Chapter 8
The Technological Fix
A society dominated by scientism is a society that looks first,
and sometimes only, for a technological fix for every challenge that
confronts it.
8.1 Science and technology
As we've seen, science is intimately related to
technology in the first place because science is
precisely the kind of knowledge that gives rise to
technology. Technology requires that the world respond to the
application of controlling and manipulating influences in a
reproducible way. The basis of technology is just this reliable
response. And technology is the most convincing demonstration of the
reality of scientific knowledge. Science is persuasive in the modern
world not because of some theoretical argument that shows it to have
particular methods or approaches that are guaranteed to yield
objective knowledge, but because it gives rise to understanding that
works. Nothing so convincingly demonstrates human understanding of
compressible fluid dynamics as to fly in a Boeing 747. A laser pointer
that can shine with exquisite focus for hundreds of meters is a
palpable demonstration that we really understand light, and the
quantum mechanics that governs its emission. There is no more
convincing proof of our understanding of bacterial diseases than to
experience the dramatic cure by penicillin of an otherwise fatal
infection. No intellectual argument has anything like the impact of
useful technology.
The intimate relationship between science and technology has existed
since the scientific revolution. Before it, the technologies, `Arts'
as they were called, existed primarily in the craft guilds who
practiced and made their livelihoods from technical skills that were
passed on largely by apprenticeship and inheritance. Although we today
might think of their knowledge as a kind of science - and it was frequently
systematic and reliable by the standards of the day - it was generally
not an intellectual enterprise. Bacon's vision of intellectual
science as enabling the relief of man's estate helped to justify the
rejection of the sterile arm-chair philosophizing of the
schoolmen. And it helped to bring together the intellectuals and the
craftsmen.
The relationship is not, and has never been, a one-way street. Science
gives rise to technology, but just as importantly technology has
always been an enabler as well as a motivater of
science. Galileo
made his name as a scientist and made
the case for the Copernican solar system not by his world-leading
understanding of dynamics, but by being an early-adopter of the latest
technology: the
telescope. He did not invent it. But
he did construct telescopes that outstripped the power of any others
of the day, and he was the first to turn them on the heavens and
interpret what he saw in physical terms. The leading edge of today's
astronomical and cosmological knowledge is likewise completely
dependent upon technology, for example on the power of space flight to
place in orbit, above the obscuring blanket of the atmosphere,
telescopes that detect ultra-violet radiation, x-rays, and gamma rays,
as well as light. Thus, even the least applied of subjects, such as
astronomy, has always depended on technology for its progress.
The reciprocal dependence, of technology on science, though hardly
requiring much argument to establish it today, was actually far less
obvious until fairly recently. The inventors who brought profitable
techniques to practical industry, and the philosophers whose aim was
to understand the world of nature, were historically different breeds
and different classes. In nineteenth century England,
Michael Faraday, chemist and electrical scientist, was
highly unusual in being from a working-class background. His public
lectures at the Royal Institution made him more of an entertainer than
a technologist, though he was consulted by the Admiralty about
lighthouses.
William Thompson, gentleman
Professor at the University of Glasgow and a founding father of
thermodynamics and the principle of conservation of energy in the mid
nineteenth century, made handsome profits investing in transatlantic
telegraph
cables, for which his scientific expertise
proved invaluable. But applications such as these were still almost
incidental to scientists' activities, and the professionalization of
science itself was only beginning to move it from the domain of the
gifted amateur gentleman or professor to the focused
professional. Engineering remained a discipline largely independent of
natural science, and was held in a degree of disdain by the pure
scientists, even in the early twentieth century.
A part of the self-image of science was disinterested
objectivity, a picture that science was pure
knowledge, free from commercial self-interest, based upon a virtuous
commitment to rationality, whose content was purely factual, but whose
applications might be good or bad. It maintained that image by
portraying the application of science to industry, commerce and
warfare, as a separate, subsequent step, in which clearly
value-judgements were made, while science itself
was morally neutral, simply opening up possibilities. During and after
the Second World War, the power of science to bring to pass new
technologies that could remake the world became more widely
accepted. Governments adopted policies that explicitly supported
scientific research precisely because it led to technological
development. And academic
engineering increasingly
began to focus on Engineering-Science, technology based on
science. That process has led now to the acceptance of a very intimate
relationship between science and technology, which hardly recognizes
the distinctions of an earlier age.
8.2 Technological critiques
Critiques of science and technology have progressed through a long
development. They first began with the industrial revolution, as
protest against its displacement of workers from agricultural to urban
employment, and from individual craftsmanship to factory production.
The critics of the industrial revolution included not only the
Romantics,
who regretted the alienation from `nature' that it brought
and who represented an anti-scientistic viewpoint; but they also
included those who were thoroughly scientistic.
Marx, for example,
thought his social science could identify the oppressive
capitalistic
traits of those who controlled the means of production, and point the
way toward a full liberation of the workers in a future
communist
organization of society. The
Luddite movement, of 1811 onward, was more
directly aimed at technology. In this case, the mechanization of the
textile industry was the target, and the Luddites broke into factories
and destroyed their machines. Actually, the mechanization had
been taking place for at least half a century prior to that time, but
the increasing introduction of power looms and similar technology
provoked impoverished workers to fear further degradation of their
working and living conditions. The popular movement was quelled only
by harsh laws that made the destruction of textile machinery a capital
offense.
The Luddites lent their name, of course, to the supposed
irrational rejection of technology. It is uncertain the extent
to which their hardship can really be attributed to the technological
changes, and it is certain that there were many other important
influences, such as the economic exhaustions of the Napoleonic
Wars. Unfortunately the charge of irrationality became entrenched in
all arguments about the adoption of technology, even till today.
The twentieth century saw increasing reaction against not merely the
displacement of the poor, but the dehumanization of all of
society. However, it was accompanied by an even more wide-spread
countervailing enthusiasm for technology, as shiny new labor-saving
machinery appeared in the household as well as in the factory.
Perhaps the epitome of the critique of technology came in
Jacques Ellul's La Technique published in
French in 1954, whose English translation appeared as The
Technological Society in 1964. As John Wilkinson wrote in his
translator's introduction
"The Technological Society is a description of the way in
which an autonomous technology is in process of taking over the
traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and
suppressing these values to produce at last a monolithic world culture
in which all nontechnological difference and variety is mere
appearance."159
Ellul attributes the emergence of the full-scale industrial revolution
to the joint occurrence of five factors
(1) a very long technical maturation or incubation without decisive
checks before the final flowering; (2) population growth; (3) a
suitable economic milieu; (4) the almost complete plasticity of a
society malleable and open to the propagation of technique; (5) a
clear technical intention, which combines the other factors and
directs them toward the pursuit of the technical
objective.160
The subsequent development has led to a new overwhelming culture of
technique that possesses five characteristics. The first, Ellul dubs
automatism, by which he means the "technical movement becomes
self-directing" towards the most efficient methods. "The human being
is no longer in any sense the agent of choice."
"... everything that is not
technique is being eliminated. The challenge to a country, an
individual, or a system is solely a technical
challenge."161
The second characteristic is self-augmentation, with the result
that "1. In a given civilization, technical progress is
irreversible. 2. Technical progress tends to act, not according to an
arithmetic, but according to a geometric progression."
and then "technique, in its development, poses primarily technical
problems which consequently can be resolved only by
technique."162
The third characteristic is translated
monism, by which he
means that "it ought never to be said: on the one side, technique; on
the other the abuse of it." "... all techniques are inseparably
united". Technique does not evolve with an end in view of human
good. "It evolves in a purely causal way: the combination of previous
elements furnishes the new technical elements. There is no purpose or
plan that is being progressively realised."163
Self-augmentation and monism combine to provide
the fourth characteristic, the necessary linking together of
techniques, by which organizational technique of necessity emerges
from prior techniques and comes to dominate economics, commerce, society, and
the state through military, police, administration, and politics.
Finally we arrive at the fifth characteristic, technical
universalism, whereby technology spreads to all geographic regions
and subverts all cultures until it has "taken over the whole of
civilization"164
Together this leads to a self-sufficiency of technique that
constitutes the usurpation of humankind's highest
aspirations. "Since [technique] has put itself beyond good and evil,
it need fear no limitation whatever. It was long claimed that
technique was neutral. Today this is no longer a useful
distinction. The power and autonomy of technique are so well secured
that it, in its turn, has become the judge of what is moral, the
creator of a new morality."165
In our technical age
"Everything today seems to happen as though ends disappear, as a
result of the magnitude of the very means at our disposal." And
though "Comprehending that the proliferation of means brings about
the disappearance of ends, we have become preoccupied with
rediscovering a purpose or a goal", this is "merely a pious hope
with no chance whatsoever of influencing technical
evolution."166
Jacques Ellul, remarkably for a theologian, offers no solution, nor
any hope for one.
Neil Postman, almost forty years later, in
Technopoly, the surrender of culture to technology echoes many
of the same substantive charges, although with a very different style.
His neologism
`Technopoly' has gathered even less currency as a
popular term for the excesses of technology than scientism has
in respect of science. But, in short, his meaning and the distinction
with the more familiar word `technocracy' is as follows. Culture was
in the state of technocracy when "two opposing world-views - the
technological and the traditional - coexisted in uneasy tension."
But "With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds
disappears. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself..." "It
makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by
redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics,
by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our
definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is
totalitarian technology."167 This
description parallels in the technical realm what I have been calling
scientism. But Postman and Ellul both perceive a degree of compulsion
in Technopoly that goes beyond the intellectual, and beyond science.
For both these commentators, and many others, a key feature of the
critique of technology revolves around what is often called
(elsewhere) the
technological imperative:
"The idea that if
something could be done, it should be done"
or perhaps, from Ellul's perspective of the automatism of technology: if
something can be done, it will be done.
I have emphasized the fact that the traffic between science and
technology has always been both ways. Each has enabled and, to a
degree, motivated and justified the other. It would be a mistake,
historically and even logically, to identify one as the
progenitor and the other as the progeny. For much the same reason, I
refrain from identifying scientism as either the parent or the child
of Technopoly. A more accurate metaphor might be to regard them as
mutually supportive siblings. Postman and Ellul, from their stance as
critics of Technopoly, speak of scientism as a facet of
Technopoly. Without wishing to contradict their perspective, in this study of
scientism, I treat Technopoly instead as a facet of
scientism. Postman summarizes his view of scientism, a word he uses
mostly in the same way as Hayek, thus
It is not merely the misapplication of techniques such as
quantification to questions where numbers have nothing to say; not
merely the confusion of the material and social realms of human
experience; not merely the claim of social researchers to be
applying the aims and procedures of natural science to the human
world. Scientism is all of these, but something profoundly more. It
is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief
that some standardized set of procedures called "science" can
provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a
suprahuman basis for answers to questions like "What is life, and
when, and why?"168 ...
Although I recognize the moral dimension of scientism, which
Postman is at pains to point out. I see scientism as the broad
intellectual foundation of Technopoly. If from the perspective of
Postman and Ellul, scientism is theoretical Technopoly, then
from my perspective, Technopoly is applied scientism. My
discussion is aimed more at examining and understanding the
theoretical underpinning of the technological domination of modern
society, rather than setting forth the empirical results. It may seem
now that Technique is in practice sufficiently automatic, sufficiently
self-propelled, that it needs no theoretical justification. Yet
theories have consequences, and if we understand scientism, we have
the intellectual equipment to contradict and undermine Technopoly's
foundations.
Unlike Ellul, Postman is willing, however tentatively, given the
immensity of the task, to offer suggestions for solutions. These are
of two types. The first, for the individual, is to be a loving
resistance fighter. The second, for society, is to reform education.
Postman, who thinks that America is the only country so far to have
succumbed to Technopoly, says that to be a loving freedom fighter "you
must always keep close to your heart the narratives and symbols that
once made the United States the hope of the world". And the
resistance is expressed as aphoristic traits. The freedom fighters are
those, for example, who "refuse to accept efficiency as the
pre-eminent goal of human relations", "refuse to allow psychology or
any "social science" to pre-empt the language and thought of common
sense", "take the great narratives of religion seriously and who do
not believe that science is the only system of thought capable of
producing truth", "who admire technological ingenuity but do not
think it represents the highest possible form of human
achievement"169.
His curriculum reform would be configured around the theme of "The
Ascent of Humanity", drawing inspiration from
Jacob Bronowski's
approach (but side-stepping the political-incorrectness of the title
of his early 1970s TV series). Its content "must join art and
science. But we must also join the past and the present"
so that "all subjects are presented as a stage in humanity's
historical development; in which the philosophies of science, of
history, of language, of technology, and of religion are taught; and
in which there is a strong emphasis on classical forms of artistic
expression."170
8.3 Energy and environment
My physics research interests are motivated by the attempt to make
fusion energy available on the human scale.
Nuclear energy is a
million times greater per unit mass than the electromagnetic chemical
energy that we derive, for example, from hydrocarbons or sunlight. As
a result, it offers the possibility of generating energy sustainable
for many millennia, while generating only tiny amounts of
waste. Present nuclear power is derived from fission, the
breaking up of heavy nuclei like uranium, which releases energy that
is used to drive electricity generators. The stars are powered instead
by
fusion, the combining together of light nuclei like hydrogen
to form heavier ones, which also releases energy. Fusion reactions
require very energetic collisions between the reacting nuclei, so as
to overcome their mutual electrical repulsion. The high temperatures,
fifty million degrees Celsius or so, required to cause such energetic
interactions are present in the center of the sun and stars. But such
temperatures require an immaterial form of containment. Any solid
container would be immediately vaporized. Creation's remarkable fusion
reactors, the stars, are based on gravitational confinement of the
ionized atoms, the `plasma', that is their fuel. But gravity is such a
weak force that it requires stars to be very large. To make a fusion
reactor on the human scale calls for a different, stronger force of
confinement. For this purpose we use
magnetic fields to confine the
plasma. Figure 8.1 illustrates the configuration we
use. Fusion energy on the human scale has proven far more difficult
than fission. The first fission reactor was operational just a few
years after nuclear fission was discovered. Fusion research during the
past 60 years has succeeded in releasing 16 megawatts of power for a
second or so, but is only now on the threshold of a scientific
demonstration of a controlled fusion reaction, and still many years
from engineering practicality.
(a)
(b)
Figure 8.1: Cut-away diagram of the `tokamak'
plasma confinement device
(a). The plasma is the light toroidal (doughnut-shaped) region
surrounded by a vacuum chamber and various circular and rectangular
magnetic coils. They are supported by a heavy steel structure to
withstand the magnetic forces. In (b) a wide-angle video frame of
the plasma itself is shown. Only the edge radiates in visible
light. The center is too hot; it radiates predominantly x-rays. On
the frame are superimposed a section through the magnetic surfaces
which confine the plasma, one inside the other like the layers of
an onion. This MIT experiment is relatively compact, having a
radius of just 0.68m.
I mention my research interests as background to matters that have in
recent years acquired increasing prominence in public concern and
discussion - energy and the
environment. In the west, everyone is
now sensitized to the challenge that our modern technology has
brought. What to do about the environmental impact of the technologies
of modern society. The usage of
fossil-fuel energy, the foundation of the
industrial revolution and modern society, is, we now realize, causing
the accumulation in the upper atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases. The prospect we now face is of global climate change
with consequences that, while uncertain, may well be disastrous for
life on earth. In a sense this is just one of many environmental
impacts of our scientifically and technologically advanced and
empowered society. But it is a particularly significant impact
because, unlike the pollution of many industrial wastes, it is not
local, but global. It afflicts the whole planet, not just the societies
that caused the (perhaps unintended) pollution and enjoyed the
(intended) technological benefits. So a question that faces
industrialized societies is how to preserve the benefits that the
availability of abundant energy has brought, without doing untold harm
to the Earth.
For the vast majority in undeveloped nations, however, the emergency
is different. For them, who subsist on a tiny fraction of the
consumption characteristic of the developed world, who use as little
as one hundredth of the energy per capita of the west, the challenge
is how to obtain access to their basic needs: clean water, food,
shelter, and a meager level of energy for cooking and light. For
developing and industrializing nations, the issues are different
again. They are how to obtain the capital to construct the technical
infrastructure: roads, dams, electric power plants, and so on; and how
to develop the human capital, in the form of education and social
coherence, that will enable them to obtain the benefits of being a
competitive part of a global technical economy. For the developing
world, the environment is a concern, but they don't have the luxury of
a detached policy debate about how to avoid global warming. Their
overwhelming immediate priorities are different.
When most westerners think about energy and the environment, most
often the question they are asking is something like "what
technologies are going to contribute to solving this problem". In
other words, they are looking for the
technological fix. From my
parochial perspective as a scientist in energy research, that's good
for me. It means that one of the few unopposed priorities within
recent policy debates has been government support of science and
technology which holds promise for clean energy. But while I do think
it is useful and appropriate to do research in energy, and I've done
it most of my career, I am concerned about the unrealistic
expectations that our society has for future technology.
This is based on simple arithmetic applied to the global
situation. Right now the average per-capita energy consumption of the
world is less than one fifth of the US rate. So if a global population
of six billion (optimistically) were to achieve the rate of
consumption of the US, it would require five times as much global
consumption as at present. Such a consumption would not be sustainable
even if by some extraordinary (and unexpected) breakthrough we were
able to replace all but 10% of the fossil fuels with non-emitting
sources. Even the most ambitious and unrealistic of political hopes, to
replace 80% of US fossil energy with sustainable forms by 2050, is not
enough. It would not lead, of itself, to a sustainable global energy
scenario compatible with the basic aspirations of the rest of
humanity.
In this sense, there simply is no technological fix for energy.
But it is worse even than that. Every technological innovation of
significant scope has foreseen or unforeseen consequences. The
side-effects or even direct effects are themselves the cause of new
challenges. It is not just that technology can be used for good or
ill. It is that even the good effects themselves may lead to new
challenges, and that they may be accompanied by unexpected
consequences. Take as an example the health benefits that result from
the understanding of the causes of disease. The demonstration by Louis
Pasteur in the mid nineteenth century that a whole spectrum of
diseases and decay arise from germs, not from spontaneous generation,
led to new strategies of public health and disease prevention and
treatment that eventually transformed the survival prospects of humans
in the west. Mortality rates dropped dramatically, and much suffering
was obviated. As a result of this and other technical and social
developments, which resulted in increased food supplies, the
population of England, for example, quadrupled during the
nineteenth century. The population growth, and the growth of
consumption that accompanies it, is the primary cause of the adverse
environmental impacts in the form of urbanization, pollution, and
deforestation. Thus the environmental challenges of today are a direct
result of past technological development. And the problems arise not
from the failures of unnecessary technologies, but from the successes
of technologies devoted to basic human needs of food, sanitation,
health, and so on. Every technological solution leads to new
technological problems. Often the new problems appear to be
greater than the older ones, and if this is so, then we have a vicious
spiral in which ever greater technological resources are chasing ever
growing technological problems, with the new solutions leading to even
greater challenges. Each `fix' just winds the spiral higher into
greater problems. Just as the successes of
health technologies have
led to greater problems, so the successes of energy technologies, of
every kind, have provided the ability to affect the environment ever
more powerfully, and ever more difficult challenges have arisen.
This pessimistic scenario is not pre-ordained. In terms of a
mathematical analysis of the dynamics of the system, what I have
described is an unstable `diverging' situation, with ever increasing
demand. It is also possible that there might be a stable `converging'
situation, where the new problems caused by each `fix' are smaller
than the prior problems, in which case the system will soon stabilize
and the perturbations die away. Unfortunately there is no sign that
technological fixes lead to stable solutions for society as a
whole. What's more, economists have spent a hundred years proclaiming
that growth (the unstable case) is good; indeed their doctrine is that
economic growth is the most important goal that
government ought to promote.
In essence the problem of environmental sustainability is that the
world has too many people wanting too much stuff. Technology cannot
fix that. And more often than not it makes the problems worse because
of the additional power that it provides. A sustainable world is one
in which the reasonable aspirations are not for the life-styles of the
rich and famous or indeed of the developed west, but for a globally
`middle-class' economic level characterized by bicycles, buses,
nourishing food, and adequate housing and communications. For the
west, such a sustainable future will certainly mean reduced
consumption, but it need not mean a less satisfying life. It will
require a change of values away from the the consumer-driven
culture. Values are not a matter of technology or science. The types
of changes we are going to need to achieve sustainability are not
technological.
I do not mean that there are no technological improvements, or that
technological improvements are useless. Technological improvements can
be very beneficial, and the science that enables them is
worth-while. It is just that those technological benefits are
insufficient in themselves and may serve as a distraction from more
fundamental issues. It is that not all the important solutions are
technological. Many of the most intractable challenges of society
are not technical, they are human, and moral. Technology is of little
use for those challenges. Just as it is an erroneous scientism which
supposes that all the real knowledge is science, it is an erroneous
technocentrism which supposes that all the efficacious solutions to
our challenges are technological. But the one error leads to the
other. The search for the technological fix follows from the
scientistic world-view.