Plutonium, broken back, debit card … denial. And as they say about denial: it ain’t a
river in Egypt. The defense mechanism
may better be described as the pall the mind casts over realities it cannot
bear to glimpse. Evolutionary psychologists
tell us that a psychic function as slippery as this one aided survival by
greasing the wheels of escape while facing a clawed animal in the
savannah. But today, given that
technological society has rolled like a bulldozer over every blade and tendril
on the planet, the modern-day version -- the chronic, unbreakable, impenetrable
denial that may help one survive the claws of a demanding day, also directs us
toward the demise of everything.
I
attempted to put words to this terrible reality in an essay for the Institute
for Policy Studies’ 1993 anthology Technology for the Common Good:
I met with a young
political activist for conversation last week at my favorite café. The founder
of an anti-war organization during the first Gulf War, this 21-year-old lives
to explore social issues and act on his convictions. His burning question of
the hour concerned technology. "Has television made people less
intelligent?" he wondered, and he
based his conclusion on the deconstructionist dictate that one speak only from personal experience. His answer,
"Decidedly not," and indeed this
young man's mental capacity was as substantial and his wit as clever as any I had seen of any age.
But I could not help but notice that even before a quadruple
espresso latte had exploded onto his brain cells, my young friend was ranting
at 120 words-per-minute, vibrating in his seat like a rocket poised for
take-off, and hurling about words like VPL, CDTV, HyperCard, and Macromind. And
answering his own questions in quantum leaps across paradigms unintegrated by
coherent worldview, physical reality, or moral obligation.
Like my friend, most of us who inhabit mass technological society find it
difficult to understand technology's impact on social reality, let alone on our
psyches. Like the tiny aerobic bacteria that reside within computer hardware,
we are so entrenched in our technological world that we hardly know it exists. Yet
widespread radioactive contamination, cancer epidemics, oil spills, toxic
leaks, environmental illness, ozone holes, poisoned
aquifers, and cultural and biological extinctions indicate that the
technological construct encasing our every experience, perception, and political act stands in dire need of criticism.
Further, such a critique requires integration by a coherent worldview,
physical reality, and moral obligation.
Gazing at ourselves from outside our hardware, few of us will be able to deny that we need to reconstruct both our
world and our worldview. Yet not many of us have begun the conversation that
would lay a conceptual framework for such a shift. Instead, we remain trapped
within both hardware and hardware-determined
worldview, and technological development promises to march onward toward
nanotechnology, virtual reality, genetic engineering, biological weapons, and
all kinds of new technologies that will further disrupt ecological balance,
cultural diversity, and psychological well-being.
I count myself as both technology critic and activist, proudly following in the footsteps of such insightful thinkers as
philosopher Lewis Mumford, sociologist
Jacques Ellul, historian David Noble, political scientist Langdon
Winner, and social critic Jerry Mander.[i]
The system under observation is mass
technological civilization. As philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote, "We are
questioning concerning technology in order to bring light to our relationship
to its essence.”[ii] What is the essence of modern
technology? How does it structure our
lives? Our perceptions? Our politics?
How does it shape our psyches? What does it say about our relationship
to our humanness and to the Earth? Unfortunately, obstacles to answers are
entrenched, like concrete piers at a freeway exchange, in both our social and
psychological reality.
I
discovered the scope of such obstacles while I was on a promotional tour for my
book When
Technology Wounds.[iii]
The book is based on a psychological study of technology survivors: people who have become medically ill as a result of exposure to some
health-threatening technology. I interviewed Love Canal residents,
atomic veterans, asbestos workers, DES daughters, electronics plant workers,
Dalkon Shield survivors, homeowners whose groundwater had been contaminated,
Nevada Test Site downwinders, sufferers of cancer, environmental illness,
chronic fatigue immune dysfunction, and many other survivors.
By all accounts, this population is on the rise. Forty-one thousand Louisiana residents are exposed to 3.5 million tons of toxic landfill along the industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.[iv] Thirty million U.S. households, or 96 million people, live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant.[v] One hundred and thirty five million residents in 122 cities and counties breath consistently polluted air,[vi] while 250 million American -- everyone of us-- are exposed to 2.6 billion pounds of pesticides each year, in addition to all the radioactive fallout ringing the globe from Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and the nuclear test sites in Nevada and Khazakstan.[vii]
By all accounts, this population is on the rise. Forty-one thousand Louisiana residents are exposed to 3.5 million tons of toxic landfill along the industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.[iv] Thirty million U.S. households, or 96 million people, live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant.[v] One hundred and thirty five million residents in 122 cities and counties breath consistently polluted air,[vi] while 250 million American -- everyone of us-- are exposed to 2.6 billion pounds of pesticides each year, in addition to all the radioactive fallout ringing the globe from Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and the nuclear test sites in Nevada and Khazakstan.[vii]
On the book tour I suggested that since people are getting sick from technological exposure, we had best
enter into an informed conversation about technology. Such a
conversation was not forthcoming. In a debate on Public Radio International
with MIT Professor Marvin Minsky, the
founder of artificial intelligence, I was asked if I had any objections to computers. I expressed concern
that the deadly chemicals used to manufacture computers -- such as
chlorofluorocarbons, diethylamine, lencast, 4,4
isophopylidenediphenol, and
biosphenol A -- contaminate the biosphere. I mentioned Yolanda Lozano, a 36-year-old worker from the GTE plant in
Albuquerque who died of cancer from
chemical exposure on the job. In
reply, Professor Minsky quipped, "It doesn't matter.”[viii]
Elsewhere
on my tour, the conversation ended before it began.
"Get this woman off the air! She's the stupidest guest you've ever had!" shrieked one talk show listener.”[ix]
I
compare today's public awareness of the impacts of technology to that of alcoholism in the 1950’s.
Back then, everybody drank. It was more than socially acceptable to drink; it
was required. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) was 20 years old and growing, but
still considered an embarrassment.
It is not a new idea that we who live in mass technological society
suffer
psychological addiction to specific machines like cars, telephones, and computers, and even to technology itself. But the
picture is bigger and more complex. As social philosopher Morris Berman
says:
Addiction,
in one form or another, characterizes every aspect of industrial society....
Dependence on alcohol (food, drugs, tobacco . . .) is not formally different
from dependence on prestige, career achievement, world influence, wealth, the need to build more ingenious
bombs, or the need to exercise control over everything.[x]
The editor of Science
describes the nation’s dependence on oil as an addiction,[xi] while Vice President Al
Gore claims that we are addicted to
the consumption of the Earth itself.[xii] Evolutionary philosopher Gregory
Bateson points out that addictive behavior is consistent with the Western approach to life that pits mind against body and
concludes, "It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange [polarized] way of looking
at its world can survive.”[xiii]
To clarify this notion that contemporary society
itself is based on addiction, what I
call "techno-addiction," we will do well to turn to the pioneers
of the sociology of technology. Mumford,
Ellul, Winner, and Noble remind us that no machine stands alone.[xiv] In other words, we will forever be trapped in a narcissistic
"I-want-my-mammogram" analysis as long as we view technology
only as specific machines that either serve us individually or do not. What Mumford calls the “Megamachine" is
an entire psycho-socio-economic system that includes all the machines in our
midst; all the organizations and methods that make
those machines possible; those of us who inhabit this technological
construct; plus the ways in which we are socialized and required to participate
in the system; and the ways we think, perceive, and feel as we attempt to
survive within it.
What I am
describing is a human-constructed, technology-centered social system built on
principles of standardization, efficiency, linearity, and fragmentation-like an
assembly line that fulfills production quotas, but cares nothing for the people
who operate it. Within this system, technology influences society.
The automotive industry reorganized
American society in the 20th century. Likewise, nuclear weapons define global politics. At the same time, society
reflects the technological ethos. As
Mander shows, the social organization of workplaces, as well as their architecture and physical layout, reflect
the mechanistic principles of standardization, efficiency, and
production quotas.[xv]
From our
everyday experience we might note that
"normal" acts like standing in line, obeying traffic signals, or
registering for the draft all constitute acts of participation in this grand
machine. Regarding our minds and bodies as disconnected in health and disease,
or thinking that radioactive waste buried in the Earth won't eventually seep
into the water table, are symptoms of the fragmented thinking that emerges from
such a mechanical order.
At this
point in history, technology and society are completely interwoven. The
feminist philosopher Susan Griffin characterizes the impossible task of
distinguishing the two as "like saying my hand causes my fingers.”[xvi]
"Technology has become our environment as well as our ideology," writes the Dutch social critic
Michiel Schwarz, "We no longer use technology, we live it.”[xvii]
Vine
Deloria, Lakota author of books on Native history and politics, describes the
results of this social-technological imbrication as "the artificial
universe."
Wilderness
transformed into city streets, subways, giant buildings,
and factories resulted in the complete substitution of the real world for the artificial world of the urban man
...Surrounded by an artificial universe when the warning signals are not the shape of the sky, the cry of the animals, the changing of seasons, but the simple
flashing of the traffic light and the
wail of the ambulance and police car,
urban people have no idea what the natural universe is like. . . . Their
progress is defined solely in terms of convenience within the artificial
technological universe with which they are familiar.[xviii]
Langdon
Winner moves the idea further, arguing that the artifacts and methods invented
since the technological revolution have developed in size and complexity to the point of canceling our every ability to grasp
their impact upon us. The
scientific-technological reality that now
threatens to determine every aspect of our lives and encase the entire
planet is out of control, he asserts. "Our technologies are tools without
handles.”[xix]
Characteristics like total immersion, loss of perspective, and loss of
control tip us off to the link
between the psychological process of addiction and the technological
system. According to Craig Nakken of the
Rutgers School of Alcohol Studies, addiction is a progressive disease that
begins with inner psychological changes,
leads to changes in perception, behavior, and life-style, and then to total breakdown.[xx] Its hallmark is the out-of-control, often
aimless compulsion to fill a lost sense of meaning and connectedness with
substances or experiences.
Throughout technological society the recognized symptoms of the addictive
process are blatantly evident. They are obvious in the behavior of those
Jacques Ellul calls "the cabal of self-serving officials and executives"[xxi]
who promote technology to maintain control over society or inflate their own
bank accounts and egos. And they are evident for us all because our experience, knowledge, and sense of reality have been
shaped by life in the technological
world. Some symptoms of the addictive process include: denial, control, dishonesty, thinking disorders, grandiosity,
and an unhealthy relationship with one's feelings.
This blog is a book. Please feel free to read the next chapter now. Go to the Table of Contents under the introduction on the right side of the page and click on the next chapter.
[i] Lewis
Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development. New York New York Grand Rapids MI :
Eerdmans, 1990; David Noble, America New York Cambridge MA Chicago : University of Chicago New York San
Francisco
[ii] Martin
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Technology and Other Essays,
trans. William Levitt. New York
[iii]
Glendinning, When Technology Wounds.
[iv] David
Maraniss and Michael Weisskoff, “Corridor of Death along the Mississippi Boulder CO
[v] Critical
Mass Energy Project, “The 1986 Nuclear Power Safety Report.” Washington
DC : Public Citizen, 1986; and Daniel F. Ford, Three Mile Island .
New York
[vi] Aerometric Information and Retrieval System:
1988 with Supplemental Data from Regional Office Review. Washington DC
[vii] Unfinished Business: A Comparative
Assessment of Environmental Problems. Washington DC: Environmental
Protection Agency, Office of Policy Analysis, February 1987, pp. 84-86; Lawrie
Mott and Karen Snyder, “Pesticide Alert,” Amicus
Journal, Vol. 10 No. 2, Spring 1988,
p. 2; and Information Disease Almanac,
1986. Boston MA
[viii]
“Neo-Luddism Is Sweeping North America : An
Interview with Chellis Glendinning and Marvin Minsky,” Canadian Broadcasting
Company rebroadcast on National Public Radio, March 26, 1990.
[ix] “The Mike
Cuthbert Show,” WAMU-FM, May 16, 1990.
[x] Morris
Berman, The Re-Enchantment of the World.
New York
[xi] D.E.
Koshland, “War and Science,” Science,
Vol. 251 No. 4993, February 1, 1991, p. 497.
[xii] Al Gore, Earth in the Balance. New York
[xiii] Gregory
Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
New York
[xiv] Mumford, Technics and Civilization, p. 12; The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power, Chapter 13; Ellul, The Technological Society, pp. 3-11;
Winner, Autonomous Technology, pp.
8-12; and Nobel, America By Design,
Chapters 8-9.
[xv] Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred, Chapter 7.
[xvi]
Conversation with Susan Griffin, Berkeley
CA
[xvii] Michiel
Schwarz and Rein Jansma, eds., The
Technological Culture. Amsterdam
[xviii] Vine
Deloria, We Talk, You Listen. New York
[xix] Winner, Autonomous Technology, p. 29.
[xx] Craig
Nakken, The Addictive Personality. San Francisco
[xxi] Jacques
Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s
Attitudes. New York
