Dialogues
Seven Voices
Technology

Humane Village Journal
Volume 2, 1995

Compiled by
Alexander Manu

From Tool to Cause and Back

 

Hannah Arendt •

The discussion of the whole problem of technology, that is, of the transformation of life and world through the introduction of the machine, has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upon the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labour less painful. Their instrumentality is understood exclusively in this anthropocentric sense. But the instrumentality of tools and implements is much more closely related to the object it is designed to produce, and their sheer "human value" is restricted to the use the animal labourans makes of them.

In other words, homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and implements in order to erect a world, not - at least, not primarily - to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.

Thomas Berry •

Our difficulty is that we are just emerging from a technological entrancement. During this period the human mind has been placed within the narrowest confines it has experienced since consciousness emerged from its Paleolithic phase. Even the most primitive tribes have a larger vision of the universe, of our place and functioning within it, a vision that extends to celestial regions of space and to interior depths of the human in a manner far exceeding the parameters of our own world of technological confinement.

Jacques Ellul •

We still do not know the ultimate effects of these transformations on the human being. We have only begun to study them. Precisely what is modified in man by this violent upheaval of every element of his environment? We do not know. But we do know that violent modifications have taken place, and we have a foreboding of them in the development of neuroses and in the new behaviours with which contemporary literature acquaints us. In ceasing to be himself, modern man bears testimony to these phenomena not only when he suffers anxiety but even when he is happy.

Hannah Arendt •

Unlike the products of human hands, which must be realized step by step and for which the fabrication process is entirely distinct from the existence of the fabricated thing itself, the natural thing's existence is not separate but is somehow identical with the process through which it comes into being: the seed contains and, in a certain sense, already is the tree, and the tree stops being if the process of growth through which it came into existence stops. If we see these processes against the background of human purposes, which have a willed beginning and a definite end, they assume the character of automatism. We call automatic all courses of movement which are self-moving and therefore outside the range of wilful and purposeful interference. In the mode of production ushered in by automation, the distinction between operation and product, as well as the product's precedence over the operation (which is only the means to produce the end), no longer make sense and have become obsolete.

Jacques Ellul •

Technical analysis concentrates on the efficient cause of human actions and eliminates as secondary everything that expresses human personality. Action is no longer a real function of the person who performs it; it is a function of abstract and ideal symbols, which become its sole criteria.

Hannah Arendt •

Although machines have forced us into an infinitely quicker rhythm of repetition than the cycle of natural processes prescribed&emdash;and this specifically modern acceleration is only too apt to make us disregard the repetitive character of all labouring&emdash;the repetition and the endlessness of the process itself put the unmistakable mark of labouring upon it. This is even more evident in the use objects produced by these techniques of labouring. Their very abundance transforms them into consumer goods. The endlessness of the labouring process is guaranteed by the ever-recurrent needs of consumption; the endlessness of production can be assured only if its products lose their use character and become more and more objects of consumption, or if, to put it in another way, the rate of use is so tremendously accelerated that the objective difference between use and consumption, between the relative durability of use objects and the swift coming and going of consumer goods, dwindles to insignificance.

Theodore Roszak •

...There is a vital distinction between what machines do when they process information and what minds do when they think. At a time when computers are being intruded massively upon the schools, that distinction needs to be kept plainly in view by teachers and students alike. But thanks to the cultlike mystique that has come to surround the computer, the line that divides mind from machine is being blurred. Accordingly, the powers of reason and imagination which the schools exist to celebrate and strengthen are in danger of being diluted with lowgrade mechanical counterfeits.

Jacques Ellul •

Man, emptied by the technical mechanism of all personal interests, sometimes finds himself at home. What shall he talk about? Man has always had one unfailing subject of conversation, life's vexations. Not fear, nor anguish, despair, or passion. All that has always been suppressed in his subconscious. But he has always been able to talk companionably about vexatious things, hail on his vines, mildew, machinery out of order, a troublesome prostate, and so forth. Now technique intervenes, repairs everything, and creates a world in which everything works well, or well enough. Even if some petty vexations persist, the individual feels no need to speak of them and turns toward the efflcient silence-fillers, television and radio, prodigiously useful refuges for those who find that family life has become impossible.

Theodore Roszak •

The machines may not be smarter than we are, but we may not be proficient enough or moneyed enough to hold our own with those who own and exploit the machines. The cult of information is theirs, not ours. They use it, and they use it against us. What "the rest of us" are offered as access to the information society is hardly enough to make us real citisens of the information age: it may be little more than a diversion.

Hannah Arendt •

The instrumentalisation of the whole world and the earth, this limitless devaluation of everything given, this process of growing meaninglessness where every end is transformed into a means and which can be stopped only by making man himself the lord and master of all things, does not directly arise out of the fabrication process; for from the viewpoint of fabrication the finished product is as much an end in itself, an independent durable entity with an existence of its own, as man is an end in himself in Kant's political philosophy. Only in so far as fabrication chiefly fabricates use objects does the finished product again become a means, and only in so far as the life process takes hold of things and uses them for its purposes does the productive and limited instrumentality of fabrication change into the limitless instrumentalisation of everything that exists.

Theodore Roszak •

Two distinct elements come together in the computer: the ability to store information in vast amounts, the ability to process that information in obedience to strict logical procedures...The cult of information fixes upon one or the other of these elements (sometimes both) and construes its intellectual value. Because the ability to store data somewhat corresponds to what we call memory in human beings, and because the ability to follow logical procedures somewhat corresponds to what we call reasoning in human beings, many members of the cult have concluded that what computers do somewhat corresponds to what we call thinking. It is no great difficulty to persuade the general public of that conclusion since computers process data very fast in small spaces well below the level of visibility; they do not look like other machines when they are at work. They seem to be running along as smoothly and silently as the brain does when it remembers and reasons and thinks.

Jacques Ellul •

The complete separation of thought and action effected by technique produces in a new guise a phenomenon which we have already discussed as it appears in other areas: the lack of spirltual efficacy of even the best ideas. The very assimilation of ideas into the technical framework which renders them materially effective makes them spiritually worthless. This does not mean that ideas have no worthwhile effect on the public at all. They have a great effect, but not the effect their creators intended.

Hannah Arendt •

The danger of future automation is less the much deplored mechanisation and artificialisation of natural life than that, its artificiality notwithstanding, all human productivity would be sucked into an enormously intensified life process and would follow automatically, without pain or effort, its ever-recurrent natural cycle. The rhythm of machines would magnify and intensify the natural rhythm of life enormously, but it would not change, only make more deadly, life's chief character with respect to the world, which is to wear down durability.

Theodore Roszak •

If there were not thousands already applauding the skill of those who have fashioned this technology, I might be the one to do it. But there are more than enough who stand ready to praise; indeed, one of the things that worries me most is the great number who are handsomely rewarded for doing so. The "data merchants," as I call them, find their careers or their investments tied to the extravagant promises that attach to computers; they have every reason to believe that there is nothing computers cannot do and should not be doing. The result has been the creation of a mystique of information that makes basic intellectual discriminations between data, knowledge, judgment, imagination, insight, and wisdom impossible.

Hannah Arendt •

One thing is certain: the continuous automatic process of manufacturing has not only done away with the "unwarranted assumption" that "human hands guided by human brains represent the optimum efficiency,'' but with the much more important assumption that the things of the world around us should depend upon human design and be built in accordance with human standards of either utility or beauty. In place of both utility and beauty, which are standards of the world, we have come to design products that still fulfill certain "basic functions" but whose shape will be primarily determined by the operation of the machine. The "basic functions" are of course the functions of the human animal's life process, since no other function is basically necessary, but the product itself&emdash;not only its variations but even the "total change to a new product"&emdash;will depend entirely upon the capacity of the machine.

Jacques Ellul •

Beginning with Sylvester Graham's Treatise on bread, a number of studies have shown to what degree the organic structure of bread has been modified by the machine and by the science of chemistry. The result was a profound modification of taste, as if "the consumers, by an unconscious reaction, adapted their taste to the type of bread which corresponded exactly to the demands of mass production." Mechanisation shattered the age-old character of bread and converted it into a valueless article of fashion. This statement is not an aesthetic judgment or a lingering romanticism, but rather the result of exact technical studies, a technical fact established by technicians; this in itself presupposes it is not a value judgment. We are registering a fact and not nostalgia for the old whole-wheat bread of our ancestors It is a fact of the same order as the retreat of wine before Coca Cola; the ancient "civilisation of wine" is becoming obsolescent as a result of an industrial product.

Theodore Roszak •

...The computer... has been overdressed in fabulous claims. Further, I believe these claims have been deliberately propagated by elements in our society that are making some of the most morally questionable uses of computer power. The glowing promises with which they have surrounded that power need to be challenged if the computer is not to be delivered into the wrong hands. As this should make clear, my interest...is not in the technology of computers, but in their folklore: the images of power, the illusions of well-being, the fantasies and wishful thinking that have grown up around the machine. Primarily, my target is the concept to which the technology has become inextricably linked in the public mind: information.

Jacques Ellul •

The technical society must perfect the "man-machine" complex or risk total collapse. Is there any other way out? I am convinced that there is. Unfortunately, I am also compelled to note that neither the scientists nor the technicians want any part of any other solution. And since I work with realities and not with abstractions, I recognise the inevitability of the fact that technical difficulties demand technical solutions. All the troubles provoked by the encounter between man and technique are of a technical order, and therefore no one dreams of applying nontechnical remedies. Men distrust them...

Theodore Roszak •

Information has taken on the quality of that impalpable, invisible, but plaudit-winning silk from which the emperor' ethereal gown was supposedly spun. The word has received ambitious, global definitions that make it all good things to all people. Words that come to mean everything may finally mean nothing; yet their very emptiness may allow them to be filled with a mesmerising glamour.

The loose but exuberant talk we hear on all sides these days about "the information economy," "the information society," is coming to have exactly that function. These often repeated catchphrases and cliches are the mumbo jumbo of a widespread public cult. Like all cults, this one also has the intention of enlisting mindless allegiance and acquiescence. People who have no clear idea what they mean by information or why they should want so much of it are nonetheless prepared to believe that we live in an Information Age, which makes every computer around us what the relics of the True Cross were in the Age of Faith: emblems of salvation.

Jacques Ellul •

Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometres an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.

Hannah Arendt •

To design objects for the operational capacity of the machine instead of designing machines for the production of certain objects would indeed be the exact reversal of the means-end category, if this category still made any sense. But even the most general end, the release of manpower, that was usually assigned to machines, is now thought to be a secondary and obsolete aim, inadequate to and limiting potential "startling increases in efficiency.'' As matters stand today, it has become as senseless to describe this world of machines in terms of means and ends as it has always been senseless to ask nature if she produced the seed to produce a tree or the tree to produce the seed.

By the same token it is quite probable that the continuous process pursuant to the channeling of nature's never-ending processes into the human world, though it may very well destroy the world qua world as human artifice, will as reliably and limitlessly provide the species man-kind with the necessities of life as nature herself did before men erected their artificial home on earth and set up a barrier between nature and themselves.

Willard Gaylin •

At this juncture, where our technology seems to be expanding our horizons for changing the nature of our species and the forms of our lives, we must be unafraid of such changes and recognise that our glory has always been not just in what we are, but in what we can become.

Hannah Arendt •

For a society of labourers, the world of machines has become a substitute for the real world, even though this pseudo world cannot fulfill the most important task of the human artifice, which is to offer mortals a dwelling place more permanent and more stable than themselves. In the contmuous process of operation, this world of machines is even losing that independent worldly character which the tools and implements and the early machinery of the modern age so eminently possessed. The natural processes on which it feeds increasingly relate it to the biological process itself, so that the apparatuses we once handled freely begin to look as though they were "shells belonging to the human body as the shell belongs to the body of a turtle." Seen from the vantage point of this development, technology in fact no longer appears "as the product of a conscious human effort to enlarge material power, but rather like a biological development of mankind in which the innate structures of the human organism are transplanted in an everincreasing measure into the environment of man.''

Theodore Roszak •

To reflect on the powers of the mind, to probe its secrets, these are among the time-honoured pursuits of philosophy. It is quite another matter, however, to teach children and tell the public that the secrets have all been revealed and the powers harnessed&emdash;and to offer a collection of semiconductors in a metal box as proof. Measured against that claim, even the most ingenious computer is bound to look ludicrously inadequate in the eyes of thoughtful people&emdash;more of a joke than an achievement.

Thomas Berry •

Our present awakening from this enchantment with technology has been particularly painful. We have altered the earth and human life in many irrevocable ways. Some of these have been creative and helpful. Most have been destructive beyond imagination.

Theodore Roszak •

...I raise a small protest on behalf of the naked human mind, its creative powers, its animal resiliency, its undiscovered evolutionary potentiality, its deep enigmas of aspiration and self-transcendence. I seek to remind readers of the obvious that so often goes unobserved. There have been works of genius, indeed whole golden ages of culture&emdash;many of them the creation of peasant peoples and tribal folk&emdash;based upon nothing more than human speech, imagination, and memory. The heights of intellect and vision have been scaled by people gathered around campfires to tell stories, by poets scratching away with a quill by candlelight, by scribes bending over a sheet of parchment, by inspired painters working on the wall of a cave. There is, of course, no reason why we should not, in our time, look for other, more expressive media of communication, but I find it important to recall that mind has never been dependent on machinery to reach the peaks of achievement.

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