As I was writing this essay for the Institute for Policy
Studies, the all-pervasiveness of addiction was rising to collective awareness
in the United States. More people were
joining Alcoholics Anonymous, and more psychotherapy clients were attempting to
blend the lessons of A.A. with the healing offered by deep-excavation therapy. I was invited to speak at a mental health
conference put on by an organization located in the hyper-conservative town of Colorado
Springs. When I stepped to the podium
and began to outline a relationship between personal addiction and disconnection
from the natural world -- with its implied critique of technological progress
and favoring of environmental politics -- several listeners stormed out of the
auditorium in a rage.
The essay for Technology for the Common Good continues:
According
to psychotherapist Terry Kellogg, addiction is "a process of decreasing
choice sustained by denial."[i]
The practicing alcoholic pretends that everything is normal. I once met a
politician who had gotten himself elected to office by spending ten times more
on his campaign than any other contender in the race. He was addicted to power,
sex, overspending, and abuse of other people. His denial of these addictions
blinded him from admitting them for year -- until one day the Sheriff's
Family Violence Protection Act served him notice for assault.
The denial of
addiction we find in society's ecological, economic, and psychological crises resembles this man's
life. A society-wide stance of "business-as-usual"
pervades. Denial abounds.
The automotive industry keeps cranking out new models of polluting cars. Television runs ads for them. We buy them. The U.S. government denies a link between technological development and global warming, while President George Bush calls for more technological development as the answer to environmental disaster. The plastics industry inundates world markets with petro-products, even using the idea of park benches made from recycled plastic as an excuse for further production. The medical establishment denies the existence of environmental illness. Corporations deny the ecological impact of manufacturing toxics.
The automotive industry keeps cranking out new models of polluting cars. Television runs ads for them. We buy them. The U.S. government denies a link between technological development and global warming, while President George Bush calls for more technological development as the answer to environmental disaster. The plastics industry inundates world markets with petro-products, even using the idea of park benches made from recycled plastic as an excuse for further production. The medical establishment denies the existence of environmental illness. Corporations deny the ecological impact of manufacturing toxics.
Technology survivors
suffer the rejection caused by denial from the insurance industry, justice
system, medical establishment, media, and even friends and family. As Love
Canal resident Lois Gibbs told me: “I went to my son's pediatrician, and I
said, ‘Look, there are eight patients who have you as their doctor. All of them
are under the age of twelve, all of them have a similar urinary disorder. Why
is this? What do you make of the fact that you have eight patients who live
within a few blocks of Love Canal who have the same disease?’ He said, ‘There
is no connection.’”[ii]
Dishonesty is acted
out by the alcoholic in secret drinking, sneaky behavior, and lying. With
respect to technology addiction, this symptom reveals itself most blatantly in
the behavior of corporations and government agencies whose self-interest lies
in purveying offending technologies. We know, for example, that officials at
A.H. Robins, the makers of the Dalkon Shield, knew in advance of the potential
medical risk of their product. Nonetheless, they sent it to market, and when
reports and studies indicating ill effects became public knowledge, A.H. Robins
claimed ignorance.[iii]
Likewise, in the face of increasing liability suits, Manville Corporation
(formerly Johns-Manville) froze its assets and declared bankruptcy. At the
time, Manville ranked 181st on the Fortune 500 list, with assets of
over $2 billion.[iv]
Addicts
need to control their world to enjoy
uninterrupted access to the source of
their obsession. A workaholic who directs a small institute is incapable of negotiating even the smallest
agreement because input from others
upsets her sense of control. Likewise, today's multinationals display an
unbounded obsession with controlling the world's resources, consumer markets, workers'
behavior, and public opinion toward their products.
The
kinds
of technologies a society develops are not
as preordained as the ethos of linear progress would have us believe;
they express a society's goals, both
conscious and unconscious. In mass technological society there exists a
striking resemblance between the kinds of technologies produced and tyrannical modes of political power. Winner
discusses the similarity in language between the realms of power and
technology. "Master" and "slave"
are words used to characterize both technology and fascist politics,
while "machine," "power," and "control" appear in
the vocabularies of both worlds.[v]
When humans assume a
position of extreme dependence on technical artifacts, the lines blur between
who is master and who is slave. What happens to our lives when cars break down? What happens when you don't own
a computer? Technology's mastery over our
lives translates into political disempowerment as well. The very
conception, invention, development, and deployment of new technologies involve
an undemocratic social process rationalized as "progress."[vi]
The life experience of technology
survivors attests to this fact: they are usually exposed to technological
events without warning or choice.
If the particular
kinds of technologies in our midst exist to promote mastery and power, we might
ask: For whom? Over whom?
Windmills and teepees express democratic and ecological values because the very people who invent, produce, and maintain them are the people who use them. By contrast, the technologies of mass society reflect a mentality of domination over the natural world, space, and people. As Mander points out, running a nuclear power plant requires tight, centralized control by both government and industry to produce such a capital-intensive project, master public opinion, and provide military back-up in case of sabotage, accident, or public protest.[vii]
Windmills and teepees express democratic and ecological values because the very people who invent, produce, and maintain them are the people who use them. By contrast, the technologies of mass society reflect a mentality of domination over the natural world, space, and people. As Mander points out, running a nuclear power plant requires tight, centralized control by both government and industry to produce such a capital-intensive project, master public opinion, and provide military back-up in case of sabotage, accident, or public protest.[vii]
Alcoholics
typically employ obsessive, confused, and
narcissistic thinking. One addict who assaulted a woman explained that
he was not responsible for her medical
bills; instead he blamed the woman for her reaction to his attack,
rationalizing "you create your own reality."
Likewise,
much thinking in mass technological society is dysfunctional -- with people
embracing the "technological fix" as the answer to social,
psychological, and medical problems caused by previous technological fixes. Doctors treat servicemen with cancer
from exposure to nuclear testing -- with small blasts of radiation. Chemists
look to ever more-potent pesticides to conquer the insects resistant to last
year's poison. One proposed government program
seeks to cover the oceans with polystyrene chips which will reflect
"unwanted" sunlight off the Earth's surface
and save us from global warming. And some scientists suggest orbiting
hundreds of satellites around the planet to block the sun's light.[viii]
The
practicing alcoholic's delusion of
grandeur is well known. The inflated
power that fuels technological development is less apparent, more
assumed. This grandiosity insists that mass technological society is superior
to all other social arrangements. It implies that human evolution is linear and progressive, and that all societies
should be judged by the yardstick of technological achievement. These
ideas are inescapably present -- on
television, in textbooks, in movies -- and are reinforced by each season's
parade of state-of-the-art technologies.
Technological
society's main organ of socialization, public relations, purveys the
grandiosity of technology. "Master the Possibilities" teases the
MasterCard ad. "What Exactly Can the World's Most Powerful and Expandable
PC Do? Anything It Wants," promises the Compaq Deskpro. At the same time
the "smart weapons" unleashed on television during Desert Storm
advertise that American technology -- and America -- is "Number One."
Behind this all-too-earnest insistence lies the out-of-control, often aimless
compulsion to create ever-increasing expressions of grandiosity -- and the
hallmark of the addict -- to return continually to the source of
aggrandizement. We need more cars, more bombs, more televisions, more golf
courses, more dams, more shopping malls, more new technologies to prove our
grandiosity.
Alcoholics
are brimming with emotions, but they
can't express themselves
directly or constructively. Instead, their feelings are hidden from view,
and they live in a state of frozen
emotion. Or they act out their feelings in dishonest, controlling, grandiose
behavior.
Likewise, survival in
the technological system requires that people behave
like machines. The hallmark of education is to quantify reality and
function in a mechanistic world. Every subject we learn at school seems
unrelated to the others. Each department of government appears disconnected
from every other. Modern medicine denies
links between body organs and systems; between mind, body, and social experience.
Similarly,
technological society is structured "top-down," its fragmented nature keeping most of us from ever
grasping an understanding of the
whole. The Manhattan Project that built the bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
was constructed according to a
mechanistic military model. The project included 37 installations,[ix]
each providing one fragment of the
production process. At Los Alamos National Laboratory work was
purposefully accomplished with a compartmentalization of tasks and a censuring
of communication between scientists that enabled them to engage in activities the consequence of which could neither
be felt nor understood.
The
upshot of such an approach to life is that feelings, knowings, and perceptions
are disconnected from each other, and the unconscious mind becomes the receptor
of repressed feelings. As a result, many
of us tend to reside in a semi-conscious state: the hideous and subterranean
violations around us catalyze our feelings, but unacknowledged by the mechanistic world, we act them out in
behaviors we neither feel nor understand.
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] Terry
Kellogg, “Broken Toys, Broken Dreams,” Santa
Fe , NM
[ii] Glendinning,
When Technology Wounds, p. 66.
[iii] Morton
Mintz, At Any Cost: Corporate Greed,
Women and the Dalkon Shield. New
York
[iv] Paul
Brodeur, Outrageous Misconduct: The
Asbestos Industry on Trial. New
York
[v] Winner, Autonomous Technology, p. 20.
[vi] Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred, Chapter 7.
[vii] Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of
Television, p. 44
[viii] Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred, p. 179.
[ix] Richard
Hewlett and Oscar Anderson, Jr., The New
World, 1939-1946: A History of the Atomic Energy Commission. University Park PA : University of Pennsylvania
[x] Adapted
from Chellis Glendinning, “The Conversation We Haven’t Had; Trauma, Technology,
and the Wild” in Michael Shuman and Julia Sweig, eds., Technology for the Common Good.
Washington D.C.
