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- Teich, Ch. 1 -

The Enlightenment is often thought of as the period when the modern idea of progress was born. Enlightened thinkers believed that an understanding of the laws of nature and human nature - in other words science - could liberate humanity and reform our lives for the better. Some went so far as to envision utopias and even the perfectibility of man through the “mastery of nature.”

But this belief in science had some qualifications in the eighteenth-century. Believers in the benefits of science and technology did not typically elevate these above national freedom and individual development. Science and technology were considered to be servants of humanity, and not ends in themselves. Some of the effects of improved technology - such as the factory system - could even be considered inimical to human development.

For example, in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith praised the division of labour in the pin factory as a remarkable development that increased production exponentially. But he also claimed that the labouring classes who would be subject to this division of labour would be mentally impoverished and even alienated from their work. To restore the mental health of workers, Smith went so far as to argue that the state should provide them with education. This education was anything but job related; the concept of education was to broaden the mind of workers, to compensate for their mundane work, and to allow them to become human beings and citizens.

Thus, new technology could be double-edged. Because technology only improved the material conditions of life, it needed to be subservient to more human and political needs. This recognition was held by yet another enlightened thinker, Thomas Jefferson, who argued that America should remain a fundamentally agrarian (i.e. agricultural) economy. This, of course, meant having to trade with industrializing countries for finished commodities and represented a drain on the U.S. treasury. But Jefferson thought that it was more important to have mentally healthy citizens with a good “overall quality of life” than to pay the price of industrial development, including an urban proletariat and middle class who lacked the independence of people who owned or worked on the land.

In a similar fashion, Benjamin Franklin went against a fundamental principle of technology in capitalism, and showed us the bigger picture of the enlightenment, when he refused to take out patents (i.e. to profit) from his inventions. The purpose of technology was not to enrich the individual but to improve the overall quality of life for everyone. Technological progress in the eighteenth-century, in other words, was submerged in and subservient to social and political values.

In America, the ideal of technological progress, and the marriage of technology and capitalism, appears to have occurred sometime in the 1840s. Daniel Webster, a senator from Massachusetts, was different from the aristocratic/agrarian philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. He was a champion of the urban middle class, the kind of people who built and managed factories. This group equated the advance of civilization with a kind of technological progress that was divorced from earlier intellectual and political aspirations. In Webster’s writings and speeches, the technological sublime begins to take shape. Technology is equated with progress, and progress is identified with unbridled capitalism. Profitability and progress now, for the first time, go hand in hand.

The Websters of the Western world, of course, did have things much their own way. But the Jeffersonian perspective did not die out. It had its locus in the older politically independent agrarian community whose values helped to shape young America. It resurfaced in Henry Thoreau’s elevation of nature over the machine in writings like Walden. It was embodied in the literary critique of industrialization - particularly the railway - in the writings of Emerson, Hawthorne and Melville. Against technology, American writers idealized the purity of the wilderness.

But such ideas, in Great Britain (Carlyle, Coleridge and Wordsworth) and Germany (Kant, Fichte and Herder) as well as America, these ideas were not dominant. They represented a defensive, adversary culture that could be easily dismissed as romantic or unrealistic. It was only during the twentieth century, especially during the 1960s, that this adversary culture began to attract a wider body of adherents. The hippy movement was the beginning of a growing movement that held the concept of technological progress up to the light of serious scrutiny. This critique can be seen in: the anti-nuclear movement, environmentalism, zero growth formulates, alternative technologies and a host of loosely connected movements. At the popular level, it is embodied in a host of new age philosophies and perspectives that, while often superficial, at least demonstrate the growing disillusionment with the idea and reality of technocracy.

More and more, people have begun to question this belief that technology will solve all human problems and to demand that technology serve a social purpose. This new attitude sets strict limits to technological progress in terms of political, community and cultural goals. What people want is to “make rational and humane choices among alternative technologies”. A naïve belief in technological progress is being replaced by a more questioning attitude. It is not that we no longer believe in progress, we are simply asking the question progress towards what.

Such a questioning attitude is not universal. In countries like China, and certainly in parts of the developing world, technology is still viewed a saviour in its own right. These countries have such a desire to imitate the wealth and power of the West that they tend to be blind to the problems associated with technological development. Many of the inhabitants of Western countries, however, have witnessed a deterioration in the overall quality of their lives as result of technology. Their faith in technological progress has been weakened (but certainly not shattered) by the obvious problems that technology brings in its wake.

The notes presented here are for the AK NATS 1760.06 “Science, Technology and Society” course offered in the Fall/Winter Semester of 2001/2002 by the Atkinson College of York University, Toronto, Canada and taught by John Dwyer. The lectures are based on the following texts:

1. Martin Bridgstock et al, Science, Technology and Society: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 1998), ISBN 0-521-58735-2
2. Kevin Robbins and Frank Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life (New York, Routledge, 1999), ISBN 0-415-16115-0
3. Albert H. Teich, Technology and the Future (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2000), ISBN 0-312-01885-1

For more about John Dwyer, visit: http://www.sayitagain.com/ivorytower/