the mood of the present day. It is an essential part of what we mean when we say that we live in a technological age; for an age tends to characterize itself, above all, by what defines its hopes and fears. And yet the term is in some respects thoroughly misleading, suggesting as it does that technology is a new factor on the scene setting us apart from our human predecessors. The classification of distinctive epochs in terms of some specific difference that separates the mode of life of their inhabitants from what went before is one way we make sense of the past. As a classificatory scheme, the notion of an "age of technology" enables us to extend our comprehension of the human story into the shadowy realms of prehistory. When we speak of the Bronze Age or the Iron Age, we are referring to epochs in man's history in which the horizon of human possibilities was extended by the discovery and use of new material. When we think of the development of agriculture as marking a new epoch in human existence, the start of the agrarian age, we are thinking of the ways in which man transformed his way of life by bringing under his control and guidance processes that were already present in nature. The term technological age is not like that, if only because the development of agriculture, like the working of metals and of stone before them, is already an essentially technological achievement - the
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