Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search For Scapegoats

by Samuel C. Florman

Overview

Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats is Samuel C. Florman's 1981 discussion of the state of technology and engineering in the United States, including the pros and cons, and the public's perceptions and opinions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466867796
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/08/2014
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	836,684
File size:	330 KB

About the Author

Samuel C. Florman is the author of Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scaepgoats, Engineering and the Liberal Arts, and The Existential Pleasures of Engineering.

Samuel C. Florman, a civil engineer, is a principal in a major New York-area construction company. In addition to scores of articles, Mr. Florman is the author of the novel The Aftermath, as well as The Introspective Engineer, The Civilized Engineer, Blaming Technology, and his classic, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. He lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Taken Aback In Michigan

In the fall of 1979 the humanities department of the University of Michigan's College of Engineering sponsored a symposium entitled "Technology and Pessimism." The purpose of the event, as announced in the prospectus, was "to examine why and in what ways technological development has led to pessimistic assessments of the future." Just a few years ago such a statement would have made no sense. Today it sounds like the most appropriate theme that could possibly be selected for an academic conclave.

I was invited to participate in the opening session of the three-day program, and found myself paired with Melvin Kranzberg, professor of the history of technology at Georgia Tech and long-time editor of the quarterly Technology and Culture. Kranzberg spoke at 4:00 in the afternoon and I at 8:00. The following morning we were both scheduled to participate in a panel discussion.

If the planners of the event had hoped to start off with speakers who themselves felt pessimistic about technology, they had chosen the wrong twosome. Kranzberg, joviality personified, quickly showed that he had no patience with prophets of technological doom. In ringing tones he reminded his audience that technology has progressively made life longer and more comfortable, while at the same time fostering the concept and practice of social justice. Problems have arisen, he maintained, because of peoples' continually rising expectations, and because in some instances technology has become appropriated by narrow interest groups. What is required, Kranzberg concluded, is social innovation — improved means of exerting democratic control over technological decisions.

When my turn came, I argued that neither childish optimism nor petulant pessimism was an adequate response to technological problems, and I suggested that a mature recognition of realistic possibilities would be more appropriate. Kranzberg had entitled his lecture "Technology: The Half-Full Cup." In the same vein, I told the parable of the two children in the garden, one who complained about thorns on the rose bushes, the other who said happily, "Mommy, the thornbushes have roses!" We were both so reasonable — "on the one hand, and on the other hand. ..." — and the reception accorded us was so friendly, that it was difficult to imagine there being a single person in the audience who did not agree with what we were saying.

The mellow mood that prevailed reminded me of a program in which I had participated a couple of years earlier, a symposium at Lafayette College entitled "Technology and the Human Condition." On that occasion Isaac Asimov had entertained one and all with his mockery of antitechnologists who would like to be back in old Athens "yakking it up with Socrates." The truth is, said Asimov, that most of the people in ancient Greece worked like animals and died young. We should be thankful for technology; it gets a bad press; it can be used wisely or unwisely. All of the other speakers agreed, the audience applauded, and everybody went home in high spirits.

This is just like it was at Lafayette, I thought to myself, as I got ready for bed that evening in Michigan. Everything so cordial and civilized. Thank goodness it isn't like Albion College, where I had to debate lifestyles with a hippie from a commune and an abbott from a monastery, nor like Smith College, where an angry feminist reviled technology and its defenders for being "macho." I enjoyed the deep sleep of the complacent.

*
The next morning's panel discussion was moderated by John Broomfield, a University of Michigan history professor. Since I had enjoyed his affable company at a faculty dinner the previous evening, I was startled when he opened the proceedings on a hostile note. "No shred of optimism," he said, "is added to my view of our current technology and its spokespeople by the arguments of our first two speakers." He then launched into a bitter tirade against high technology and its sponsors. I had heard its like before, but I found this version to be particularly unsettling because it was so unexpected. Technocrats, according to Broomfield, are developing large-scale technological systems that disenfranchise the average citizen, erode civil liberties, and produce "specialized ignorance for some and generalized ignorance for most." This new order is perilously vulnerable to disaster because, being exceedingly complex, and neither "natural" nor "biological," it has become "intolerant of mistakes." Not only is high technology the malignant product of a bureaucratic technocracy, Broomfield continued, but it also appears to have gotten out of control: "... if you have a new technique you encourage its widespread adoption; if you have a new product you peddle it everywhere ..."

The professor's attack encouraged others in the audience who had been silent the previous day. Soon we were hearing a young man compare farm tractors unfavorably with oxen; a woman rose solemnly to announce that the very building in which we were meeting should never have been constructed since it was situated on terrain that once was sacred to a local Indian tribe. By the end of the morning session, my mood had soured considerably.

*
A few days later, an article about the conference appeared on the front page of The New York Times science section. At first I was pleased to see it; there is a primal satisfaction connected with finding one's name in the newspaper. But then I wondered, considering all the important developments in science and technology, why the dispirited musings of an academic symposium should be receiving so much attention.

"Scholars Confront the Decline of Technology's Image," read the headline. This reminded me of how often in recent months I had seen similar headlines prominently displayed in this same newspaper: "Skylab and Other Mishaps Tarnish Technology's Image," "Scientific Decisions: The Baffled Public," "Scientists and Society's Fears," and so forth. In a series of philosophical essays, this august voice of the American establishment had been brooding about the public's fear of technology. As I read the article about the Michigan symposium, I felt increasingly uneasy. Academic handwringing is one thing, but for the press to treat it as important news is something else entirely.

To be sure, in recent months there had been no shortage of anxiety-producing technological incidents: oil spills, airplane crashes, collapses of dams and auditorium roofs, the descent of Skylab, the discovery of toxic materials at Love Canal, and the uniquely alarming accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Yet reciting this litany does not explain a change in the journalistic perception of technology. For never in the history of newspapers has there been a shortage of technology-related catastrophes. They have long been the very stuff of headlines and extra editions: train wrecks, falling bridges, bursting boilers, collapsing buildings, devastating fires, explosions in mines and factories, lead poisoning, botulism. ... Incidents today occur no more frequently than they used to, and the consequences are no more ghastly. There were also, in the past, plenty of long-range, enduring torments associated with technology — city slums wretched beyond telling, disease-causing tanneries, foul-smelling gas works, grime-filled air, and more — a long, sordid list we have been happy to forget.

Nor was there ever a shortage of spirited reporters and editors to report on these intolerable conditions. It was always the pride of journalists to complain about carelessness, ignorance, laziness, and greed, and to insist that in the future there be improved performance. Even the revelations that led to identification of an "environmental crisis" were greeted at first with outrage and sermonizing. Only recently has indignation seemed to be giving way to malaise. When newspapers start becoming melancholy — or even dwelling upon the melancholy of others — one cannot help thinking that something is terribly wrong. At least that is the way I felt as I read in the Times of "growing doubts about society's ability to rein in the seemingly runaway forces of technology. ..."

*
What is it, however, that is really running away? Is it technology, or is it fear of technology? The newspapers print scare stories; people read the stories and become alarmed; and then the newspapers quote the people expressing their alarm. Television, with reports that stress helplessness in the face of calamity, increases the tension. An academic symposium is scheduled to consider what is happening, and it in turn becomes news. The growing hysteria feeds on itself.

Perhaps this is not being fair to the media. The current mood of apprehension cannot have been created out of thin air by editors and reporters. It has percolated through our social consciousness in a diffuse pattern that is almost impossible to trace. It starts with disasters, but as I have said, there have always been disasters. It is the way we respond to disasters that has changed. If occasional indignation has given way to lingering skepticism, that is understandable enough. Utopia was promised, and it isn't coming. But if a sense of helpless resignation is taking over — if technology, after changing from boon to disappointment, is now perceived to be changing from disappointment to threat — then somebody had better try to find out what is happening, and quickly.

Clearly, the change in mood has been inspired in part by a number of lionized science writers such as Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner. These persuasive alarmists have cautioned that the problems we face today are far more grave than those we faced in the past. Whether or not this is true, these critics have given useful warning and gone on to suggest alternative courses of action. It cannot be said that they have tried to cultivate fear of technology itself. Yet their eloquent polemics may have oversensitized the public in ways that were not intended. The same paradox pertains to advocates of the "counterculture" who, in voicing opposition to certain manifestations of technology, have helped to spread the belief that "the machine" will inevitably take over. Warnings intended to bring about constructive action seem inadvertently to be spreading fear and paralysis.

Another source of the new anxiety lies deep in the tomes of such introspective scholars as Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford. Not many people buy, much less read, the works of these savants, yet their dolefully deterministic view of technology is revealed to the public in book reviews, and disseminated throughout intellectual circles by articles in abstruse journals. Starting in the early 1970s, the concept of runaway technology became much the vogue among academics. Articles, books, and dissertations devoted to this theme began to appear in great number, abetted no little by funding of "technology and society" studies by both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. By 1977 this school of literature was growing at such a rate that Langdon Winner, an MIT professor, was moved to review the issue in a book entitled Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought.

Book titles tell a lot about what is happening to a culture, and during the 1970s there was ample evidence that the American love affair with technology was in trouble. Bookstore windows displayed serious works with titles like The Illusion of Technique and The Poverty of Power, along with stacks of mass-market paperbacks like Future Shock and Overskill.

Such subliminal influences as book reviews and bookstore windows have been reinforced by the comments of respected sages as reported in important places. Robert Penn Warren, interviewed in U. S. News & World Report, predicts that "in the technetronic age ... the boys who handle the post-computer mechanisms ... will inevitably be in control ... with a vast, functionless, pampered and ultimately powerless population of non-experts living on free time, unemployed and unemployable."

Daniel J. Boorstin, Librarian of Congress and Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian, writes an essay for Time magazine striking a somber note: "The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world. There wants will be created not by 'human nature' or by century-old yearnings, but by technology itself." John Hersey speaks at a convocation at MIT, and his remarks about "the growing public hostility to technology" are reported in the syndicated column of Anthony Lewis.

Antitechnology, which for a while seemed to be a rather harmless — possibly even wholesome — undercurrent of intellectual rebellion, is suddenly a rushing tide. In their comfortable parlors, readers of The New Yorker are subjected to weekly elegies: "The Faustian proposal that the experts make to us is to let them lay their fallible hands on eternity. ..." In thousands of barbershops, the readers of Penthouse are given less subtle warnings: "In the darker sense, technology is whatever you're not supposed to understand."

A measure of the pervasiveness of the new mood is the consternation evinced by once-haughty scientists and engineers. In the spring of 1980, Philip Handler, president of the National Academy of Sciences, writing in the prestigious journal Science, expressed his concern in uncharacteristically urgent tones:

The intellectual elite in every era has always been pessimistic. But today, concerned that "that which can be done, will be done," there has arisen an antiscientific, antirationalistic trend that should give us pause. ... That antiscience attitude perniciously infiltrates the news media, affecting the intelligentsia and decision-makers alike. It must be confronted at every opportunity.

Apparently the seriousness with which The New York Times regarded the symposium on "Technology and Pessimism" was both effect and cause, a symptom of the nation's growing concern as well as a source of new anxiety.

*
Many intelligent and responsible people, however, seem not to be unduly alarmed about technological change. And public opinion polls show that the average citizen still considers science and technology to be, on balance, forces for good. Maybe I am overreacting.

In my previous book I carefully considered, and tried to rebut, the antitechnological arguments of Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, René Dubos, Charles Reich, and Theodore Roszak. A reviewer, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, said that for an engineer to complain about the works of such people "seems a little like an elephant complaining of being bullied by gnats." Well, perhaps — but then it is common knowledge that gnats can torment large animals to distraction. A sting here, a buzz there, and all of a sudden we have the beginnings of a calamitous stampede. There is small comfort in thinking of the antitechnologists as gnats.

*
There are many different ways of trying to understand the antitechnological movement. A theologian might conclude that it is a long overdue recognition of the ebb of rationalism, a development that could have been predicted four centuries ago when Copernicus and Galileo first challenged the teachings of the Church. A political scientist might view the changing mood as an expression of incipient revolution, since technology is perceived by some to be the means by which the ruling classes perpetuate their power over the masses. Through an anthropologist's prism, antitechnology can be seen as a new mythology, welling up in the effervescent depths of the cultural subconscious.

If one thinks in the language of psychology, a completely different hypothesis comes to mind, namely that the dread of technology is nothing other than a phobia, that condition which develops when people displace their anxieties (about death, separation, parental rage, or whatever) in an effort to control them. It is well known that certain objects or situations — such as crowds, heights, closed spaces, open spaces, and a variety of animals — can be endowed by individuals with special meaning, and thereafter regularly induce a reaction of anxiety. Omnipresent technology is an apt candidate for this list. Fear of flying is, in fact, being treated as a phobia, and much publicity has been given to the cures effected by techniques of behavior modification. The anxieties of people living in the vicinity of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant have also been the subject of much interest and some study.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Blaming Technology"
by .
Copyright © 1981 Samuel C. Florman.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Introduction,
1. Taken Aback in Michigan,
2. Technology's Minor Moments,
3. Technocracy: A Short, Unhappy Life,
4. The Myth of the Technocratic Elite,
5. Hired Scapegoats,
6. Nuclear Angst,
7. Muddled Heads and Simple Minds,
8. Small Is Dubious,
9. On-the-Job Enrichment,
10. Codifying the Future,
11. The Feminist Face of Antitechnology,
12. The Gentle Sophistries of the Club of Rome,
13. The Spurned Professional,
14. The Image Campaign,
15. Moral Blueprints,
16. Technology and the Tragic View,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Index,
Also by Samuel C. Florman,
Copyright,