Where Is Technological Civilization Heading?

Shortly after Heidegger drew attention to the dangers of contemporary technology, Lewis Mumford did as well. Mumford’s pessimism is even more explicit than Heidegger’s: he offers a severe critique of technology as dominion over nature that would eventually come to dominate human beings themselves. He argues that it is thought, not the manufacture of tools, that makes Homo sapiens human and that, for this reason, the species deserves that name more than Homo habilis or Homo faber. In this, he sets himself in direct and explicit opposition to the exponents of pragmatism.

Mumford draws a distinction—one that has endured to this day—between a current that advocates technology “on a human scale” and the dominant, dominating “megatechnic” tendency. He contrasts a polytechnic order—traditional crafts, produced individually—with a monotechnic order, hegemonic in character and compatible only with large-scale organization of human beings, as we have been experiencing with concern in recent years. The same consideration underlies the utopian proposal of E. F. Schumacher, who became very famous in the 1970s with his book Small Is Beautiful. Schumacher is among the originators of the concept of “appropriate technology.” Although he believed that “small is possible,” Mumford admits that his program is unworkable. He emphasizes that the drift toward monotechnics or megatechnics has been advancing inexorably since the dawn of the civilization of great empires at least five thousand years ago; that it made necessary—and produced—a hierarchical organization of society and the emergence of coercive political power as one of the structural axes of human activity. It is, therefore, an ethical critique of the whole course of human social development from the beginnings of civilization, more than an analysis of technology or of the artificial as a human phenomenon.

Something similar is attempted by other authors who analyze not so much the nature of the artificial as the way in which it has been possible for so intricate and complex a system of objects and relationships to arise as those produced by modern technology. What is involved here is a more sociological than anthropological study: it leaves to anthropologists the interesting topic of remote origins, but treats modern technology as a fact of reality and tries to discern where its evolution is taking us. Most of these authors are pessimistic in their assessment of the way social evolution is unfolding, given the impact of the undeniable achievements of modern technology, which, together with its benefits, brings society problems associated with its effectiveness, its gigantism, and the difficulty of controlling its effects on the environment and on society itself.

Without diminishing in the slightest the weight of the arguments put forward by these authors, we must nevertheless do justice to technological civilization by highlighting its undeniable successes in many fields: it has made the lives of a large part of humanity longer, easier, and more pleasant; it has freed great masses of people from the heaviest labor; it has made the material standard of living of most of the population in the developed world better than that of nobles in the Middle Ages. This also applies to the more recent concept of quality of life, which is somewhat less subject to ideological interpretations.

One of the most telling indicators of that fact is life expectancy at birth, which up to the year 1800 was 20 to 30 years, even in countries with the best standard of living. The corresponding figure reached 40 years around 1870, 50 in 1915, 60 in 1930, 70 in 1955, and is in the 80s today. Modern technology has made wars far more deadly, but at the same time it has saved more lives than all the wars in the history of humanity.

Faced with the fears expressed by those who see in megatechnics above all a threat to the survival of the human species, and even of life as a whole, technophiles insist that just as experience and history indicate that in the past technology has always been able to solve every problem posed to it, it will surely be able to find solutions to the dangers now looming over the world’s ecological and social balance. Although it is possible that this will happen, the claim is laden with ideology: it expresses a faith in progress that many have abandoned, and in the political and economic interests of the dominant system.