Philosophers have become interested in technology and technological problems only recently--though Karl Marx in the nineteenth century as well as Plato and Aristotle in the classical period had paid some attention either to technical work or to its social implications.  Within recent decades, among North American philosophers paying significant attention to technology, Albert Borgmann (1984, 1992) holds a special place because of the originality of his call to citizens of technological society, urging them to rethink the way they live.  What I want to argue, in my brief historical remarks here, is that Borgmann's work might appear to be at least partially misguided--at least it might appear so to philosophers like myself who are primarily concerned with technosocial problems--unless it is interpreted in a special way.

A Retrospective:

    The perspective I bring to these brief historical remarks reflects my practical (or "praxical" would be better) bent.  In that, I differ with others who have recently summarized the history of philosophy of technology in the United States (Mitcham 1994; Ihde 1993).  For me, the primary concerns about technology that gave rise to philosophy of technology were practical--even political.  Philosophers and social commentators were worried about negative impacts of nuclear weapons systems, chemical production systems, the mass media and other (dis)information systems (among others) on contemporary life in the Western world--including negative impacts on the environment and on democratic institutions.  And typically they wanted to do something--preferably politically--about the situation.

    Among the first broadly philosophical works to say to those early philosophers of technology (myself included) that this might be a difficult struggle was the translation into English, in 1964, of Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society.  There Ellul spelled out what he called the "essentials" of a "sociological study of the problem of technology."  (The word he actually uses is "Technique"--a hypostatized term for the sum of all techniques, all means to unquestioned ends.)

    According to Ellul, Technique is the "new milieu" of contemporary society, replacing the old milieu, nature; all social phenomena today are situated within it rather than the other way around; all the beliefs and myths of contemporary society have been altered to the core by Technique; individual techniques are ambivalent, intended to have good consequences but contributing at the same time to the ensemble of Technique; so that, for instance, psychological or administrative techniques are part of the larger Technique, and no particular utilization of them can compensate for the bad effects of the whole.

    All of this leads to Ellul's overall characterization:  there can be no brake on the forward movement of the artificial milieu, on Technique as a whole; values cannot change it, nor can the state; means supplant ends; Technique develops autonomously.

    This was the Ellul most of us knew in the 1960s when we first started reflecting philosophically on technology.  More knowledgeable students of Ellul, however, saw this as merely Ellul's warning--a warning about what Technique (technology?) demands if we do not heed his warning and act decisively.  But how can we act, given Ellul's pessimistic conclusions?  What these Ellulians say we missed was the dialectical nature of Ellul's thinking.  Every sociological warning was matched by a theological promise; more particularly, The Technological Society was intended (they say) to be read in tandem with The Ethics of Freedom (1976).  According to one of these scholars:

    Ellul's intention is to attempt to make . . . [the absolute] freedom [of Christian revelation] present to the technological world in which we live.  In so doing, he hopes to introduce a breach in the technical system.  It is Ellul's view that in this way alone are we able to live out our freedom in the deterministic technological world that we have created for ourselves (Wenneman 1990, p. 188).

    Some of these same religious critics of technology were influenced, at the same time, by translations of works of Martin Heidegger into English.  But in the 1960s this did not, to any great extent, reflect Heidegger's concerns about technological society.

    At the opposite end of the political spectrum, we were influenced, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by the writings of Herbert Marcuse (especially One-Dimensional Man, 1964)--the widely acclaimed "guru of the New Left."  Where Marcuse's neo-Marxism seemed to differ from the dire warnings of Ellul's pessimism about technology was in its offering of a possible solution to technosocial problems.

    Marcuse and other neo-Marxists were, in some ways, as pessimistic as Ellul.  No amount of liberal democratic politics, they said, could get at the roots of technosocial problems.  But there was a way out:  to challenge the technoeconomic system as a whole.  (Marcuse was explicit that this meant challenging, not only the capitalist technoeconomic system of the West, but also its imitator, the "bureaucratic socialist" technoeconomic system of the Soviet Union and its satellites.)  Only a wholesale revolutionary challenge to the political power of technocapitalists and quasi-capitalistic bureaucratic socialists could do the trick; it was (he thought) possible to deal with technosocial problems, but all at once and not one at a time.  The means was revolutionary consciousness-raising--and, at least for a time, Marcuse (1972) saw the vehicle as the student uprisings, worldwide, in the late 1960s.  (After the New Left faded, Marcuse found hope in the radical feminist movement--but in the end he seems to have lost all hope, matching Ellul's pessimism of the right with a deep pessimism of the left; see Marcuse 1978.)

    Between these extremes--in our philosophical consciousness at the time--loomed a liberal-centrist hope.  Daniel Bell, a sociologist (others would say a social commentator) rather than a philosopher, had already announced The End of Ideology (1962) (presumably it was the end of ideologies of the right as well as the left).  Now he came forward to announce The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973)--a society in which experts, including technical experts, offered the hope of solving technosocial problems.

    Bell was not, however, an unalloyed optimist.  As much as he believed that non-ideological technocratic expertise could solve at least our major problems, just that much did he also worry about the "rampant individualism" of our culture.  One of his best known books (Bell 1976)--which also influenced those of us trying to fashion a philosophical response to technosocial problems at that time--was an exhaustive documentation of the anarchy of cultural modernism in the twentieth century.  Bell did not, like Ellul, counsel a return to traditional religion as an anchor for a world adrift, but he did maintain that technological managerialism could not save us if there were no cultural standards--if thinkers in the late twentieth century could not solve our "spiritual crisis."

    So the first philosophers of technology in the United States, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, had a variety of approaches to turn to in the search for solutions to such technosocial problems as nuclear war and environmental destruction--techno-philosophies of the right, left, and center.

    In the next decade--from the late 1970s until the mid-1980s--the picture became more complex, but a political spectrum remained a useful lens through which to view the fledgling philosophy of technology scene.

    Langdon Winner's influential Ellul-inspired book, Autonomous Technology (1977), might suggest the contrary.  Early in the book Winner says:  "Ideological presuppositions in radical, conservative, and liberal thought have tended to prevent discussion of . . . technics and politics."

    About liberals, Winner says:

[The] new breed of [liberal] public-interest scientists, engineers, lawyers, and white-collar activists [represent] a therapy that treats only the symptoms [and] leaves the roots of the problem untouched. . . .

    The solution [Don K.] Price offers the new polity is essentially a balancing mechanism, which contains those enfranchised at a high level of knowledgeability and forces them to cooperate with each other . . . [as] a virtuous elite . . . in the new chambers of power. . . .

    The Marxist faith in the beneficence of unlimited technological development is betrayed. . . .  To the horror of its partisans, it is forced slavishly to obey [technocapitalist] imperatives left by a system supposedly killed and buried.

    But this is not the whole of Winner's story.  He makes these points, in fact, in a book devoted to a different sort of technological politics--an "epistemological Luddism" that would set out, explicitly, to examine the goals of large technological enterprises in advance, and would hold them to lofty democratic standards.  In subsequent books (1986, 1992), Winner has been even more explicit about this, and--though he is still generally viewed as a technological radical--he has come, more and more, to espouse participatory-democracy movements as the solution to particular technosocial problems.

    More devoted Ellulians of this period were not explicitly political, but their religious philosophies were most compatible with a theological conservatism. (See Hanks 1984; Lovekin 1991; and Vanderburg 1981).

    At the opposite end of the political spectrum from these conservative Christians, other neo-Marxists carried on Marcuse's critique of technology even after the decline of the New Left.  Philosopher Bernard Gendron's Technology and the Human Condition and historian David Noble's America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism both appeared in 1977.  Both echoed aspects of Marcuse's critique even when they did not explicitly cite him.  It would be over a decade before an explicitly neo-Marcusean philosophy of technology would appear, in Andrew Feenberg's Critical Theory of Technology (1991).  It makes explicit the arguments that continued to predominate in neo-Marxist critiques of technology in the late 1970s and 1980s--right up to the demise of Soviet Communism.  (See Gould 1988; Feenberg's book actually appeared after the official disavowal of Communism in Russia.)

    It was at this stage that Heideggerianism entered the philosophy of technology debate in the United States.  (See Heidegger 1977.)  I will not deal with that influence here except in terms of three avowed neo-Heideggerians.

    Hans Jonas was, at the time, the best known of the three.  His magnum opus, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age was not translated from the German in which he composed it (though he had been a professor at the New School for over twenty years) until 1984.  But he had already published an influential essay, "Toward a Philosophy of Technology," in the Hastings Center Reports in 1979.  And he was already well known in the 1970s for his "heuristics of fear" in the face of such technological developments as bioengineering:  "Moral philosophy," he said, "must consult our fears prior to our wishes to learn what we really cherish" in an age of unbridled technological possibilities.

    Don Ihde (beginning with Technics and Praxis, 1979, and Existential Technics, 1983), with his downplaying of some Heideggerian influences in favor of a Husserlian phenomenology, may seem to be an exception to my political reading of this decade in philosophy of technology.  But in later works--especially Technology and the Lifeworld (1990)--Ihde has espoused an environmental activism that could only be implemented politically.

    At this point, while mentioning Ihde's later environmentalism, I want to digress for a moment.  During the second decade of the development of philosophy of technology in the United States, there developed a parallel tradition of reflection on technology.  What I have in mind is environmental ethics, since a significant portion of the literature in that field touches on negative impacts on the environment of particular technological developments:  the nuclear industry and electric power companies; the chemical industry; agriculture using pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers; the automobile; and so on.  Without going into these issues--and making no claims about natural affinities between philosophy of technology and environmental ethics--it seems fair, here, to point out how strong the political dimension is in environmental ethics.  And I am not just thinking of radical environmentalism, eco-feminism, or similar approaches; almost all of environmental ethics, it seems to me, is and ought to be political.

    Finally, we come to Albert Borgmann and his 1984 neo-Heideggerian book, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life.  I have argued elsewhere (and will not repeat those arguments here; see Durbin 1988 and 1992)   that Borgmann's proposals for the reform of our technological culture--his appeal to "focal things and practices"--is an implicit appeal to expand focal communities.  That is, it presupposes at least educational activism and probably political activism.  Furthermore, the communitarian followers of Robert Bellah, who have found in Borgmann's writings an eloquent statement of goals they are striving for in our bureaucratized and technologized culture (see Bellah's comment on dust jacket of Borgmann 1992) are clearly committed to a social movement.  Many view that movement as neo-conservative, a charge that has also been leveled at Borgmann; but accepting that assessment is not a necessary concomitant of seeing Borgmann's work as having political implications.

    In this retrospective, I have concentrated on two decades--roughly the mid-sixties to the mid-eighties--and I have made a deliberate choice to emphasize contributions to philosophy of technology that reflect a commitment to the solving of technosocial problems, typically by political means of one sort or another.  There were, of course, other contributions to the development of the philosophy of technology in those years; I have myself, in fact, chronicled those other developments elsewhere (Durbin 1994) under two headings that do not emphasize the politics of technology, "The Nature of Technology in General," and "Philosophical Studies of Particular Technological Developments."  However, even in many of the books I mention in that survey--books that do not seem to have a political slant--it is easy to perceive the political orientations of their authors.  In any case, it is the political thrust of philosophy of technology that renders urgent the critical point I want to make in the second half of this chapter.
 

A Prospective View:  The Future of Philosophy of Technology:

    In Social Responsibility in Science, Technology, and Medicine (1992), I discuss several ways in which philosophers might follow the lead of a number of activist technical professionals who have, in recent decades, been working to achieve beneficial social change.  Some of the ways I list are academic:  clarifying issues, or helping to move academic institutions in positive directions.  Some of the ways involve working outside academia--for example, on ethics or environmental or technology assessment committees.  But, in addition, I join the lament of those decrying the loss of "public intellectuals" or "secular preachers"--a modern counterpart to the scholar-preachers who provided moral leadership to earlier generations of American society on issues such as slavery or child labor or injustices against workers.  The example I mention in my earlier book--of a recent philosopher/secular preacher--is Albert Borgmann.  Especially in Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992), he is explicit about playing the role of a public intellectual.

    I feel that the need for vision is so great in our culture of fragmented specialized knowledge that it is time to welcome philosopher-preachers back into the mainstream.  Their numbers have been exceedingly small since the death of John Dewey, but we might hope for a resurgence now.

    Bringing about such a happy eventuality, however, will not be easy.  Public intellectuals, visionaries, secular preachers, academic activists of any sort are going to have a very difficult time in our technological culture.

    The philosophers and social commentators I listed in my retrospective, above, did sometimes make a public impression.  Ellul was widely hailed as the first thinker to awaken American intellectuals to the dangers of technology; Marcuse's critique of technology was widely influential among student radicals and others in the New Left; and Bell served as the favorite target of abuse for those same radicals.  In the next decade, Winner and Ihde were (and are) ubiquitous speakers and panelists, and both also have influenced graduate students.  Ellulianism has spread slowly and continues to be influential in much the same circles as in the late 1960s.  Jonas left few disciples, but his influence in biomedical circles--in particular in the Hastings Center, itself very influential--was strong.

    As I mentioned earlier, much attention has been paid to Albert Borgmann's contributions to philosophy of technology.  Whatever may be Borgmann's influence on others, whatever influence he may have that extends into the future, there remain good reasons to question the lasting influence of the other philosophers of technology that I have mentioned.

    Some may think it quaint of me even to include Marcuse and Bell.  Will that be the same fate, in twenty years, of Winner and Ihde and Jonas?  Though an Ellulian school has persisted for twenty-five years, so far it has produced no other thinker of note.

    Then there is the issue of impact--of solutions for key technosocial problems.  No one can say that ideas of Ellul or Winner or Ihde or Jonas--or, for that matter, of neo-Marxists--have not had some influence on activists who have had success on particular issues.  I would think, in particular, of Winner's influence on Richard Sclove, with his Loka Institute and FASTnet activist electronic mail network.  But probably, of all those mentioned, it is philosophers in the environmental ethics community who have had the greatest and most direct impact on particular solutions for major technosocial problems.

    So, if I think back to why most of us early philosophers of technology got involved, in the sixties, seventies, and eighties--and if I am right that what motivated the great majority of us were concerns over major technosocial disasters such as nuclear proliferation and widespread environmental degradation--then I believe I am not being unrealistic in saying that the field has not had the impact that I personally hoped it would.  For the most part, it has not even had a great impact in academia.

    What I want to talk about now is why this is so.

    The key, it seems to me, is to be found in the phrase, "in our technological culture."  I have always had problems with Ellul's characterizations of "technological society" in the abstract.  But a description with much the same thrust--and which is both more neutral and can be tied down to specific observations in ways I find difficult with Ellul--is available in the sociological work of Peter Berger (and colleagues)(especially 1966 and 1973).

    Berger sometimes (1966) refers to his work as sociology of knowledge; at other times he described his basic method as phenomenological (1973, acknowledging a special debt to the "phenomenology of everyday life" of Alfred Schutz 1962).  He is also indebted to Karl Marx (though not to doctrinaire Marxists), to George Herbert Mead (1934), and, in a special way, to Max Weber.

    What Berger proposes is that we describe our culture in terms of a spectrum of degrees of "modernization," with no particular culture or society prototypically "modern."  What (to Berger and colleagues) makes any particular culture "modernized" is two things:  its dependence on technological production, and its administration by means of bureaucracy.  (Nearly all of Berger's ideas about bureaucracy seem to come from Weber--see Gerth and Mills 1958--and sociologists influenced by Weber.)  Thus, the more technologized and bureaucratized a culture is, the more it makes sense to call it "modernized."  And this allows comparisons both over time--historically--and cross-culturally, as between more and less modernized societies even at the present time.  (Berger and colleagues do not like to refer to particular societies as "underdeveloped," but they think it less offensive to refer to some as less modernized.)

    With this characterization as his basis, Berger is able to identify key (he even says "essential") characteristics of workers in technological production facilities (including agriculture), as well as of citizens in a bureaucratized society--which characteristics carry over into a rigidly compartmentalized private life.  For example, "modern" individuals play several roles in both work and private life; they have many anonymous social relations; they see themselves as units in very large systems; etc.  It extends as well into the "secondary carriers" of modern consciousness--the media in the broadest sense and mass education.  The latter both prepare young people for life in such a society and reinforce the "symbolic universe" that gives it meaning--and they do so in ways decidedly different from those in non-modernized societies.  Furthermore, many people in less modernized societies envy the lifestyles of those in more modernized societies, though they often do not realize what a price--in terms of values and lifestyles--living in a modernized society exacts.

    I admit that there are many similarities between this account and Ellul's indictment of ours as a society controlled by "Technique."  (Both Berger and Ellul were influenced by Weber.)  The difference, for me, lies in the attitudes of the two.  Ellul views technicized society as an unmitigated disaster, inimical to human freedom.  Berger simply sets out a framework to understand our society--and he remains open to various forms of resistance to modernization, in both modernized and less modernized societies (though he does not think it realistic to expect societies to return to a romanticized premodern past).

    The way I see all of this impinging on the potential for philosophers of technology to have an impact on society is that they (we) must do so within what Berger calls the "secondary carriers" of modernization:  that is, we must exert our influence either through the media or through education.  And these are, by definition, oriented toward fostering modernization, not criticizing it.

    Almost all the impacts I mentioned, above, with respect to the philosophers of technology I listed, have been made through the media--through book publishing, magazine articles, lectures (mostly) on the academic circuit, occasionally in interviews on radio or television.  And we all know both the audience limitations of academic media and the ephemeral character of the impacts of the mass media.  Today's "hot" book is tomorrow's remaindered book.  The handful of books by academics that have had or are likely to have any lasting impact are just that, a handful--in technology-related areas, probably no more than the works of Lewis Mumford (1934, 1967, 1970) and Rachel Carson (1962).  For most of us, there is little hope that our writings will have that kind of lasting impact--even if we manage to make a momentary impression even in intellectual circles.

    Similarly for education.  Any lasting impact via mass education must come through influencing teachers and textbooks, and everyone knows by now how bureaucratized both textbook publishing and the public schools are.  If we think instead of teaching the teachers, of influencing the next generation, then the impact will be by way of training graduate students; and the regimentation of graduate education is hardly conducive to producing reformers, social critics, activists who will change technological society for the better.  It can happen.  Some of the most critical of our current crop of philosophers of technology have survived the worst evils of contemporary graduate education in philosophy.  But it is not easy, and the scholar who expects to exert a lasting impact on society via that route is almost by definition not a person who is thinking about real changes in society.
 

Conclusion:

    What should we conclude from this retrospective and prospective?  Abstractly, it would seem there are four possibilities.

    Some people will scoff.  I had unrealistic hopes in the first place, they will say.  Philosophy's aims should be much more limited--limited, for instance, to analyzing issues, leaving policy changes to others (to the real wielders of power whose efforts might be enlightened by the right kind of philosophical speculations); or limited to critiquing our culture (following Hegel) after its outlines clearly appear and it fades into history, imperfect like all other mere human adventures.

    Others will go to the opposite extreme.  I set my sights too low, they will say.  We must still hold out for a total revolution.  The injustices of our age, as well as its ever-increasing depredations of planet Earth, demand this.

    Still others are likely merely to lament the fate to which technological anti-culture has doomed us; we must resign ourselves to the not-dishonorable role of being lonely prophetic voices crying out against our fate.

    Then there is my own conclusion, a hope--following John Dewey (1929, 1935, 1948)--that we will actually do something about the technosocial evils that motivated us in the first place.  That, in simple terms, we will abandon any privileged place for philosophy, joining instead with those activists who are doing something about today's problems--and, to some extent, succeeding in limited ways in particular areas (see McCann, 1986, as well as Durbin, 1992).

    Albert Borgmann might be read as endorsing any one of these options:  limiting philosophy's scope to analyses of technology (however large-scale, Hegel-like those analyses might be); or offering radical, even revolutionary alternatives to a device-dominated culture, really hoping that a revolution will come about; or merely lamenting our sad, commodity-driven fate, our culture's wasting of its true democratic heritage.

    But I hope he would, with me, endorse the fourth option.  We might, no matter how weak our academic base, still manage to succeed in conquering particular technosocial evils one at a time.  And environmental ethicists, one of the positive examples I list in chapter IV, may be showing us the best way--precisely because they do not try to succeed alone, but join with other
environmental activists, fighting every inch of the way.

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