The Morality of Scientific Technology
Goodman, Paul
It is becoming common among philosophers to treat the progress of science and the proliferating system of technology as the now determining cause of history, autonomous and underlying like the...
...Behavior no longer springs from animal humors, the personal conflict of passion and reason, or the politics of groups, but from the decision of the giant intellectual spirit...
...Instead, on the basis of puerile theories the programmers compute hard-nosed facts—"hard" facts are those with numbers attached — and bull through solutions to which human beings with the flexibility and fortitude that, God bless them, they have, adjust as best they can...
...5. Mass Education in Science Much could be accomplished also by a different kind of mass education in science...
...In their hearts, I am sure, many scientists still belong to the ancient band—just as many academics still vote with Abelard...
...This sounds like chaos and modern life pretty nearly is...
...Does "replicable" mean "replicable by those cleared by the FBI...
...42 For Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, however, the new knowledge and technique constitute no less than a leap forward in organic evolution, transcending humanity as we have known it...
...he would say they are, like his own complaints, "the work of some miserable intellectual who balks at technical progress...
...Facilities are improved, but during the transition everybody is inconvenienced, and by the time the facility is completed it may be obsolescent...
...yet it is revolutionary and beyond our present political means...
...Whatever men wish, the independent development of scientific technology will shape the future...
...But therefore these groups had a strong ethical code, to permit only white magic, and prescribing Christian virtue as the priceless ingredient of the Philosopher's Stone...
...It is one of the few things that make it worthwhile to be human...
...we might ease the entry of small enterprises and new regions into the economy...
...Sometimes a great scientist talks the old 'language...
...Its inquiries may not lead to anything useful...
...Make a historical contrast...
...The ultimate of irresponsibility is that the engineer is not allowed to know what he is making, and we have had this too...
...and Americans would not be spending six hours a day watching television and learning new habits of perception...
...A secondary but important origin, in the natural experiments of Medieval and Renaissance alchemists and magicians, and perhaps physicians, provided no such check...
...At present, there is some effort to teach the excitement and beauty of science and natural truth, and to get great men to give the TV lessons...
...Theorists of anarchism point to the sublime progress of modern science as a triumph of almost perfect coordination without top-down management...
...How do these new multitudes of scientists take themselves...
...The popular feeling about it contains both superstitious reverence and superstitious fear, and the current mass-education in science, we shall see, does not allay these...
...Another valuable consideration is to check competition in technology when an enterprise reaches a size and expense that makes it a natural monopoly that should be regulated in the public interest or nationalized...
...The rationalization is ready to hand...
...4. Prudential Criteria Let me suggest two kinds of remedies to restore morale to scientific technology...
...This is a peculiar position, and quite untraditional...
...But invariably, in its proliferation, its direction of development, and its intensification of effect, it has been in the employ of old familiar motives: profits, power, and the aggrandizement of persons or groups...
...Their image was rough and morose or moonstruck and bumbling...
...and a reasoned machine, like a steam engine or a generator, is a model of its theory, it is not an "application...
...not breeding out the taste and maturity of food for the convenience of processors and packagers...
...Marshall MacLuhan pursues the same theme less pessimistically...
...What good is it to pose questions of motive...
...they have still come from lonely (and often rejected) individuals, random amateur inventors, partnerships, tiny firms where the scientists, technicians, and craftsmen have a chance to talk to one another...
...but it is significant that utopian writers have stopped fantasizing in this direction...
...new apparatus make new theory...
...it was devised for cash-accounting, tax collection, military discipline, logistics, and , mass-manufacture...
...There is only one culture...
...in large areas it has created an artificial landscape and altered the balance of species...
...Nevertheless, in my opinion, a lot would be accomplished if technicians would take the lead and insist on acting like professionals...
...The rigidity, timidity, shortsighted greed, propensity to take the image for the reality that beset big business organizations in communications, education, and government, beset them also in technical innovation...
...I agree with the current wisdom that in a world pervaded with scientific technology, a great part of the curriculum must be scientific...
...Their claim to freedom of inquiry was grounded not in a formal distinction about role but in a civil conflict about content...
...They tend to omit from the equations factors that are unknown or stubbornly existing but excessively complicated, like individual differences, history, anomie, esthetics, the changeableness of policy...
...It is hard to know whether the corporate style of research is really the best one, for it tends to be self-proving...
...Actual experiments, in city planning, welfare, education, and foreign policy, have not been promising...
...By definition, anything radically new must seem far-fetched except to its innovator...
...I do not see the autonomy...
...It is the same with the development of communications...
...If management is not concerned with these either, a technician must often lend his wits to ludicrous contradictions...
...As the engineers design, we move, or sometimes can't move...
...but it is also, I am afraid, a self-deception and a hoax on the public...
...I do not...
...and natural philosophers have always put their wits to work for industry, war, and medicine...
...it would be odd if they had...
...The marvels of fable, like flying through the air and seeing at a distance, have not proved so beautiful in reality...
...And the populist and libertarian counterforces are to him whistling in the dark...
...how are they in the world...
...With regard to one area of science, however, it is essential that citizens do learn to judge the substantive issues...
...One is puzzled as to what restricted "scientific" information can mean...
...A few years ago, C. P. Snow created a stir by speaking of the chasm between "two cultures," that of the scientists and that of the humanists...
...His work was suffused with himself--and it is my Wordsworthian bias that scientists and artists, formed by their disinterested conversation with meaning, are usually good people...
...I do not see any way for the average citizen to be able to judge the substantive issues relevant to the vast sums for research and development, medicine, space exploration, and technical training...
...He means that a few motions of human labor and brains are selected and used mechanically, and the rest must be deleted as an interference...
...Copyright © 1967 by Paul Goodman...
...It looks like an attempt, on the part of the scientists, to affirm their identity and protect themselves against officious interference by managers...
...If brainy people agree to operate in this manner, they are not operating in some other manner and we do not know what they would be producing...
...But I doubt that an older-style scientist paid attention to what he considered indifferent...
...Also, technology is grounded in the human principle that you must give a workman the best tool, otherwise he is degraded...
...But the official position is quite otherwise...
...The duty of publication to allow replication became part of the definition of science...
...it has gotten off the planet and may destroy a good part of life on the planet...
...Corporations mark up prices 1000 per cent in order, they say, to pay for basic research, but most of the research is to bypass other firms' patents...
...The theories are thus confirmed...
...The problem here is not the training but the availability of the jobs...
...But even with the Industrial Revolution and the capitalization of machinery finally for cash profits rather than any other purpose, the market itself provided a check on the cheapness of the process and the utility of the products, although of course the whole system was notoriously careless of social costs and remote effects like enclosure, slums, air pollution, slag heaps, and the exhaustion of resources...
...We can legislate, and exact penalties for hazard, dishonest claims, and malpractice, but not for slovenliness, childish gluttony, callousness about the community, and indecency...
...Technique exists because it is technique...
...Yet the gross history of the past hundred years does not reveal this phenomenon...
...During the heroic age of modern science, say from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, natural philosophers believed, uncritically and perhaps naively, that they directly confronted the nature of things in a kind of dialogue with Nature with a capital N. Each man was solitarily engaged in this open dialogue which might lead in any direction and hopefully be surprising...
...Scientific thinking must be able to be parcelled out for efficient division of labor, and discoveries must occur on schedule: basic research, application, development, shaping up for production...
...As part of social studies, a major subject should be the economics, politics, and organization of science and technology...
...If they were organized in their own terms, science and technology would be very differently organized...
...it is the system of ideas that everybody—including myself—believes, whether or not one knows anything about it...
...Corporations become impresarios for scien 47 tists...
...In an essay on "Applied Science" in Utopian Essays, I listed the following criteria: Utility, Efficiency, Comprehensibility, Repairability, Flexibility, Amenity, Relevance, Modesty...
...How odd it is that today this obvious proposal has an odd ring...
...It makes little difference, he says, what message or entertainment is broadcast on television, or whether the airways are a free forum or are regimented monopolies, for the effect on human nature has already occurred because of the electronics medium itself...
...Of nearly $20 billion marked for Research and Development, more than 90 per cent is actually devoted to last-stage designing of hardware for production...
...not building obsolesence into expensive machines as if they were children's toys...
...Committees must be able to evaluate "projects...
...Essentially, we now inhabit the NoOsphere, the world-wide network of exchange of scientific information...
...The chief use of drugs that influence behavior will be to paralyze an enemy's will to resist...
...For this, it is worse than useless for the average student to learn answers for the College Board examinations...
...When a study is pursued as indifferently scientific, however, it is likely that extrinsic purposes will dictate the direction that is taken...
...New opportunities do not make time available to enjoy them, and the chance for choice works out as superficial acquaintance and confusion...
...Yet it is likely that most of those who are scientifically gifted will follow their bent anyway, quicker than they can in standard courses...
...The machine is applied, not the theory...
...food is processed to take out the nourishment...
...What is striking is that the doctrine of pure science and its moral neutrality always comes to the fore when scientists are assigned an official status and become salaried or subsidized, as in the German universities in the nineteenth century or in America today...
...Let me make myself clear once again...
...What is "ap 44 plied" science...
...this confirmed their solidarity as a rebellious band...
...And it is not the case, as is claimed, that in a high technology average workmen need extensive scientific schooling...
...They were not morally neutral, nor was Nature morally neutral...
...Scientific technology has become isolated by becoming subject to the empty system of power: excluding, expanding, controlling...
...make it human...
...The Manhattan Project was the watershed...
...Rather than banded individuals, scientists have become an organized priesthood, and their system has become the major orthodoxy of modern society...
...there is a dramatic reversal in the opinion polls...
...Lasers will be death rays...
...Contrariwise, any natural discovery is bound to be tried out...
...There is no point in making value judgments, and Professor MacLuhan claims, at least in his delightful lectures, that he is morally neutral...
...this is laudable...
...We really do not know how to educate for creative genius...
...It is not that our society has become scientific, but that to be a "scientist" has become one of the exploitable roles...
...Cities spread so far that one can't get out of them...
...There must be profiles of gifted persons to support, and there must be university courses relevant to training others...
...The first is to judge technology directly in terms of the moral criteria appropriate to it as a branch of practical philosophy...
...The remedy is for scientists and technicians to reassert their own proper principles, and for ordinary people to stop being superstitious and to reassert their own control over their environment...
...And with this, as Horace Gray of the University of Illinois points out, freedom of access to knowledge must be extended by limiting monopoly patents...
...This was the scientific program of classical progressive education fifty years ago, to make critical and self-reliant users in an industrial society, to restore the sense of causal control of things rather than feeling powerless among things...
...But the chief purpose of most recent curriculum reform seems to me to be wrongheaded: it is to process Ph.D.'s or even to educate creative scientists...
...By amenity I mean concern for the whole range of feelings, not trivia like getting rid of billboards but the frayed nerves of traffic congestion, the destruction of cities by freeways, the chewing up of landscape for quick profits and transient convenience...
...Business machines are installed and there is no longer any person from whom to get information or service for one's particular case...
...in general, he said, there is more new information in a good poem than in a scientific report, because there is more improvization on the basic code...
...There is now less use for individual genius and hunch, nor for a personal ethical choice of a field of search as peculiarly fascinating, congenial, or "good...
...not disregarding thrift merely for convenience of administration—for instance, radical decentralization would often save on costs, as well as giving more control to those who do the work...
...By-passing the method of hypothesis, analysis, deduction, and crucial experiment, the scientific style of nearly 400 years, we have amazingly come back full circle to the bureaucratic system of Bacon's Novum Organum...
...Anthropology is for counterinsurgency in primitive countries...
...There should be heavy emphasis on becoming at home in the actual technology, making model, machines and learning to repair intelligently the usual standard machines...
...These matters are too important to be delegated to experts...
...Science, the dialogue with the unknown, is itself one of the humanities...
...50 The fact remains that countries with a fifth or a tenth of our available technology have a way of life that is as good or better...
...Old-fashioned moralists hanker after a "natural ethics" or a "scientific way of life...
...People submit to inhuman routine out of fear and helplessness...
...In more drastic versions of the theory, technology has already changed man into a product of itself or a technical function in its own system...
...And even the benevolent dolphins are to be trained as kamikaze submarines...
...Then there will be communication again...
...weapons are stockpiled that only a maniac would use...
...At present there is a waste of scientists' time and brains, and engineers are not allowed to decide like real professionals...
...Fast trips are made possible by jet, but they prove to chop up our lives, to involve longer trips to airports and more waiting in terminals, so we have less free time...
...But since all were engaged in a common enterprise on the frontier of knowledge, they eagerly communicated with one another, in academies, by publication, depositing theses in university libraries, and by-enormous correspondence by letter...
...Political Economy did not devote itself to these matters but to the Gross National Product measured in cash...
...Ralph Nader is going across the country preaching this to the engineers...
...Yet I would not bother to make these academic remarks—which are partly matters of definition and largely depend on what one pays atten 43 tion to—except that the present submissive state of scientific technology is a sad betrayal of the promise of independent scientific technology dreamed of by Thomas Huxley, Kropotkin, Veblen, John Dewey, Buckminster Fuller...
...Then the public becomes resigned...
...By flexibility we might stave off the increasingly frequent disasters that occur when interlocking sys 51 tems of technology break down as a whole because of stoppage in a part...
...It is to this system that scientists are dedicated and which they serve with a special method ,prac 46 ticed with considerable formal scrupulosity, so that it sometimes seems to be the correct method rather than the content that constitutes scientific truth...
...And I have heard the pathetic contrary position, a fine physicist at Caltech saying he feels guilty about taking the federal money, because they are not going to get what they expect...
...Despite the disruption sometimes involved, for instance in automation, most people are not Luddite and do not oppose technological advance...
...We complain not because we balk at technical progress but because we are disappointed in it...
...Common people would follow their lead and find political means...
...Useful findings are "applied" and become part of the system of technology...
...Apart from these basic principles, however, the meaning of both science and technology has changed radically in the past fifty years...
...Human scale may be quite disregarded, the time and energy that people actually have, the space they need to move in, and the rhythm or randomness with which they best operate...
...Apart from honestly trying to make his detail work, he is not entitled to criticize the program itself, in terms of its efficiency, common sense, beauty, effect on the community, or human scale...
...And the control of the systems of technology, and of the systems of systems, is lodged in managers who finally are not interested in efficiency, not to speak of prudence...
...This is computing costs and benefits...
...At present as public policy—if only to increase the general cultivation—I would 48 decentralize subsidies for science as widely as possible rather than, as we do, letting the money go to a few managers...
...The student ought instead to be scrupulously reporting what happened in his laboratory, why his experiment did not "work out"—of course, it has worked out some way or other...
...The time of the vast 52 majority who are not going on to scientific careers is wasted...
...By relevance I mean concern for human scale, the time, size, energy, need for space of actual people, rather than calculating efficiency in abstract units of time, space, and energy...
...It is taken for granted that amazing new developments will, if possible, at once be sequestered for military use and sometimes be made secret...
...Such a moral program is, I say, obvious...
...He holds that the technical style of communications alters the nature of human perception and thought...
...Unfortunately this is not a caricature...
...With enough capital, one can mount a crash program and break through...
...This turns the whole thing into an abstraction or a hoax...
...I am not opposed to heavy subsidies for science...
...I do...
...Norbert Wiener used to point out that repetition of communication just increases the noise...
...And the various technologies increasingly interlock and depend on one another in a vast and recondite system, so that it has become fantastically difficult even for experts to decide what is by and large useful, cheap, or even safe...
...Scientific brains from other countries are bought up to work in the American style on American problems, seriously depoverishing their own peoples and precluding the development of various schools of thought...
...The great advantages, on balance, that came from universalizing basic conveniences or necessities, like electricity or water supply, do not necessarily occur when massifying comforts and luxuries...
...The issue is not, let me make,clear, whether the field is benevolent or useful, for it has often been the hallmark of scientific genius to research the senseless, the apparently trivial, the pathological...
...On the contrary, it can be shown that the organization of recent scientific technology has, by and large, moved away from the traditional research autonomy of science and the principle of efficiency of technology, and under political, military, and economic control...
...by it one became honored as the first...
...A large part of the training of scientists in the universities is toward rather narrow technological expertness...
...To Jacques Ellul, for instance, the American "empty society" can be more simply defined as an inevitable result of our high technology where, in his words, "work implies an absence of man, whereas previously it implied a presence...
...In principle, the discipline of Political Economy was, and is, supposed to regulate costs and benefits so as to guarantee the general good...
...It certainly applies to the crazy competition in exploring space...
...and technology, practical efficiency, is a part of moral philosophy...
...By comprehensibility of design and concern for repairability we might alleviate the growing ineptitude of users and their bondage to repair-men and corporation service-stations...
...Scientific technology has certainly effected with its products, processes, and method most human beings and nearly every human function...
...At present, I think, this applies especially to automating, where it is absurd to duplicate immense concentrations of tools—though it might be wise radically to decentralize the programming...
...Nature was wonderful or horrible or fascinating...
...but especially since the Renaissance, natural philosophers would not have made a big deal of such a distinction...
...The question is for what purpose and how...
...but there is a problem here that we have no right to disregard as we do...
...During the heroic period, science was not the social orthodoxy...
...But, like art, perhaps science is hard to buy directly...
...In this discipline, the use and extent of technology are subject to prudence, including safety, caution because of the possibility of unforeseen disadvantages, forethought to prevent over-commitment, and concern for the shape and function of the whole...
...The interlocking of systems of technology without the direct check of personal acquaintance and use and political prudence creates a series of booby traps...
...the country is deserted, so it is inefficient to provide means to get to it Immense printing presses and other means of communication are devised, but to warrant such an investment of capital requires a mass audience, and it becomes hard to publish a serious book or transmit a serious message...
...It is endlessly amazing how people spring back to life and good instincts if they see a glimmer of hope...
...The moral advantages, of enriched opportunity, are largely delusory...
...And such routine is not of the essence of scientific technology...
...There has been a re-definition...
...Entirely neglected in the present curriculum, however, is what science is, as a way of being in the world...
...Grant-getters, who are clever about the forms, become scientists...
...or convenience, health, excitement, and curiosity...
...Then it is dismaying to hear dedicated scientists explain that they 45 are allowed perfect freedom to do restricted-publication research, and that any theoretical problem is indifferently good for the progress of science...
...no price can be set on it...
...Cars are designed to go faster than it is safe to drive...
...Jacques Ellul is mistaken about us miserable intellectuals...
...By efficiency, I mean especially not over-riding the competence of technicians for the demands of the system...
...These are now science par excellence...
...their difficulties and errors lead to new questions...
...This is human ecology, combining physical science, physical and mental hygiene, sociology, and political economy, to analyze problems of urbanism, transportation, pollution, degenerative disease, mental disease, pesticides, indiscriminate use of antibiotics and other powerful drugs, and so forth...
...Historically, the main origin of technology, in the work of craftsmen, miners, navigators, etc., provided a ready check on utility, efficiency, costs, and unforeseen effect...
...Then, if our electronics media, and printing media, were doing their job, there would be less brainwashing and less gabble altogether...
...It is becoming common among philosophers to treat the progress of science and the proliferating system of technology as the now determining cause of history, autonomous and underlying like the Marxist "relations of production," but narrower than that, less dependent on human choice...
...The adventure of space will end in orbiting missile sites...
...Yet there is a curious body of evidence compiled by the Anti-Trust Committee of the United States Senate that shows rather overwhelmingly that in recent decades, even in practical Research and Development, the majority of significant advances have not come from big corporations and big universities and have not been sponsored by foundations and government...
...I am bemused at the nature of the love given or received, as either eros or agape, by what seem to be information-retrieval computers, but no doubt I fail to understand...
...the archetypal story is The Sorcerer's Apprentice...
...The controlling social organization, to which I would attribute independent influence, is to Ellul nothing but a function of technology itself, which in its essence standardizes, swallows up every case, and controls...
...They are not in business for technical or citizenly reasons...
...A scientist becomes personnel, pursuing the goals of the organization...
...The check of the market has been weakened by subsidies, cost-plus contracts, monopolies, price-fixing, advertising, and the ignorance of consumers...
...As a pious Christian, Teilhard de Chardin is enthusiastic about our new state of being, which is imbued with divine love...
...and probably the scientific technologists have be 53 trayed it most...
...Perhaps the best we can do is to provide a decent society in which people can be themselves and children can grow up with their lively curiosity not too stultified...
...By and large, however, laymen are convinced that the progress of science will increase human happiness...
...housing is expertly engineered to destroy neighborhoods...
...but it would be helpful if he understood the interests and politics involved...
...3. The Morality of Technology The morality of technology has also suffered a sea-change...
...To give a random sample in major areas: big organizations were not involved in either the basic inventions or the innovating models of xerography, automatic transmission and power steering, guided missiles, continuous mix baking, shrink-proofing of knit goods, oxygen conversion and continuous casting in steel, tranquilizers and antibiotics...
...A technician is hired to execute a detail of a program handed down to him...
...One would expect this to be still more so in pure science...
...I do not mean by this argument that we ought to cut back our technology, for human beings are bound to try out everything...
...The simplest explanation of the proposition that "there are more scientists alive today than existed up to now" is that business-as-usual has coopted science...
...It is hard to credit that this kind of science is disinterested, and that promoters are not using the prestige of science as a talking-point...
...its advice was, and is, how to maximize technological growth to increase the abstract number of goods and services, whatever their quality or mutual contradictions...
...For instance, its austerity and honesty...
...Modern science requires big capital and big organization: take cyclotrons, moon shots, statistical surveys, universal information-retrieval...
...Since we live in times dominated by scientific technology, he castigated the humanists especially for not knowing the other language...
...But this style was not devised for open dialogue with surprise...
...This essay was one of the Massey Lectures prepared for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and will be published by Random House, Inc., in Like a Conquered Province, in spring, 1967...
...do not over-commitl take it easy...
...Every theory involves operations and apparatus...
...a model is built if only as a toy...
...Science is no longer a dialogue with Nature but a system of expanding knowledge that is self-generating and self-correcting, something like Hegel's progressive Absolute Idea...
...Science is autonomous, because knowledge must be pursued for its own sake as part of the human adventure...
...she was surely beyond ordinary human uses, but abounding in moral as well as practical lessons for human betterment...
...I think he is privately more disturbed...
...Despite the risks involved, for instance in nuclear physics, most people honor this claim...
...They were not getting any grants...
...The shift of emphasis from an open dialogue of morose or bumbling men with surprising Nature to an elite service to a progressive selfcorrecting system of knowledge has been accompanied by immense changes in the social organization of science, the role of the scientist, and the personal engagement of the man in the role...
...No one at all can trace the remote effects...
...To be serviceable, excellent scientists become administrators...
...Then, though wise and impartial, the computer cannot give its best advice, which might often be: Not safe...
...on the contrary, a few weeks to a year on the job, rather than years of lessons, is still the best way to train adequate lowlevel technicians...
...They thought of science as humble, brave, and austere, and of technology as circumspect, neat, and serviceable...
...By modesty I mean not looming larger than a function warrants...
...In the past both science and technology progressed better without such rituals, and they would do so now...
...The point of this lecture has been that Sir Charles posed the issue wrongly...
...In fact, of course, science and technology have rarely gone separate ways...
...In America at present the great bulk of the billions of dollars for science is for research on extrinsically chosen problems, or even on particular products...
...More fatefully, as a great successful institution, the system of knowledge has become interlocked with the other great institutions of society, and the dominant style takes over...
...Working by its own morale, scientific technology should by now have simplified life rather than complicated it, emptied the environment rather than cluttered it, and educated an inventive and skillful generation rather than a conformist and inept one...
...and the method is to teach the latest findings...
...Agriculture, domestication of animals, measurement, building, machinery, navigation, transportation, communication, politics, war, pedagogy, medicine, all abound in controlled experiments that invite observation and testing...
...Indeed, a disproportionate number of the natural philosophers were exploring forbidden territory and publishing defiantly...
...Yet it must somehow be appropriate to science too...
...It is reasonable to make the Aristotelian distinction between science as an act of wonder, disinterested curiosity, and esthetic construction, and technique as empirical rules of thumb for efficient practice...
...2. The Morality of Science Since I intend to complain about the present morale of scientific technology, let me first make clear what I do not complain of...
...caution about hasty commitment and over-commitment which by now have given us several generations of slums of engineering and piles of junk...
...49 There ceases to be a morality of technique at all...
...Here, then, are three strong minds who see essentially the same phenomenon, the system of scientific technology brooding freely and determining the future, though they evaluate it differently as horrible, neutral, or blessed...
...In the end, unless a hypothesis involves big cash, its author cannot afford to pursue it, though he used to love it...
...The Black Magician, like our Mad Scientist, was a villain for popular tragedy...
...It is not hard to fantasize a use of our high technology that would be neat, uncomplicated, rich, and educative...
...By utility I mean, for instance, not pushing brand-name variety that makes no practical difference, whether in cars or drugs...
...Finally, the moral and ritual drives to standardization, rationalization, control, and self-control—what Max Weber called the Protestant Ethic—have, in my opinion, been more intensified by new psychological obsessions to ward off insecurity, and compulsions to identify with power, than by technical routine...
...The often repeated statement that there are more scientists now alive than existed in all previous time ought to put us on the alert...
...Inevitably there is pressure for pay-off rather than the wandering dialogue with surprise...
...The present orthodox philosophy of scientific technology is that there is something called pure science or basic research which is morally neutral (except for the drive toward knowledge...
...Apart from the cure of infectious diseases, some public services, and some household and farm equipment, there have been few recent advances in technique that have not proved to be a mixed bag in actual convenience...
...There is a new technological instrument of Political Economy that, ideally, could follow up some of the bewildering remote effects of innovation and detect the contradictions before they occur...
...The history has been different...
...But it would have to be used authentically, focusing on what happens to people rather than on the convenience of the programmer or the aggrandizement of his system...
Vol. 14 • January 1967 • No. 1
