Our society, like all others, picks and chooses among available technological options, implementing some and neglecting others.
John Michael Greer -- The Arichdruid Report
Feb. 21, 2007 -- One of the things that gives the mythology of progress its emotional power is the circular logic at its center. From within the confines of the myth, what’s new is better than whatever it replaces by the simple fact that it’s newer, and whatever our technology happens to be good at is more important than the things it does poorly, especially when older methods did a better job of these latter than newer ones do. I had a useful reminder of this the other day, thanks to one of the readers of The Archdruid Report, who critiqued my recent post “Technological Triage” with a certain degree of heat. One of his central points was that technology is here to stay, no matter what the future holds, because it’s better than any alternative. “What is certain is that ‘technology’ will not disappear,” he wrote: “... the engineer’s outlook and the scientist’s methods will continue to be applied to problems. And they will continue to provide better results for questions involving the physical world than magical thinking of any sort.”
His comment missed a central point of my post, of course, which is that there’s no such thing as “technology” in the singular, only technologies in the plural. The notion that technology is a single monolithic thing is a convenient bit of mystification, used to hide the fact that our society, like all others, picks and chooses among available technological options, implementing some and neglecting others. This needs hiding because most of these choices are made by influential members and groups within America’s political class for their own private profit, very often at the expense of the rest of the public. Wrapping the process in a smokescreen of impersonal inevitability is a convenient way to keep awkward questions from being raised via what remains of the democratic institutions of an earlier age.
From another angle, of course, my reader’s comment is true but tautological. Toolmaking is as natural to human beings as singing is to finches, and every human culture across space and time has had its own technologies, each of which draws on available resources to meet culturally recognized needs in culturally desirable ways. It’s habitual in our own culture to think of the particular suite of technologies we’ve come up with as not only better than anybody else’s, but more advanced, more progressive. Think about what these two phrases imply, and you’ll see how they derive from and feed into the core narrative of the myth of progress, the way of telling the story of our species that turns every other culture and every past technology into a stepping-stone on the way to us. From within this narrative, all earlier technologies are simply imperfect attempts to achieve what we’ve got.
Again, this is mystification, and it serves a socially necessary purpose in a culture where talking about the goals and values of specific technologies is taboo. The frequently repeated claim that “technology is value-free” is fatuous nonsense, but as long as we think about tools and techniques as a single thing called “technology,” it’s also plausible nonsense. In reality, of course, individual technologies embody the values and goals of their designers, and are selected by users on the basis of the technology’s relationship to values and goals. Look at the suite of technologies used by a person or a culture, and it’s an easy matter to divine the values that person or that culture holds and the goals they pursue. This is unmentionable in our culture, among other reasons, because the values and goals our technologies reveal to the world are a very long ways indeed from the ones we claim to embrace.
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