REBUTTING THE ANTI-TECHNOLOGISTS
Sisk, John P.
BOOKS REBUTTING THE ANTI-TECHNOLOGISTS The Existential Pleasures of Engineering SAMUEL C. FLORMAN St. Martin's Press, $7.95 Samuel C. Florman's book, like so many others written during the past...
...He faults his fellow engineers along with the antitechnologists for their "failure to recognize that life is complex...
...His own vision is ironic...
...economically, it was the discovery, or rediscovery, of scarcity lurking behind the mask of affluence...
...Florman, the present Dark Age, in which the engineer has become a favorite whipping boy for many of the discontents of civilization, dates from President Truman's announcement early in 1950 that work was about to begin on the hydrogen JOHN P. SISK bomb...
...indeed, to judge from the recent past, they are all too likely to produce books that quickly embarrass many of their early enthusiasts...
...Florman is aware that the disenchantment with the engineer has to be understood in relation to the historical causes of larger disenchantments, but he chooses not to push very far back into the past, and is not much concerned with the theological and religious dimensions of his subject...
...Therefore he recommends that the engineer study the liberal arts: they will "rob him of his innocence, stain his character, make him less 'moral'-or, at least, less naive...
...Thomas Sieger Derr assesses White's argument in a World-view essay (January, 1975) and finds it "deeply tinged with elitist, antidemocratic values" and all too easily available to "romantic technology-haters ready to abandon centuries of civilization...
...Martin's Press, $7.95 Samuel C. Florman's book, like so many others written during the past ten or fifteen years, is a reassessment after a traumatic event prior to which it was inconceivable and after which it, or something like it, seemed inevitable...
...This charge, especially as it appears in Lynn White Jr.'s 1967 essay "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," has put a powerful weapon in the hands of Florman's adversaries...
...there will be no Utopias...
...He is therefore in no position to confront the assertion that Christianity itself must bear much of the responsibility for runaway technology and the ecological crisis...
...More importantly, he is in a position to see the elitist and conservative spirit that associates so easily with the fear of technology: that hankering after a unanimous, harmonious and basically pastoral state of affairs that makes it so easy to overlook the inseparability of problem-solving and problem-creating...
...For Mr...
...culturally, it was the psychedelic revolution and the assertion of the counter-culture...
...Witness the fate of Charles A. Reich's The Greening of America and Richard Neville's Play Power...
...Thus he is able to enlist in his cause such figures as Homer, Goethe, Whitman, Henry Adams, Peter Viereck, Arthur Koestler, William Golding and Antoine de St...
...Florman has taken on the near-Herculean task of explaining not simply how Golden Age became Dark Age but of persuading his readers that the engineer's current bad reputation "is based on a misapprehension of the engineer's experience...
...human beings are too varied, too fickle, and too willful...
...His own two-culture background (he is a Dartmouth engineer with a master's degree in English literature from Columbia) gives him an almost unfair advantage over adversaries who belong in a class that remains in great part just as one-cultured as Alfred North Whitehead said it was fifty years ago...
...All about us the sense of disenchantment with technology appears to be growing...
...In the church the event was Vatican II: nationally, it was the Vietnam war...
...Such watershed points in time do not necessarily result in books as good as Mr...
...Derr's essay needs to be read as an appendix to Florman's book, if for no other reason than to claim territory for it that might otherwise have to be abandoned to the enemy...
...We cannot-should not- pretend that it has not happened, or that a hundred space spectaculars can restore things to what they were...
...But there can be no denying that, with the coming of the environmental crisis, our relationship to society has changed...
...Mr...
...I suspect that it is the mix of engineer and literary intellectual in Florman that protects him from the literary man's tendency to be beguiled by visions of harmony...
...Florman must pick up where C. P. Snow left off and do battle once again with an adversary convinced-as Noel Aman has recently remarked of the Oxford wits and the Bloomsbury group, but which with a few modifications might be said of American literary intellectuals as well -"that the career of moneymaking, industry, business, profits, or efficiency is a despicable life in which no sane and enlightened person should be engaged...
...Considered en masse, this opposition, as has become clear enough in the past decade, is formidable indeed...
...Exupery who might be assumed to be in the other camp...
...hence a technological optimist like Buckminster Fuller is no more acceptable to him than a pessimist like Ellul...
...Thus he is able to write knowledgeably, even passionately, of the esthetic pleasures of engineering without forgetting that "the joy of engrossment in the mechanical, like all the existential pleasures of life, has the possibility of becoming a destructive obsession...
...Prior to this moment engineers had for more than a century enjoyed a Golden Age of technical accomplishment and unquestioned prestige...
...Sometimes it is easy to forget what has happened, since we engineers are all busy, our successes are many, and the majority of the people still seem to treat us as pretty respectable citizens...
...Man must be accepted as he is...
...The Existential Pleasures of Engineering To do this he must take on a familiar group of antitechnologists: Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Mar-cuse, Theodore Roszak, Rene Dubos, Charles A. Reich and John McDermott-to say nothing of a legion of recalcitrant counter-culturists, disillusioned Marxists and impassioned ecol-ogists, for whom to be against technology is to be on the side of the best of all angels...
...No one who is interested in the engineering profession-least of all those of us who are engineers-can ignore the fall of the engineer from the dizzying heights he once occupied...
...Florman's rebuttal of the anti-technologists is the strongest part of his book...
...Roszak with bis "visionary commonwealth" ig-nore's man's irrationality no less than Golden Age engineering philosophers have ignored it in the past...
Vol. 103 • July 1976 • No. 15
