There is little doubt that the advance of technology, today, is problematic for us. We seem to create as many problems as we solve. And while we try to deal with the production of smog and the disposal of toxic wastes, among other things, we may wonder whether the "conveniences" that have produced these have really made us better people or happy. All of this makes us wonder what technology is. Can it be stopped, redirected, brought under control? Is technology merely a "tool" in our hands? Is the problem ours?
Ortega argued that technology is no simple tool but rather a trait of human character. Ortega suggested that technology is essential to being human and that it is the disposition that humans have to deliberately modify whatever environs them. These modifications are systematic; that is, humans modify the environment in order to solve problems. Of course, calling something a problem is already complex. It means that we take issue with the way things are, as given to us, and that we can imagine at least some other ways in which our environment might be.
In making these suggestions, Ortega makes constant reference to a contrast between humans and other animals, denying that other animals are technological. It is, for Ortega, a uniquely human trait. I suspect that Ortega is wrong about this in detail, yet the gross comparison fits. For instance, at the outset, both humans and coyotes hunt rabbits. But running down and killing rabbits is a problem for humans so they capture some rabbits alive, build enclosures for them, feed them and their offspring, and butcher them for food when they want. For coyotes running down rabbits and killing them doesn't seem to be a problem (at least they've done nothing about it) and they go on hunting as they always have.
Domesticating animals, as suggested in the example above, is a form of human technology. Thus, technology isn't simply a tool, though it may require making some things. Technology is a comprehensive solution to something that we have identified as a problem; hence, it involves a strategy, procedures, some initial activities, bringing resources together, and building some things. When the technological invention is complete, we wind up living differently; that is, technology represents a re-routing of life to avoid some problem.
The rabbit example is typical of human technology because it clearly creates other problems. We now have to feed the rabbits --- something that we did not have to do when we hunted them in the wild. Rabbit feces and urine now accumulate under their cages in close proximity to where we live --- again, something that did not happen when they lived in the wild. The rabbit meat may be much less tasty, depending upon the food that we provide them; and we may become less healthy since we are no longer getting the exercise that we used to get hunting rabbits in the field. Inevitably (and somewhat compulsively) we find technological solutions to all of these problems. Yet in so far as these solutions are typical of the phenomenon of technology they simply create new problems that demand new solutions.
It is really of little consequence whether technology is a uniquely human trait. What matters is that we understand this basic pattern of problem identification, solution, new problem identification, new solution, etc. Clearly, we see humans caught up in this cycle; I know of no other animals that are. What Ortega wants us to see is that part of the essence of technology is the impulse to challenge the way things are in what naturally environs us. To see something as a "problem" really means to imagine that a "solution" exists; that is, the whole phenomenon rests on a human disposition to change the environment, to alter the course of natural events as opposed to simply being a part of those events as they naturally and spontaneously unfold.
In the desert environment of the Great Basin it is extremely hot and dry through late spring, summer, and fall. Most of the precipitation occurs as snow in the winter and early spring. Thus, plants that have naturally adapted to this cycle sit dormant until early spring when water and warmth bring them to life; afterward, these plants dehydrate and re-seed the local terrain. It is the human will that requires a constant supply of fresh vegetables and sees this brief growing season as a problem; thus, humans build dams and reservoirs and irrigate fields where they grow plants that could never survive there on their own. But looking at this particular example introduces the fact that technologies differ among humans. Around 8000 years ago, human occupants of the Great Basin, who clearly did see this as a problem, adopted a technological solution that is now called the archaic lifeway. They adopted a strategy of annual movement. Having recognized that the local topography of the Great Basin provides a number of diverse microclimates at different elevations, they solved the problem by developing a timetable, arriving in each locality in time to harvest the resources available. The strategy, in other words, was to arrange to live in springtime in so far as one could by moving into higher-and-higher elevations, from late spring into early fall. When the people returned to their winter residencies in the lowlands in the late fall, they adopted a different strategy that emphasized hunting rabbits, antelope, and waterfowl, sustaining them through winter. The point is that this was an expression of technology and that it was a successful solution to their problems of food acquisition, lasting (with a few interesting modifications) until the 19th Century. But it is a very different kind of technology as compared with the Anglo-American plan of agriculture and ranching that moved into the Great Basin in the second half of the 19th Century. The latter quickly demolished the natural environment so that the technology of the Paiute and Shoshone, which was really an integral part of that environment, became unworkable.
When we look seriously at the history of human existence, what we see is that most humans have practiced a low-impact technology over a very long period of time --- more than 50,000 years for homo sapiens sapiens, longer if we consider our direct ancestors. Local adaptations beyond the archaic hunter-gatherer formula began as early as 10,000 years ago, in the Middle East, and were common in North America 4000 years ago. Sedentary agricultural life dominated Europe until the mid-18th Century and dominated the United States until the end of the 19th Century. (80% of the US population was still rural and agricultural in 1900.) The so-called Scientific Revolution began in the first half of the 17th Century; the Industrial Revolution began in the last half of the 18th Century; and the phenomenon of the Modern Industrial State became dominant in the middle of the 19th Century. In all, we are talking about 350 years at most, the huge irreversible changes have happened in less time. For instance, the Industrial Revolution paved the way for a huge increase in population; but there was no way that this population could survive on the land if forced out of the industrial cities back to agriculture. Agriculture and ranching themselves had already invaded the natural plant-and-animal environment so thoroughly that there was no retreat to an archaic hunter-gatherer existence, wherever these had taken root.
What concerned Ortega was the fact that human technology, in modern times, has taken us on a path of radical change and its progress into these changes has been so very rapid, in terms of previous history, that neither humans nor environment have had a chance to return to equilibrium. We are, in fact, pushing the natural factors that enter into that equilibrium so far and so fast that we haven't seen a state of equilibrium since we began. What we see before us is an environment that is in a situation of constant "recovery" and no one knows (really) what is going to happen to it since it is now so far out of equilibrium. Ironically, our own actions are pushing toward an "equilibrium" only by exterminating as many of the natural factors as possible. Thus, we are "stabilizing" the environment by constantly simplifying it --- reducing the populations of other species of plants and animals, defeating the natural tendency toward diversity.
At some point, not long ago, human technology in the North Atlantic modern industrial states went beyond the traditional pattern of simply changing the balance point in the natural environment; since then, human technologies in this region have orchestrated so many basic changes in the natural environment so rapidly that the whole is no longer an effective dynamic equilibrium but is, instead, a mass of unbalanced systems more strongly under the control and direction of humans than any other factor. (Incidentally, we ought to take note of the fact that many humans remain in the world today who do not express technology in the same ways that the North Atlantic community does.)
How did humans become so powerful? Ortega suggests that technology passed through several stages before arriving at its present stage of organization and power. Crucial among these changes, was the "institutionalization" of the craftsman role in which the single craftsman, who was designer and executor of the technical work, came to be replaced by a collection of specialists, thus separating the roles of financier, designer, executor, and market manager. The philosopher Martin Heidegger adds to this formula the fact that the mode of technology began to change in the mid-18th Century, especially with respect to sources of energy. In particular, we began to move from using sources of energy spontaneously, as served by nature, to appropriation of energy sources that could be stored, laid aside in reserve, so that we could use them at our will. (This is the basic difference that he sees between water- and wind-power and coal- and oil-power.) Electricity and the power generator are symbols of this new era of technology. For Heidegger, this transformation carried with it a fundamentally different relationship between humans and nature, including a very new way in which humans viewed nature. Now, everything around them was to be valued in terms of what it might be reserved for and ultimately put to use doing. Nature itself has no value; only humans place values on natural objects out of their own interests.
What has become of humans in the process of undertaking such radical and rapid change? It is naive in the extreme to believe that humans can do things like this and somehow remain unchanged themselves. Humans are, after all, natural creatures that reflect their environments and change. What Heidegger observes is that, the more humans have transformed the environment and determined to value it only in human terms, the more humans meet only themselves when they look outward into the universe. But this means, in a crucial sense, that nothing is left standing to oppose the human will and help define human needs or necessities. Humans are left alone in the universe to author the fate of all. This is a dilemma. As Ortega expresses it, "the more humans find that they can do, the less they know what to do." Everything is a problem because there is a solution for anything; yet nothing is left to direct us to what is most problematic so there are actually no longer any real problems to be solved. In our understanding of capitalist economics, today, all we really know is that the system has to keep moving or it will all come apart; it is a system that depends on constant change. So we find ourselves in the desperate situation that we have to keep on appropriating our environment and transforming it even though we can no longer answer what we are intending to do with it or why!
In summary, we have tried to answer the question What is the essence of technology? The basic answer to this question is that intelligent animals (humans being the principal examples) find aspects of their natural environment that are inconvenient or problematic. They solve these problems (or resolve these situations) by altering their relations with the environment. Sometimes this means changing elements of the environment itself, even creating new objects in it. Ortega notes three phases (levels) of technology; and all three of these can be directly observed in different contemporary human communities. Modern industrial societies exemplify the third of these phases of technological development in the institutionalization of technology --- a complex division of roles in which the design process has been distributed between people with quite diverse motives and points of view. One of the problems with this phase of technology is the fact that no single intelligent human being takes the holistic role of thinking through problem-and-solution in relation to human purposes. One of the other problems is that the progressive impact of technology on the natural environment has destroyed the natural equilibrium of diverse features. "Environment" is progressively a feature of human creation; and this, ironically, threatens the coherence of the whole technological process by placing humans in the odd position of defining themselves in an otherwise empty world.
In this essay, my intention is to summarize the issues that we have discussed since Spring Break, namely, technology and the environment. There is, perhaps, no other single topic that points more directly and dramatically at the singular character of our particular expression of technology. It is a form of technology, in human history, that takes a radically aggressive stance toward the natural world that environs us.
When Malthus advanced his hypothesis, in the late 18th Century, that human population was expanding geometrically and predicted that it would outstrip the world's food supply, the population explosion was really just beginning. When we examine a graph of world population over historic time, the truly dramatic ascent begins within the Industrial Revolution, 250 years ago. To this day, it still points ominously upward. Whether the world's human population will double in the next 30 years or the next 80 years is certainly debatable. But what is not debatable is that doubling will produce 10 billion people and twice the demands on the earth's "carrying capacity." Also, what is not debatable is that throughout 99+% of human history up to now human population expansion still occured within a framework of open territories in which the appropriation of new resources was possible. Few open territories remain today.
How could this come upon us so swiftly? That's the way with any kind of precipitous growth. Half the earth is used in one moment of time; things seem great. But a doubling of population afterwards can mean that the whole earth is used --- apparently all of a sudden!
Malthus, of course, has a bad name; he is treated like a pessimistic, haranguing crank. The population did not outstrip its food supply and it increased at an ever increasing rate. He did not foresee the enormous impact that the Industrial Revolution was about to have on the world. In particular, he did not foresee how many people could be sustained in huge urban empires, nor did he foresee the degree to which agriculture could become itself industrialized and more productive.
In the US, roughly 80% of the population lived in agrarian rural areas in 1900. In 1990, about 2% of the US population lived in rural areas. What is staggering about this figure is that roughly the same number of people continued to live in rural America! So the decline of 78% actually measures the increase in the real urban population. When we consider the incredible expansion of urban population, we have to ask how that was possible and the answer is quite simple. The Industrial Revolution ushered in a radically new era in human history. People left the land and left the production of food to the small number of people who remained. No one had ever dared to do this before --- certainly not on a massive scale. The revolutionary change from hunting-and-gathering to agriculture and animal husbandry pales in comparison. That revolution left humans attached to the land and directly dependent upon nature. The Industrial Revolution, in contrast, removed people from the land and isolated them from nature so that human population growth was apparently dislocated from any natural force of containment. One is left asking, then, what natural factor can effectively limit human population so long as humans maintain the strategy adopted in the Industrial Revolution?
This economic experiment is unprecedented in millions of years of human history; indeed, as an experiment, it is merely 250 years old, scarcely enough time to determine whether nature will allow it! Our opinions about Malthus are conditioned by the affluence that we have been able to generate in the brief, but dramatic rise of industrial society. But everything in this experiment rests on "sustainability". If we cannot sustain this economy, then Malthus was right (just not timely), and we are left wondering what value there was in a human experiment of this magnitude if nothing remains of it afterward, especially if the experiment leaves the environment devastated so that retreat to any reasonable and sustainable lifeway is excluded.
One can say, of course, "Why give it a thought?" And truly, whatever will happen will happen without our sober predictions. What seems wrong about this (maybe "inconsistent" is a better word) is the fact that we take such huge pride in being intelligent and rational. In fact, all of our science and engineering is a source of enormous boasting; for we are the "incredibly intelligent" beings who have created all of this. Yet what is inconsistent is that we might be allowing all of this to head straight over the equivalent of a natural-historical "cliff" into the waiting "arms" of an ecological disaster. And if we do nothing about that, what will this say about our "intelligence"?
Science itself assures us that the population curve will not continue to rise exponentially. Natural processes of this kind are not exponential. The proper population for humans is an "S" curve; we have only seen the early growth phase that appears exponential. Various forces will eventually come to bear on the growth rate, reducing births and increasing deaths, lowering the slope of ascent and easing human population into a plateau. Of course, there is nothing to guarantee that natural forces will produce a curve of this nice form; it is quite possible that the forces driving population to slow down will be so traumatic that total population will go into decline. Natural changes tend to depend on reversibility; as natural forces bring pressure to human populations, their survival may depend on their ability to reverse aspects of their lifeways. But the Industrial Revolution would seem to be a profoundly irreversible change of lifeways, producing huge urban populations that have nowhere to go and no access to a natural system of support. Humans have irreversibly committed themselves to a human-built environment and may not be able to return to a natural environment. Yet if it is natural factors that will bring human population under control, then we are talking about a "war between worlds" rather than a natural adjustment to balance by compatible reversible processes.
The question is whether humans are prepared to take some responsibility for this or whether they will continue to behave like irresponsible children and wait until natural factors take control of the situation. It is not difficult to guess that, if nature is pushed to the point of bringing human population under control, it will not be a pretty picture!
As I have suggested above, ever since Malthus' time, we have been riding on a wave created in large measure by our specific expression of technology. The mood of this essay so far implies that this expression of technology cannot continue to create a wave that is capable of carrying the next century of population growth. Now we need to articulate why this seems to be a realistic assumption.
The whole issue revolves around what we have called the world's "carrying capacity." In the simplest sense, this is a question of what the earth can provide and what humans demand. When provisions are larger than demands, obviously human population is free to grow. When provisions are outstripped by demands, then human population will be distressed in various ways. We could define "sustainability" as the situation in which provision and demand are equal and the system is in equilibrium. Of course, neither of these features is as simple as it may sound.
The earth's provisions include, at the very least, a division between renewable and non-renewable resources. In fact, what we refer to here is the complex pattern of availability belonging to anything that humans call a "resource." Outside of rocks and minerals that may never be created again since the geological conditions of the earth's formation will not occur again, all resources are in a process of continual regeneration. (A leading exception to this, of course, is extinct species which could be regenerated spontaneously and accidentally though it's unlikely.) Water will return to streams during the next rainy season; trees will grow back; or an animal population can recover. At some level, everything will be renewed in a healthy natural environment; the issue is time. What we called non-renewable is going to take longer than we can possibly wait! That includes coal, petroleum, and natural gas, at the very least; but it probably also includes old-growth forests, top soil, and the larger underground aquifers. Availability is conditioned in two ways, also; something that we should keep in mind. We can use up a resource so that we have to wait for it to regenerate. But we can also ruin a resource so that it is useless to us. For instance, we can poison rivers, lakes, and aquifers so badly that they can no longer serve as resources.
The other side of the equilibrium is human demand and that is equally complex. Part of demand is purely quantitative --- how many people there are to make demands. But another part of demand is qualitative --- how particular people are inclined to make demands on the earth. Multiplying the number of people is less burden to the earth if they make few demands on the earth's resources; but population could remain static and still produce problems if everyone increased their level of demands. Today, we are facing a double threat. World population is rising and, at the same time, more people in the world are looking forward to Western-style "development" --- in effect, making Western-style demands on the earth's resources. There is no way that this trend can last. If all humans living on the earth today consumed in Western style, it would be by far a worse load of demands on the earth's resources than the next doubling of population is expected to be. To experience both is strictly impossible.
Still under construction . . .