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- Teich, Ch. 7-8 -

Introduction

The most important thing to notice about the articles “The Role of Technology in Society” and “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals” is that they provide an explicit debate. This debate revolves around differing conceptions of the place of technology in society. When examining a debate, it is important to notice where the debaters agree and where they disagree. In the introduction, Teich obscures the areas of agreement by informing the reader that the authors have a fundamentally different perspectives based on the vantage point of the powerful and the powerless. That’s true but it may not be the best way to categorize the differences and it doesn’t take into account some very interesting similarities.

Points of Agreement

1. Mesthene and McDermott both agree that technological positivism and pessimism really miss the complex and subtle interactions between technological development and society. Both writers want to explore those “subtle relationships”.
2. Mesthene and McDermott both agree that technological advance has negative consequences that relate directly to technological change. Mesthene is not a simple or simplistic cheerleader for new technologies.
3. Mesthene and McDermott both criticize the presumed mystical autonomy “presumed to lie in technology” and demand that technological change and social values be better aligned.
4. Both Mesthene and McDermott suggest that a major problem with the introduction of new technologies is social and individual dislocation. Mesthene, for example, points out that the development of new transportation systems widened the gap between the rich and poor and made the American inner cities places of poverty and unemployment.
5. Both Mesthene and McDermott agree that that one of the major problems of a technologically advancing capitalist nation the irresponsibility of private individuals and large corporations who put profits before the interests of people.
6. Mesthene and McDermott would also agree that one of the most serious negative effects of technology is the erosion of traditional freedoms and democratic processes that Americans fought for over the course of two centuries.
7. Both Mesthene and McDermott conclude that the scope and complexity of “public decision making” in a technological society results in systems of social organization that are centralized, controlling and fundamentally undemocratic.
8. Both Mesthene and McDermott believe that, while the overall level of social control is increasing dramatically, it has become much more subtle, indirect and manipulative.
9. Both Mesthene and McDermott would probably agree that we need “new institutional farms and new social mechanisms” or the “political conflict” of the 1960s will increase.

Laissez innovers

There appear to be so many points of agreement between Mesthene and McDermott that you might wonder why McDermott is so aggressive in his attack on what he calls laissez innovers. Let’s define the term to see what McDermott is getting at. Laissez-faire means ‘let it be’; the term was coined by eighteenth-century French economists do define a free market in grain. Gradually, it came to be equated with the creation of a free market (i.e. capitalist economy).

McDermott has serious reservations about a free market because he believes that capitalist economics means the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful for their own ends. In other words, the term laissez-faire was not neutral. It involved elements of control and oppression that people had to fight against in order to create a more humane and democratic society. To a certain extent, McDermott believes that the American people did win significant rights in the twentieth-century through their greater involvement in the political process.

McDermott believes that the people are losing their ability to influence the political process and to defend their interests in a developing technological society. Laissez innover means freedom for technological innovation. The lack of significant social controls over technology means those who control the direction of technology have much more power over people’s lives than ever before. In order for laissez innover to exist, social relations and social values have to be rationalized in ways that allow the controllers of technology to take advantage of the opportunities that technology provides. The primary emphasis in a society based on laissez innover, therefore, is constant technological innovation that is mirrored and reinforced by institutional innovation.

In such a technology-directed environment, McDermott suggests, human values must be directed by technological development. But technological development is not simply an abstraction. Technology is a series of innovations, and also systematic processes, that are directed by a small group of people. These elites push technology in directions that are favourable to the self-interest of their group. In a technological society, they are able to do this very effectively because the vast majority of people haven’t got the specialized expertise or the understanding of highly complex systems that would allow them to participate in decision-making.

The Technocratic Perspective

Mesthene clearly understands the problems and disadvantages associated with the introduction of new technologies. He is also willing to criticize capitalists and corporations who don’t seem to understand the damage and social dislocation that new technologies can bring in their wake. None of this, however, stops him from being a technocrat. A technocrat is someone who advocates a government or social system that is controlled by scientific technicians.

At no point in his article does Mesthene ever suggest that technology should be controlled by a democratic society. Quite the reverse; he believes that “decision-making structures” need to be adjusted “to the realities of technology so as to take maximum advantage of the opportunities it offers and so that we can act to contain its potential ill effects before they become so pervasive and urgent as to seem uncontrollable.”

Who is going to achieve this balancing act? Mesthene doesn’t say explicitly, but he does give us lots of information that allows us to draw the appropriate conclusion. It has to be achieved from above, since most of the people don’t understand the complexities of a modern technological society. It can’t be achieved, or if so only formally, by represented officials, because most of them don’t have the specialized skills in data collection and systems analysis that are required for the task. The groups who will marry the needs of a complex society are trained experts who can commit the enormous amount of time and develop the skills necessary to “foster technology on a large scale.”

Mesthene suggests an enormously important role for two groups in society. The first are the technological innovators - scientists and technicians - who generate opportunities. The second are the social engineers or those whose job it is to make sure that the political structures and values of society conform to the reality of a modern technological society. The net result is a society controlled by experts with a technological agenda. The average person needs to have their values changed to come into line with technological reality. Popular democracy is a thing of the past; society now must be rationally managed.

Is this assessment of Mesthene too harsh? Look at what he says. He says that the entire logic of modern decision making “requires greater and greater dependence on the collection and analysis of data and on the use of technological devices and scientific techniques.” In other words, a technological society will be created by fundamentally technological means. Second, he says that public policy can no longer be based on anything other than reliable knowledge which he describes as “a strong capability to collect, aggregate, and analyze detailed data about economic activities, social patterns, popular attitudes, and political trends.” Third, he suggests that we as individuals can no longer play a significant role in decision making because modern societies are complex systems rather than collections of free and independent individuals. In a complex system, everyone is dependent on everyone else and individuals need to be controlled to ensure the greatest health of the social organism. Fourth, he dismisses any defense of the dignity of the individual or objection to our “increasing dependence of decision making on scientific and technological devices an techniques” with the claim that a small group of knowledgeable experts needs to “save the society before it explores under planless and inadequate administration.

In a technocratic world, “social and psychological displacements” are not signs that the system itself may be haywire. Rather, they are problems or “paradoxes” for technocratic experts to solve. Technology is the motor that continually runs ahead of man’s ability to deal with it.

Technology as Opiate

In “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals”, John McDermott claims that this technocratic position gives technology way to much power over people. It transforms technology into an abstraction. That abstraction, despite the acceptance of negative problems associated with technology, is inevitable. It is also scientifically pure, just as long as it is controlled by experts - intellectuals like Mesthene. With the intellectuals at the help, technology can be a self-correcting system.

McDermott thinks that this viewpoint is extremely naïve. Take for example, Mesthene’s anticapitalist statements. McDermott suggests that Mesthene’s heart might be in the right place; Mesthene might think that he and his friends will shape technology for the benefit of mankind. But what guarantee is there that the new technocratic elite will not simply perpetuate themselves and increase their power in society? Even worse, what it this technocratic elite merely increase the power of those who really control the production, use and distribution of new technologies - the people that McDermott stereotypes as profit driven corporations and their “managerial cronies.”

For McDermott, a technocratic society is not an abstraction but a specific set of social relationships in which the power to make decisions in concentrated in the hands of scientific-technical bureaucracies. Technocracy is not so much about finding ways to bring social institutions into line with technological realities. It is an institutional movement and culture in its own right that “improves and rationalizes the performance of its machines and men” within quite specific and tightly “integrated systems.” These systems place such an emphasis on the control of any “negative externalities” that they are remarkably resistant to “intervention by persons or problems operating outside or below their managing groups.”

In a technocratic scenario, politics becomes irrelevant. There is no need (a la Mesthene) to bring politics into line with technology because “technology creates its own politics.” Not only is the natural impulse of technology to create highly efficient systems that limit the potential for individual disruption, but also they are so “capital intensive” that the power of the individual is effectively inconsequential. Only those who have senior managerial power to control the flow of capital investment, or the technical knowledge to take advantage of opportunities, have any real power in a technocratic society.

For McDermott, the spread and mystification of technocratic values is a serious threat to democracy. The formal ingredients of democracy might persist for some time, but a technocratic society cuts the majority of people out of power sharing and limits their influence on the decisions made that profoundly effect their lives. A technological society that is controlled by scientific and technical elites takes knowledge out of the hands of the people and reserves it for a small group - the meritocracy.

The Rise of the Meritocracy

McDermott views technocracy as an attempt to centralize and control power in the hands of the few against the many. Someone like Mesthene could conceivably argue that, while some dislocation and perceived powerlessness is the inevitable result of technological change, that does not mean that the fundamental requirement for a democratic society ceases to exist. He could, and probably would, argue that a technocratic society is democratic because it needs to identify and reward the smartest and most hard working people in society - the group that McDermott dismisses as “the intellectuals.”

To be sure, not everyone can be a member of the elite. But assuming that Mesthene is right and we can create an elite cadre of scientists and technicians from our university and college system, would that be such a bad thing? Just as long as everyone has “equality of opportunity”, the best people would rise to the top. Isn’t that what everyone wants a democratic society to do? Isn’t one of the problems with more primitive capitalism precisely that it distributes social rewards unevenly and sometimes unfairly.

Many technocrats like Mesthene believe in the power of higher education to ensure that people with merit rise to the top. Mesthene himself is an example of a person who has achieved distinction at one of America’s top universities - Harvard. On the other hand, McDermott appears to have had a much more uneven experience in the Department of Labour Studies at the State University of New York. Perhaps, McDermott’s criticism of Mesthene is partly the result of sour grapes and the “scientific and technical elite and their indispensable managerial cronies are the really creative (and hardworking and altruistic elements in American society.”

McDermott doesn’t really address the issue of merit head on. But we can illuminate the debate somewhat by doing it for him. He could suggest, for example, that a technocratic society favours those who come from families with the economic means to pursue higher education. He might want to argue that a meritocracy cannot exist without a massive investment in education generally, in order to make sure that those with ability have the opportunity to achieve. He could point out that many so-called meritocracies do not really promote people with the best ability; in fact, they tend to be self-perpetuating and to provide a few people with quite exceptional opportunities to achieve. These are questions that go to the very heart of our present system of higher education and give rise to intense differences of opinion.

While McDermott hints at some of these issues, however, they are not his primary concern. His real issue is that a technocratic society, a meritocracy if you will, relegates the majority of the people to minor roles in society. McDermott puts this rather strongly when he suggests, “the common mass of men are essentially drags on the social weal.” Thus, technocracy breeds an elitism that strikes at the heart of democracy. That kind of elitism is only implicit in Mesthene’s discussion of the social displacement that comes with technological development. But in other writers, it can be quite explicit. Zbigniew Brzezinski, writing ironically for the left leaning The New Republic, suggested that the technetronic society of the future would be run by a “singularly talented few”. The rest of the population would have to content themselves with being passive players in society and pursuing their own individual interests.

The Imperative of Control

Equality of opportunity in a technocratic society, paradoxically, creates a very inegalitarian, hierarchical, and role stratified society. In the past, such societies have been inherently unstable and characterized by class or other kinds of conflict. But conflict is the antithesis of a technocratic society, which requires a high degree of social control in order to ensure the integrity of systems.

It is the implicit element of social control that most worries McDermott. Both McDermott and Mesthene agree that a technological society means centralization and the control of power in the hands of a few. How will the many be controlled so as not to threaten the few? Mesthene provides some suggestions when he claims that the increased knowledge and subtle techniques of the key decision makers will allow them to develop new institutional forms and new mechanisms for better integrating individuals into the system. Even if these techniques were not explicitly coercive, it is difficult to see how they could avoid being manipulative. After all, the system cannot function unless discordant negative externalities are suppressed.

McDermott mentions other forms of social control, the chief being the ideology of technology itself. Technology may have conquered nature, but it can only conquer man if people internalize it. That is why the advocates of technology constantly push not only the rationality of technology, but also its millenarian promise. A technological society cannot rely on communicating a future utopia in the face of problems and dislocations, so it also promotes a hedonistic lifestyle that distracts people from their powerlessness. Thus Brezinski, for example, is quite open in suggesting that hedonistic preoccupations will “serve as a social valve, reducing tensions and political frustration.” Political men and women are transformed into a consumer community, aided by advertising, the promotion of credit cards, and selective service channeling (i.e. cable television).

Writing in the 1960s, McDermott believed that the technological system was far too complex, and its controls too indirect, to be stable. He believed that “advancing technology” had “an ever declining capacity to enforce the required discipline…” Of course, he was writing during the hippy era, when the civil rights movement and anti-war protest were at their height. During such a period, it was possible to envision alternatives to the status quo and even to posit social revolution. The technological society has advanced since then.

The Altruistic Bureaucrat

Clearly, despite their areas of agreement, McDermott and Mesthene have distinctly different views of technology. For Mesthene, a technological society is inevitable and provides humanity with opportunities. The trick is to deal with the problems; something that can only be achieved if power is given to a small group of people to ensure that scientific and social engineering are in harmony. These people would by definition be modern society’s problem solvers and entirely neutral because they are rewarded for their disinterested ability to bring their scientific and technical knowledge to bear on social problems. For McDermott, this kind of thinking borders on technocracy. A technocratic society is not desirable because it would mean the end of democracy. Moreover, it would be inherently unstable and conflict ridden because it deprives the majority of any effective power.

Where McDermott and Mesthene disagree most violently is in their assessment of the new scientifically trained elite that would have hegemony in a technological society. For Mesthene, these individuals are the saviours who would “save the society before it explodes under planlessness and inadequate administration. For Mesthene, this would simply represent a new self-perpetuating social elite. By presenting himself and his colleagues as anything more than right wing defenders of the status quo, Mesthene is either being totally naïve or engaging in deception for reasons of self-interest.

One aspect of this debate is worth considering in our present context. Mesthene’s argument is mildly anticapitalist. The elite that Mesthene describes could come from the ranks of business, but his heroes more closely resemble scientists, technicians, and civil servants (the social engineers). When Mesthene wrote his article, university scientists were much more independent than they are today, when universities and governments are looking at the bottom line and increasingly seeking partnerships with the corporate community. Moreover, Mesthene wrote his article at a time when the public sector in North America was still at the height of its power, prior to the advent of privatization and the exodus of some of the public sector’s finest minds.

Conclusion

Do the changes of the past 4 decades strengthen or weaken Mesthene’s or McDermott’s arguments? Consider that the corporate community has much greater power over government and the direction of technology than it did in the 60s. Consider also that the social conflicts of McDermott’s time have dissipated. Does putting their arguments in historical context make these arguments as relevant today as they were when they were written?

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/