Technology and Justice:
Cameron, J M
WRESTLING WITH MODERNITY TECHNOLOGY AND JUSTICE George Parkin Grant University of Notre Dame, $8.95, 135 pp. J. M. Cameron All George Grant's work has an unfashionable presupposition: that...
...The criteria for deciding who is to live, and under what conditions persisting life is to be allowed, are no longer racial...
...There is her extraordinary enmity to the Old Testament, an almost Mar-cionite hatred of it (she once asked Père Perrin if it would be possible for the church to take a sunnier view of Mar-cion...
...It is taken for granted in Western society that sexual activity is inescapable for all normal people...
...For Plato (and Aristotle-Grant follows Simone Weil in strangely excluding Aristotle from the canon), justice and the good were primary realities about which men are bound to inquire...
...When one compares the education of Queen Elizabeth the First, or of Gladstone, with that given to nearly all modern rulers, one may come to understand why they were such masters of what Plato called the highest art...
...This is how Grant reads the fundamental tendencies of our society...
...Even one who finds Aristotle shocking in this matter must surely find him a liberal if he is compared to the author of The Laws...
...There is something very strange about Simone Weil...
...We are now seeing in the liberal societies of the West the fulfillment of the dreams of National Socialism...
...Then, there is her venomous attack on Aristotle for his defense of slavery...
...A sad confirmatory account of technological society's grappling with a problem is the present response to the AIDS crisis...
...It was this, so Thibon believed, that kept her out of the church, with its insistence on the unity of the two covenants...
...In his essay "Faith and the Multiversity," Grant illustrates the predicaments in which the elites of our society find themselves...
...J. M. Cameron All George Grant's work has an unfashionable presupposition: that whatever we may think about this or that political problem there are lying behind our thinking theological or metaphysical issues about which little can be communicated directly but with which we must wrestle if we are to say anything worth heeding...
...Here the greatest influence upon him has been the work of Simone Weil...
...research in the humanities...
...Everyone knows that the response of our society has not been to commend continence and chastity but rather to explain that those at risk - and everyone who leads a life of sexual activity with several partners is at risk - that they should go in for (comparatively) safe sex,- oral, anal, or otherwise, using condoms...
...What counts, for us, as a solution to a social problem, has to have a technological form for it to have any plausibility...
...that continence outside marriage is an impossible ideal - indeed, not an ideal at all - and that fidelity within marriage is too hard for most people, and may, in any case, be tedious and psychologically undesirable...
...And there are other heartening instances...
...And behind Weil there is Plato...
...What this reviewer would like from him (I am sure I speak for many) is a critical account of his relation to his authorities, above all to Simone Weil and to Plato seen much as she sees him...
...Grant is strong in description but weak in analysis...
...Grant is strong in description but weak in analysis...
...The boom in the manufacture of condoms is so great that it wouldn't be surprising if their entrepreneurs were to donate a proportion of their profits to the arming of the contras...
...and flavors...
...Technology and Justice is a collection of essays on themes that interest Grant: the nature of modern technology and the forms of thought it nourishes and shapes...
...These valuable essays do not exhibit the full range of his talents...
...conviction that our society, that of the opulent West, is in a very bad way, intellectually confused, morally blind, and bent on self-destruction...
...and Grant's Christianity is very much that of a Platonist...
...Even one who finds Aristotle shocking in this matter must surely find him a liberal if he is compared to the author of The Laws.hor of The Laws...
...It was this, so Thibon believed, that kept her out of the church, with its insistence on the unity of the two covenants...
...Among the young, the cultivation of habit was considered central...
...Then, there is her venomous attack on Aristotle for his defense of slavery...
...The early practice of fulfilling some small segment of justice was necessary to the overcoming of self-assertion among the young...
...In his treatment of all these questions, Grant betrays his...
...they are settled by educational and medical elites...
...So if you want a red-white-and-blue condom (such were to be had in 1976 and the machines that marketed them in washrooms bore the slogan "Have a bang for Old Glory") with ribbing and a cherry flavor I dare say this could be had...
...We stumble into Nietzschean policies without having the Nietzschean clarity about what they amount to...
...We get the impression that while there is a duty to speak out against the horrors, actual and impending, our society is so trapped within certain intellectual categories that it is hard to explain to liberals and "progressive" persons in general just what the objections to current policies are...
...We have the idea that the instruments of technology"are neutral instruments in the sense that the morality of the goals for which they are used is determined outside them.'' That this is false is suggested by the irresistible-or almost so- impulse when faced with a problem thrown up by technology to look for a technological solution and to reject those approaches that seem to those reared in and by the technological society to be primitive or simple-minded...
...The boom in the manufacture of condoms is so great that it wouldn't be surprising if their entrepreneurs were to donate a proportion of their profits to the arming of the contras...
...It was necessary to understand justice within the whole scheme of the cosmos...
...So if you want a red-white-and-blue condom (such were to be had in 1976 and the machines that marketed them in washrooms bore the slogan "Have a bang for Old Glory") with ribbing and a cherry flavor I dare say this could be had...
...Justice was, in its origins, good habit...
...These forms of armor, as Boswell called them, are booming economically and are obtainable in a variety of sizes, colors, styles, and flavors...
...There is something very strange about Simone Weil...
...He recognizes that there is much that is admirable, much that is well-intentioned, in our society...
...The method of doubt is synonymous with rationality...
...For those likely to rule this was not sufficient...
...These valuable essays do not exhibit the full range of his talents...
...Our elites have been brought up within the tradition of Descartes, not of Plato...
...but the mode of thought within which the achievements of technology have been made falls into sophistry and hubris in a moment, with its chatter about "quality of life," "personhood," and the like...
...Talk about' 'the quality of life,'' "meaningful existence," and the rest is thought to be an expression of such benignity that it is senseless to criticize policies that invoke the language of "caring...
...Anything less than near-perfection in mind and body weakens a person's claim to life...
...abortion, and human rights...
...Of course, there are counter-examples, portents of what could turn out to be a counter-revolution...
...the multiversity...
...euthanasia...
...Questions about heterosexual activity were bound to be raised once it became evident that AIDS was not uniquely tied to homosexuals...
...We are not there yet, but he thinks this is the direction in which we are moving...
...The development of hospices for the dying, and the growth among many physicians of a strong belief that a man or woman has the right to know about his or her actual condition, are instances of a humane and, as it were, pre-technological solutions to a social problem...
...There is her extraordinary enmity to the Old Testament, an almost Mar-cionite hatred of it (she once asked Père Perrin if it would be possible for the church to take a sunnier view of Mar-cion...
...What this reviewer would like from him (I am sure I speak for many) is a critical account of his relation to his authorities, above all to Simone Weil and to Plato seen much as she sees him...
...and this inquiry could only be pursued with effect by those who were in their educational regimen subjected to a training in good habits...
...Nietzsche and ancient philosophy...
Vol. 115 • April 1988 • No. 8
