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As we all know, these deeper questions about scientific knowledge and control have been brewing for some time. They began with the development and use of the terrible new weapons and the threat to human life itself that the technological power evidenced in them represented. These questions continued with the realization that technology provides the political authorities and a potential scientific elite with new and dangerous powers over ordinary people: political powers based on weapons and communications systems unavailable to the people, and on the possibility of psychological and even genetic control over entire populations. Technology seemed now not so much to guarantee freedom and self-determination, individuality of style of life and privacy of personal existence-freedom from natural fates to become human-as it did to open up the possibility of an all-encompassing totalitarianism that could crush individuality and humanity, a submission of the human to a new kind of social and historical fate. These fears have been expressed for some decades in the Western consciousness, for example, by Huxley and Orwell. However, two new factors have recently become visible that have widely increased this uneasiness about a technological culture: one of them since World War II and the other in the last decade.
The first can be referred to as the dehumanizing effects of a technological culture. As Jacques Ellul has pointed out, technology is not only a matter of tools, instruments, machines, and computers. It also characterizes a society insofar as it is organized, systematized, or rationalized into an efficient organization: as in an army, an efficient business, or a bureaucracy. Here, all the human parts are integrated with each other into a practical, efficient, smooth-running organization where no time. effort, or materials are wasted; the product or the service is quickly correctly, and inexpensively created; and a minimum of loss, error an cross-purposes is achieved. Thus are identical homes built by a single company and according to a single plan-for efficiency's sake; thus local government submerged in national bureaucracy; thus do individual farms give way to farming combines; and thus is every small industry swallowed up by large, unified business or state concerns. The beneficial results of this technologizing or rationalizing of society are obvious: the rising standards of living of America, Europe, and Japan have directly hinged on the development of this sort of efficient, centralized administration of industry, distribution, services, and government. And every developing country seeks to increase as rapidly as possible its rationalization of production and organization in order to feed, clothe, house, and defend its people.
In the midst of these benefits, however, there have appeared other, negative consequences. As every advanced technological society has discovered, human beings are now not so much masters as the servants of the organizations they have created, servants in the sense that they find themselves "caught" and rendered inwardly helpless within the system insofar as they participate in it at all. By this I mean that they experience their personness, their individuality, their unique gifts, creativity and joy-their sense of their own being and worth-as sacrificed to the common systematic effort, an effort in which all that their own thought and ingenuity can contribute is to devise more practical means to an uncriticized end. Any considerations they might raise concerning creativity, aesthetics, or the moral meaning of what is being done, that might compromise the efficiency, the smooth running of the whole team, are "impracticable" and so irrational. Thus does the individuality of each lose its transcendence over the system; their minds and consciences cease to be the masters and become its servants, devoted only to its harmony and success. Human beings are here, and are creative only as parts of a system; their worth is judged only with regard to their contribution as an efficient part; they are lured into being merely parts of a machine.
The system has, moreover, proved ruthlessly destructive of many of the other, less public grounds of our identity as persons. It uproots us from that in which much of our identity, or sense of it, is founded namely, our identification with a particular place and with a particular comrnunity. For it gathers us into ever-larger groups of people similarly organized, and then it moves us about from here to there, from these People to those, within the larger society. It rewards and satisfies us only externally by giving us things to consume or to watch. Afterall, such things are all that efficient organization can produce. Having dampened our creative activity in the world into the rote work expected of a mere part of a system, it now smothers the intensity of our private enjoyments by offering us the passive pleasures of mere consumption. Thus does it stifle our inwardness.
Ironically, the West had in its spiritual career discovered and emphasized, as had no other culture, the reality, uniqueness, and value of the inwardness of each human being, of what was once called the "soul." But a concurrent theme, its affirmation of the goodness of life, the intelligibility of the world, and the possibility through knowledge of the latter's manipulation and control has gradually achieved an almost exclusive dominance. The combination of these two themes had promised reshape human existence in relation both to nature and to the forms of social life, culminating in technology, democracy, and socialism. Thus, in comparison with the Eastern world, the West had creatively learned to manipulate the external, objective world and done much to humanize and rationalize the objective social order. But it has in the process endangered its own inward soul, the reality and creativity of the spirit.
Thus, having through science, technology, democracy, and socialism helped to rescue the Orient's social orders, it now must turn back to the Orient in order to rediscover its own inwardness. And it is doing so in great numbers-ironically, just when the Orient is itself grasping after the lures of Western technology and external progress!
Technological society promised to free the individual from crushing work, from scarcity, disease, and want, to free him or her to become himself or herself by dispensing with these external fates. In many ways, on the contrary, it has-or threatens to do so-emptied rather than freed the self by placing each person in a homogeneous environment, setting him or her as a replaceable part within an organized system, and satisfying external wants rather than energizing creative powers. Thus appears the first paradox: the organization of modern society necessary to the survival and well-being of the race seems now to menace the humanity, the inwardness, and creativity of the race. In seeking to live by means of a surplus of goods unknown before and for the sake of such goods, we find that men and women are in danger of losing themselves inwardly and so of dying in the process. What had been seen clearly with regard to individual life by the wisdom of every religious tradition has been proved objectively on a vast scale by modern consumer culture: men and women cannot live by bread alone.
Consciousness of the second menacing face of technology is astoundingly recent, within the last half-decade. This may be termed the "ecology" crisis in its widest connotations. It refers not only to the problem of technological and industrial pollution of the water, air, and earth, and the despoliation of whatever natural beauties are left-though these are serious enough problems, and with energy and resources in short supply will only get worse-but it also refers centrally to the exhaustion through expanded industrial production of the earth's available resources, in the end a far more serious problem. Medicine and greater production of food have increased the population; technology in both agriculture and industry has at an accelerating pace increased our use of nature's resources of fuels, metals and chemicals. In order to feed and care for that mounting population, such agricultural and industrial growth must itself expand almost exponentially. And yet if it does, an absolute limit or term will soon be reached; these resources will come to an end, if not in two or three generations, then surely in four or five. The seemingly infinite expansion of civilization and its needs is in collision course with the obstinate finitude of available nature and threatens to engulf both civilization and nature. For the first time, our freedom in history menaces not only our fellow humans but nature as well. In the past, with the development of the techniques of civilization, history was freed from the overwhelming power of nature and its cycles and submitted nature to her own control. Now civilization and history have become so dominant in their power that they threaten to engulf nature in their own ambiguity.
In this case, that ambiguity is very great. A world economy, whether its domestic forms be socialist or capitalist, facing the combination of expanded populations and depleted and diminishing resources, is a world facing even more bitter rivalries and conflicts than the past has known. It is also, ironically, a world facing in new forms precisely these "fates" from which technology had promised to save us: scarcity, crowding, want, and undue authority. If there are to be rational solutions Co these problems impinging on us from the future, and there are, they will require an immense increase in corporate planning and control on a world scale: control of technological developments, of the industrial use of natural resources, of distribution, of the wide disparities of the use and consumption of resources. Freedom of experiment, freedom for new and radical thoughts and techniques, freedom for individual lifestyles may well be unaffordable luxuries in that age. Perhaps most important, such rational and peaceful solutions will require from the nations with power an extraordinary self-restraint in the use of their power, a willingness for the sacrifice of their affluence lest they be tempted to use their power to grab all that is left for the sake of that affluence. All this bespeaks an increase of authority in our future undreamed of in the technological Utopias of the recent past. Whether we will or no, we seem headed for a less free, less affluent, less individualistic, lg. dynamic, and innovative world. The long-term results of science and technology seem ironically to be bringing about anything but the individualistic, creative, secure world they originally promised. In fact the progressive, dynamic, innovative civilization seems to be in the process of generating its own antithesis: a stable, even stagnant society with a iron structure of rationality and authority, with a minimum of goods of self-determination, of intellectual and personal freedom. Such a grim world is by no means a certainty, for nothing in history is fated. But unless our public life-technical, political, and economic-is directed by more reason and more self-sacrifice than in the past, such a future has a disturbingly high probability.
As the hope latent in science and technology gave birth despite themselves to a new understanding of history, so the new sense of their ambiguity raises for us a host of unavoidable questions about history and the relation of human freedom-of human intelligence, will, and creativity-to history. Technology, along with language, is itself one of the most vivid manifestations of human freedom over its immediate environment. And, as we have seen, its growth in modernity has sparked the consciousness of that freedom in history, the ability of humankind to remake its world. And yet, paradoxically, technology in the long run seems not so much creative of the freedom it represents as destructive of it, for it seems to be creating conditions that will of necessity absorb freedom into authority. Here, the exercise of technical freedom in order to remove the fates that determine freedom from the outside has itself become a fate that menaces freedom-a strange ending.
Again, paradoxically, this most vivid manifestation of freedom has exacerbated industrial expansion that in turn ravishes and desecrates nature, that spurs us all to rivalry, conflict, and doom. Under and behind the creativity of humanity, recently so clear to the modem West as the principle of historical salvation, lies the estrangement and the demonic principle within us-whatever our ideals, our loyalties, our courage, and ingenuity. Finally, and most ironical of all, man as the tool maker, as inquirer and technologist, has by modern savants been regarded as the paradigm of survival. He, not religious, mystical or mythical man, was the "practical" one who alone could handle "reality." Strangely, now Homo faber, as technologist supreme, seems himself to be alienated from "reality," bringing about through his technology his own self destruction and showing himself to be the primary danger to the betrayal of his race. No more startling contradiction to the spirit of modernity from the Enlightenment to the present could be conceived.
Thus has what we can only call the mystery of history and of temporal being revealed itself to us anew, and the potential of meaninglessness in the human story, as well as in individual life. Human creativity-yes, eyen informed intelligence and good purposes-is no simple "god" bringing to us unadulterated blessings, the answers to our every wish. With our creativity freeing us from old fates comes fate in a new form; with our creativity the demonic seems to be continually reintroduced into history. We live in a far stranger and more disturbing history than we thought, where even our apparent victories, our most cherished mastery, our greatest intellectual and practical triumphs help to seal our doom!
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• © 2005 Len Hjalmarson.•
Last Updated on March 16, 2005
