Copyright 1997, 1999 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College
Jose Ortega y Gasset, Martin Heidegger, and Neil Postman have all written about technology. While they have all approached the subject from different quarters, they all agree that the most modern phases of technology have acquired considerable danger for human society. Equally, all of them see the evolution of these dangers over relatively long periods of time. The dangers of technology today are not the simple result of any particular machine or instrument. In fact, all three make the common point that it is a mistake to think about technology merely as tools and machines; we must think about technology as a host of social and intellectual processes and modes of organization.
What I intend to provide here is a relatively simple outline of each approach. Gasset follows below. Click here for Heidegger, and click here for Postman.
Jose Ortega y Gasset was born in 1883, in Madrid, Spain, and died in 1955, in Madrid. He studied philosophy at Madrid University from 1898 through 1904 and then continued studies at Marburg, Germany, from 1904 through 1908. In 1910, Ortega became a professor of metaphysics at Madrid University. While his early studies had followed the thought of Immanuel Kant and delved into epistemological and metaphysical issues, Ortega's sentiments were decidedly Spanish and cultural, in a wide sense of the word. He was thoroughly aware of the many changes brought on by the 19th Century, and he devoted much of his writing to the situation of the modern world, indeed, to modernity itself as a phenomenon.
When the Spanish Civil War erupted, in 1936, Ortega exiled himself from Spain and traveled elsewhere in Europe and in Argentina, returning to Spain only after WWII. In 1948 he founded the Institute of Humanities in Madrid. Works related to the present reading are The Revolt of the Masses and The Modern Theme. Ortega was by no means alone, at the turn of the century, in believing that technology had passed a critical turning point and had become a very different mode of human interaction with the world. Henry Adams, in his Education of Henry Adams (1905), had already announced this in his chapter "The Dynamo and the Virgin." Adams' thinking was driven by the Great Exposition of 1900, in New York, and he was haunted by the Gallery of Machines, where he wondered over the fact that humans had so thoroughly harnessed nature as to, now, wring power out of her, power that to Americans far exceeded the power that the Virgin had represented before others, for almost two millennia.
In "Man the Technician," Ortega suggested that human technology had, so far as we know, passed through three easily recognizable stages. The first of these was the stage of accidental invention, or the technology of chance, as he called it. We imagine, in this sense, that individuals stumbled upon improvements in tools or techniques which were then carried along through future time by virtue of their successful application. The second stage was the era of craftsmanship. According to Ortega, this was a stage in which individuals became specialists in making tools and other items of human creation. In doing this, they followed a well-known tradition and most of their inventiveness went into perfecting their particular specialties. The third stage, present with us today, is that of the technician. It is marked by full consciousness of technology itself and it is, in some sense, an institutionalization of technology, meaning a methodical breakdown of technology into individually operative parts -- e.g., design and execution. This technology is the offspring of modern science in the fact that it represents the same kind of thinking, the same approach to problem solving, as modern science.
Each of these stages, according to Ortega, carried us further away from a natural state of human life, similar to all animal life. Tool making merely yielded advantages of efficiency but left the basics of natural life unchanged. Craftsmanship transformed the context of life into a significantly human-built world and secured many conveniences; but it was not yet a world from which humans were unable to retreat. They weren't that far removed from a natural existence. The mark of the present age, in contrast, is the dependence of billions of people on technology, the dependency on a pervasively human-built environment with no possibility of retreat to nature. Indeed, in this world and as Ortega argued in Revolt of the Masses, humans are threatened by the real danger of actually forgetting their own responsibility for creating this world and, hence, failing to maintain it. The argument is that we tend to grow up accepting as "natural" whatever the environment is for us at birth. This presented little problem to past generations because true nature required no human maintenance. Today, however, the human-built world, that our youth accept as the "natural" backdrop for their lives, requires an enormous amount of human attention and intervention.
If this were the only problem with technology, we would be "well warned" but probably not radically concerned. The principal thesis of Ortega's essay aims in quite a different direction. This is the relationship between humans and technology, that is, what technology is as a distinctly human activity. We tend to view technology as the process of making things. Ortega suggests that humans have made things since they have been human (as opposed to animal hominids) and that making things is actually an essential part of the human's spiritual relationship with the natural environment. To talk about technology, then, is to talk about being human and not merely to talk about making things. This has already been done, above, in discussing the stages of technology, because the stages are defined by phases of human activity, thought, and organization. In Ortega's view, technology is the fact of human existence that humans are always invested in "improving" nature in order to satisfy their "vital interests." Animals live; they do not have "vital interests," in this sense. Humans, unlike animals, have to create themselves, that is, create human life, by deciding what their "vital interests" are and, then, working to satisfy them. To fail in this would be to slip back into the animal realm.
What is important about this way of understanding technology is to recognize, immediately, that every human society possesses some kind of technology. To understand it as such requires us to consider how this society conceives of its "well being" and, hence, to see what its vital interests are. Clearly, it will make those things that it deems necessary. The importance of these observations is to awaken us to the fact that technology is not driven by science, machines, inventions, etc. It is, in fact, driven by human imagination, an imagination that conceives of how life could be improved.
Here, then, is where Ortega sees the problem about modern Europe and, of course, America. In the present stage of technology, where the methodology of the technician has been divided up and distributed widely in society and where new invention is stimulated by scientific theory, the number of possible manipulations of our world has become literally unfathomable. While we were once limited by what we could do, we now find ourselves almost unlimited. Thus, the concept of "necessity" has disappeared from the concept of "vital interests" and left us without our main employment, which was the struggling of imagination to choose how to maximize our well being by balancing our capacities against our necessities. In Ortega's view, this has emptied our lives. Like a child with everything and no boundaries, the modern EuroAmerican knows less about what he/she is than has any preceding human being. "That is why our time, being the most intensely technical, is also the emptiest in human history." (P. 151)
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology
Martin Heidegger was born, in 1889, Messkirch, Schwarzwald, Germany; his father was a Catholic sexton. Heidegger showed an early interest in religion and, upon finishing high school, joined the Jesuits as a novice. He proceeded to study Catholic theology at the University of Freiburg and broadened himself only so far as medieval Christian philosophy. Nevertheless, Heidegger's interest in philosophy eventually consumed him and he took up studies with the Kantian Heinrich Rickert and, later, the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, both at Freiburg. In 1914, Heidegger wrote his doctoral dissertation on Duns Scotus, and he began teaching at Freiburg in the winter session, 1915. While Husserl's expectations were for the young man to advance phenomenology, Heidegger instead followed his own classical and religious interests. His major work, Being and Time, was the product, in 1927. After a brief period teaching at Marburg, Heidegger returned to Freiburg to take Husserl's chair and was soon elected Rector of the University. This proved to be Heidegger's undoing, for Hitler's Reich was in the process of being born. Heidegger's wife was a wealthy and somewhat naive Nazi sympathizer; Heidegger himself was neither culturally nor philosophically hostile to the early programs of Nazism. For a brief period (1933-34), as Rector, he was officially supportive, even to the degree of alienating his Jewish mentor, Husserl. Heidegger resigned fairly soon and then waited out the Reich. It was too late, however. The allied occupation authorities removed Heidegger from public teaching, in 1945, and Heidegger never really recovered his reputation, even with the help and sympathy of former students, like Hannah Arendt. He died in Messkirch, in 1976.
I shall begin by summarizing Heidegger's thinking in "The Question Concerning Technology," concentrating on his vision of the dangers with which technology confronts us. Wherever possible, I shall try to understand Heidegger's arguments in ordinary language rather than merely absorbing and repeating his terminology. This will not always be possible, however; some of Heidegger's invented terms are simply indispensable, attempting as they do to cut across developed habits of thinking. To Heidegger, it is the thinking that is important and the language of our thinking needs careful study and occasional reformulation.
The major difficulty with the present discussion of technology is the fact that we focus attention on what we call technology in its everyday sense and we ignore technology in its essence. In this situation, it matters little whether we embrace technology or condemn it, for we are all equally enslaved by our misunderstanding of what technology actually is. According to Heidegger, "technology [in its everyday sense] is not equivalent to the essence of technology." (P. 4) To be free of misunderstandings, to relate to technology intelligently, we must find its central meaning and that can be done only by discovering its essence.
In our present point of view, we see technology as a complex of contrivances and technical skills, put forth by human activity and developed as means to our ends. Technology, in this view, is an object, or a complex of objects and techniques, that seems passive itself; indeed, we conceive of it as activated by us only. According to Heidegger, however, we are fundamentally mistaken in this; "we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral." (P. 4) On the contrary, the essence of technology reveals it as something far from neutral or merely an instrument of human control; it is an autonomous organizing activity within which humans themselves are organized. Viewing technology as a means to an end, "everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner...We will, as we say, 'get' technology 'spiritually in hand.'...But suppose now that technology were no mere means, how would it stand with the will to master it?" (P. 5) How, indeed, can we cope with it if it encompasses us in its organizational activity?
In summary, the problem with our critique of technology lies at two levels. First, while we argue and take sides on the issue of technology, none of us is really free to deal with it constructively because none of us really understands it in its essence, i.e., in its entirety and in its central sense. Second, our limited understanding of technology is so misguided that little of value can be salvaged from it. This is because all discussions are prefaced on the view that technology is an object which we manipulate as a means to our own ends. In fact, the essence of technology reveals it as a vast system of organization which encompasses us rather than standing objectively and passively ready for our direction and control.
If our discussion of technology is so far off its mark, then, how can we anticipate discovering its essence? Heidegger's method is to assume that the instrumental view of technology has a basic correctness even though it is not true. That basic correctness explains why we have dealt successfully with it at a practical level as long as we have. For Heidegger, this basic correctness offers a pathway for investigative thinking by pursuing the concept of "instrument" and the roots of the word 'technology.' These are the only correct clues that we have.
To view something as an instrument is to place it in a context of ends for which it is presumed to be a means and this is the context of "causation." (P. 6) Thus, one promising path to the essence of technology is through an examination of causation. Heidegger was guided in this examination by Aristotle's classic account of the four factors in all causation -- causa materialis, causa formalis, causa finalis, and causa efficiens. While the traditional reading of Aristotle tends to understand each of these factors in isolation and ignores their cooperative relationship, Heidegger asserted that the essence of causation must lie in what unifies the four. "The four causes are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for something else." (P. 7; emphasis added) A singular thing, or event, is caused and the four factors are cooperatively responsible for that in some way. The thing caused is something that "comes into presence;" thus, the factors are cooperatively responsible for bringing it forth. In this way, Heidegger discovered the very essence of causation in the Greek word 'aitia,' or "to occasion;" and as Plato expressed it in Symposium, "Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing-forth." (P. 10)
"The modes of occasioning, the four causes, are at play, then, within bringing-forth. Through bringing-forth, the growing things of nature as well as whatever is completed through the crafts and the arts come at any given time to their appearance." (P. 11)
This bringing-forth is, in its most generally understood sense, what the Greeks called aletheia, which Heidegger expressed in the German word 'Entbergen' and his English translators have expressed in the word 'revealing.'
As mentioned earlier, Heidegger believed that there was a basic correctness both in our view of technology as an instrument, the view we have just interpreted, and in our use of the name "technology" itself. The word 'technology' is derived from the Greek word 'techne' and the analysis of this word leads us to essentially the same place. For the Greeks, 'techne' belonged to the general notion of bringing-forth, 'poiesis.' Techne and episteme are linked together, the latter related to that which comes-forth out of its own nature alone and the former related to that which comes-forth only by our intervention with that nature. As forms of poiesis, both techne and episteme are modes of revealing; but, in contrast to episteme,
"techne ... reveals watever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another... Thus what is decisive in techne does not lie at all in making or manipulating nor in the using of means, but rather in the aforementioned revealing. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth." (p. 13)
Both paths of interpretation lead to the same thing. "Technology [in its essence] is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence [West] in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens." (P. 13) What Heidegger wanted us to recognize by bringing technology to the concept of revealing is that technology's essence is to be found in the most basic realm of experience. That realm is the realm of "truths happening." It could be argued, of course, that all of this analysis takes ancient Greece as its focal point and that modern technology has little or nothing to do with ancient Greece. This is true, of course, in the sense that technology has obviously developed far beyond its origins in Greece; however, it is also misguided if it tries to convince us that technology's essence has been fundamentally changed. Heidegger's point is precisely the assertion that the basic essence of technology has remained unchanged and that this essence is most readily observed in the Greek origins of our thinking about these things. The problem remaining, then, is to understand how modern technology has evolved within this essential nature as a mode of revealing.
We have arrived at the opening of the essence of modern technology. Technology is a mode of the fundamental way in which things happen in the universe and we, as agents, are involved in this happening within the cooperative elements of causation. But technology has evolved through the intervening three millennia; what was previously called 'techne' and was a form of the general process of bringing-forth has separated into different modes of revealing. What we understand as modern technology can scarcely be recognized as having a common origin with the fine arts or crafts; indeed, modern technology is distinguished in having made its "alliance" with modern physical science rather than with the arts and crafts. Therefore, to understand technology as it is today and in its complete essence, we must understand the course of that separate and unique evolution.
Perhaps it is not difficult to understand the separate paths of the fine arts, craftsmanship, and modern technology. Each seems to have followed different human intentions and to have addressed different human skills. However, while the fine arts and craftsmanship remained relatively consistent with techne in the ancient sense, modern technology withdrew in a radically different direction. As Heidegger saw it, "the revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such." (P. 14) Modern technology sets-upon nature and challenges-forth its energies, in contrast to techne which was always a bringing-forth in harmony with nature. The activity of modern technology lies at a different and more advanced level wherein the natural is not merely decisively re-directed; nature is actually "set-upon." The rhetoric in which the discussion is couched conveys an atmosphere of violence and exploitation.
To uncover the essence of modern technology is to discover why technology stands today as the danger. To accomplish this insight, we must understand why modern technology must be viewed as a "challenging-forth," what affect this has on our relationship with nature, and how this relationship affects us. Is there really a difference? Has technology really left the domain of techne in a significant way? In modern technology, has human agency withdrawn in some way beyond involvement and, instead, acquired an attitude of violence with respect to the other causal factors?
Heidegger clearly saw the development of "energy resources" as symbolic of this evolutionary path; while the transformation into modern technology undoubtedly began early, the first definitive signs of its new character began with the harnessing of energy resources, as we would say. As a representative of the old technology, the windmill took energy from the wind but converted it immediately into other manifestations such as the grinding of grain; the windmill did not unlock energy from the wind in order to store it for later arbitrary distribution. Modern wind-generators, on the other hand, convert the energy of wind into electrical power which can be stored in batteries or otherwise. The significance of storage is that it places the energy at our disposal; and because of this storage the powers of nature can be turned back upon itself. The storing of energy is, in this sense, the symbol of our over-coming of nature as a potent object. "...a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit."(p. 14) This and other examples that Heidegger used throughout this essay illustrate the difference between a technology that diverts the natural course cooperatively and modern technology that achieves the unnatural by force. Not only is this achieved by force but it is achieved by placing nature in our subjective context, setting aside natural processes entirely, and conceiving of all revealing as being relevant only to human subjective needs.
The essence of technology originally was a revealing of life and nature in which human intervention deflected the natural course while still regarding nature as the teacher and, for that matter, the keeper. The essence of modern technology is a revealing of phenomena, often far removed from anything that resembles "life and nature," in which human intrusion not only diverts nature but fundamentally changes it. As a mode of revealing, technology today is a challenging-forth of nature so that the technologically altered nature of things is always a situation in which nature and objects wait, standing in reserve for our use. We pump crude oil from the ground and we ship it to refineries where it is fractionally distilled into volatile substances and we ship these to gas stations around the world where they reside in huge underground tanks, standing ready to power our automobiles or airplanes. Technology has intruded upon nature in a far more active mode that represents a consistent direction of domination. Everything is viewed as "standing-reserve" and, in that, loses its natural objective identity. The river, for instance, is not seen as a river; it is seen as a source of hydro-electric power, as a water supply, or as an avenue of navigation through which to contact inland markets. In the era of techne humans were relationally involved with other objects in the coming to presence; in the era of modern technology, humans challenge-forth the subjectively valued elements of the universe so that, within this new form of revealing, objects lose their significance to anything but their subjective status of standing-ready for human design.
At this point, we have almost completed the analysis of modern technology in its essence. Only one final aspect of this analysis remains; it is an understanding of the overarching context in which technology came to proceed along this path. Heidegger named this context by the German word 'Ge-stell,' which has been translated to the English word, 'enframing.' In Heidegger's words,
"enframing [Ge-stell] means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve." (P. 20) But, "where Enframing reigns, there is danger in the highest sense." (P. 28)
To understand the essence of modern technology as enframing, Heidegger claims is to understand the problem of technology in its fullest sense; for in enframing we will understand the deeper context in which humans journeyed from involvement with nature into an intrusion upon it. We must move, then, to understand what Heidegger meant by enframing.
We are to understand technology through enframing in two very important ways. First, technology is a process, or coming-to-presence, which is underway in the world and which has truly gigantic proportions. The two concepts that Heidegger used as analogies in arriving at the word 'Ge-stell' were 'Gebirg" and 'Gemuet.' Both of these are processes of cosmic scope. The former is the gradual building, emergence, folding, and eroding of a mountain range. The latter is the welling up and building of emotional feelings that originate in the depths of our beings, as differentiated from the simple emotions that arise quickly and spontaneously in normal contexts. Second, technology viewed as enframing is a process that is shaping human destiny today and that has been shaping human destiny in relation to the universe for almost as long as we conceive of our history. What we call technology and think to be a neutral instrument standing ready for our control is actually a specific manifestation of this whole process. {[7], p. 19} The concept of enframing suggests that human life in the context of the natural world is gathered wholly and cosmically within the essence of technology. Just as the technology that we now see ongoing in the world shows the characteristic of challenging-forth the objects around us, the whole process within which human life is developing challenges-us-forth to this mode of revealing the real or of ordering nature into standing reserve. Our control over technology is an illusion; it and we alike are being shaped, like an evolving mountain range, in the process that Heidegger called enframing. The possession of what we commonly call technology is only a fragmentary, though characteristic, aspect of that whole development; language thought, religion, art, and all other aspects of human life are coordinated into this development as a part of enframing.
To see the essence of technology in this way delivers us into the final phase of Heidegger's analysis, the great danger to humanity that technology represents. Just as enframing organizes our lives progressively into a disposition of challenging and ordering the things around us into standing reserve, its progress as a development of human destiny challenges and orders us into standing reserve for its own ends.
"The destining of revealing is in itself not just any danger, but danger as such. Yet when destining reigns in the mode of Enframing, it is the supreme danger. This danger attests itself to us in two ways. As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but does so, rather, exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile, man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth. In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself." (P. 26-7; emphasis added)
Just as humans have progressively limited the being of the natural objects around them, Heidegger observed, they too have acquired a progressively limited character or being. While we have come to think that we encounter only ourselves in the world, "in truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., in his essence." (P. 27) While all epochs of human evolution contain danger, the epoch of modern technology possesses the gravest danger because it is the epoch whose characteristic is to conduct humanity out of its own essence. Modern technology, in Heidegger's view, is the highest stage of misrepresentation of the essence of being human. In order to understand this danger completely and, certainly, in order to come to accept it as a correct analysis, would require a more extensive review of Heidegger's theory of human nature and its essence.
In brief (and in a very rough form) the essence of being human is being witness and, hence, aiding in creation. I do not simply walk through a field; rather, as I walk along a path, I am witness to the coming-to-presence of manifold beings. It is not just that things come into view, as we say, but that I witness them and bring them into activity in a world. For Heidegger, the environment is no mere environment, that is, no mere inanimate, encompassing thing, or backdrop. The essential nature of humans being in the world unites us with other beings. I make this a place by being witness to it and to everything united within it. More and more, though, the present tendency of technology is to remove me from the mode of witnessing beings and to place me in isolation. In this mode of technology, we order the world with things standing-in-reserve for our use. When we demand use of these things, we no longer witness them in the sense of understanding (learning about) their manifold potentials, but merely as that under which we have ordered them to be. In the gravest situation, we begin to order other human beings in the same way! Thus, we have "departments of human resources." We recognize in human beings around us their usefulness to us, not their genius. Thus, we witness them in artificially limited ways rather than enabling their coming-to-presence creatively as animated parts of our worlds.
In this essay, Heidegger took up in greater detail the possibility of a "saving power," suggested in the previous essay. The essay originated as the fourth in a serious of lectures, given in 1949, in which the dangers of the present epoch of technology were explored in the earlier lectures. He repeats (p. 42) Hölderin's ". . . where danger is, grows the saving power, also" and reminds us that "the danger is the epoch of Being coming to presence as Enframing." In effect, the essence of human life (Being) comes to truth, to expression, in different ways, as time passes. The current epoch, as indicated by the present path of technology, first witnesses humans setting upon the world and ordering it to stand and wait for our convenience in use. But this epoch continues forward into the situation where humans now set upon themselves and order themselves for their convenience in use. The result, of course, is a corruption of the essence of Being, that is, man finds himself farther removed from his true essence than at any other time in history. The grave danger of the present epoch of technology is, in that sense, the extreme alienation of Being from its essence.
Nevertheless, Heidegger suggests that the realization of danger as such means that the saving power is already alive. In effect, realizing this situation as danger means that the path back to Being's essence is still understood, hence, available to us. The farther we proceed into the present mode of technology and, hence, the farther we proceed into our gravest danger, experiencing our humanity in a form so far removed from our essence, we have still not met danger as such. What Heidegger suggests is a kind of awakening, or insight -- a flash -- that, if we were to witness that danger that is in fact over-taking us, that insight would already be at the point of turning back to an original appreciate of our essential being. Without yet appreciating that danger as such we are still not inclined, or motivated. In a way, it is the energy of our gravest disaster that can motivate us toward a more constructive path.
At the beginning of this essay, we find a simple statement of the "essence of art" true to Heidegger's understanding of it. "Art is a consecration and a refuge in which the real bestows its long-hidden splendor upon man ever anew, that in such a light he may see more purely and hear more clearly what addresses itself to his essence." (Emphasis mine) It is a telling statement when we recall Heidegger's concept of the human essence as being witness. Art, in other words, delivers the truth of the real in a way that is thoroughly consistent with our essential nature.
What, then, is science? Heidegger suggests that "science is the theory of the real" and that the present age of science has been thought through since Greek time. Equally, science invites a contrast between Greek and East Asian approaches to the real. While science, today, remains something which begins in Greek thinking, it is clear that Heidegger sees it, today, as something that has moved away from the essential character previously thought. Thus, he asks (p. 165), "what is 'the theory' that is named in the statement 'modern science is the theory of the real'?" Theory in the Greek sense is "bios theoretikos," the way of life of the beholder, "the beholding that watches over truth."
Neil Postman has created a new name for the character of technology that he believes to hold forth in our world, today. In order to get to an understanding of this word, 'technopoly,' we have to understand his own analysis of technology's historical evolution. Like Ortega, Postman believes that technology has passed through three stages -- tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies.
A tool is something that we use to achieve some aim. It is a means to an end. The overarching concept of means-ends remains in the human being, and the tool is merely brought in as a partial fulfillment of means. In this "primitive" form of technology, technology has not been alienated from its overarching human foundation within man/woman's intellectual life. Tool-using technology is obviously still run by the creation and execution of "vital interests." Tools are helpmates in the process of humans inventing modes of human dwelling and, hence, human life.
There came a time in the development of Western society, Postman claims, when tool-making and tool-using moved into a position of such domination that tools began to attack culture itself. We could say, in fact, that we moved into "the cult of the tool." Just as "aristocracy" means that the privileged class has the power of rule, "technocracy" means that the cult of tools has the power of rule. Postman, appropriately, sees the era of Francis Bacon as instrumental in this transition. To Bacon we owe the reflection that "knowledge is power;" but Bacon's interest in knowledge was clearly in technology, not in so-called disinterested knowledge by reflection. Evolution of the Western world since the 17th Century has elaborated on this thought in that sense that we believe in the intimate relationship between the exercise of power and the creation of new technologies for exploitation of the physical world. In the age of technocracy, the cult of technology has become the dominating force in our culture.
This is not at all where things come to an end, according to Postman. Technocracy has steadily given way to what he calls technopoly. In the age of technopoly, technology is not merely the dominant factor within culture; rather technology seeks to redefine culture itself. This represents the ultimate alienation of technology from its human basis. That is, so long as humans create culture and therein formulate and modify and seek various ends, technology functions as a means to those ends, hence, a factor of culture subordinate to human design. If technology itself succeeds in redefining culture, human life and human design come to be driven by technology. Technology becomes the "author" of ends, and humans become means to those ends. This, clearly, is the same point that Heidegger's philosophy carries us toward. It is also the product of the dangerous situation that Ortega described. Where technology assumes the powerful position of omnipotence, humans lose access to any clear conception of their own vital interests. The whole process comes to be driven by technology itself and humans are alienated to a subordinate role where they no longer shape their own lives. Technopoly is what Postman calls "totalitarian technology." Technopoly proceeds to redefine what all the other features of culture can mean to us.
In his chapter "The Improbable World," Postman suggests that the principal key to technopoly's successful assault against traditional culture has been its control and elevation of information. Beginning with the telegraph and the telephone and "ending" with the Internet and ultrahigh-speed satellite communication, technology has constructed a pervasive framework for the passage of information. Hidden within this mundane statement, however, is the fact that technopoly has thereby made information as such important, no in fact essential. That is, technopoly has elevated the concept of information as preeminent and, as the sole dispenser of information, acquired the power to control the destiny of an information-dependent culture as a whole. As Postman observes, technopoly has succeeded in redefining "knowledge" into something more like "information" itself. It is only when we reflect on this (something that technopoly never wants us to do!) that we realize the extent to which knowledge and information are different. (We can have all kinds of information about someone or something, for instance, and still know very little.)
In his next chapter, "The Broken Defenses," Postman tries to explain how this invasion of information has happened. Traditional culture, Postman claims, has been based on the management and, in particular, the limitation of information. Academic institutions and their programs, for instance, represented established authorities for classification, criticism, and limitation of fruitful information (knowledge). He also notes that child rearing requires a family to limit the information to which a child is exposed and that this is essential to the child's productive development. That expression, "productive development," in fact, assumes that growth has to occur within a limited realm of ends and means that we create and that the child comes to understand and accept. In the realm of technopoly, in contrast, children are showered with information coming at them from all sides; it is a truly staggering world in which the humane realm of ends and means (what Ortega called "vital interests") is diluted beyond recognition. In conclusion, Postman suggests that technopoly has succeeded in this campaign of redefining culture through the elevation of information by elaborating three aspects of its "infrastructure." These are bureaucracy, the emergence of expertise, and the evolution of information machinery.
The next five chapters of Postman's book discuss these ideas in detail and largely through examples. While the examples often describe striking problems and misdeeds of technopoly, it is important to stay on top of Postman's intellectual target which is to illustrate how technopoly redefines culture. Thus, while there are clearly terrible things that happen in the contemporary practice of medicine because of the degree to which technology has taken over, Postman's point throughout is to call attention to the very successful way in which technopoly has redefined what it is to be a doctor, including, of course, the whole relationship between doctor and patient. This is not a point that technopoly wants us to reflect upon; hence, we are consistently encouraged not to think about these matters but, instead, to always think of these changes as simply "progress." E.g., "Doctors don't practice medicine the same way anymore; but that has happened in the name of progress and better medical care." So long as we can accept it all as "progress," then we are discouraged from taking any critical look at what has happened. The cult of progress goes hand in hand with the cult of technology in advancing the regime of technopoly.
While Postman advances good points in the remainder of this book, his chapter on language as an "invisible technology" is probably the most important because, the least anticipated. The point goes back and connects with the introductory essay written by Jim Cheney on the power of language. Contrary to the technopolist's inevitable judgment that "it's just semantics!" language use exercises power in the world and, in particular, adjusts our relationships with objects. Therefore, not only is language a powerful but transparent "technology" but it is precisely the mode through which technopoly exercises its attack on culture by redefinition. A particularly insidious aspect of this attack through language lies in the process of questioning. As Postman observes, questions are directive. The way a question is asked inevitably determines the range and possibilities of answers. The cultural domination of technology today is frequently facilitated by the language through which we discuss the presence of technology in our society, and that language sets clearly the range of questions about technology and its roles that can be allowed.
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