Technology, the Challenge of the Century
El desarrollo tecnológico plantea decisiones sobre el uso de los recursos naturales, el bienestar colectivo y la responsabilidad hacia las generaciones futuras.
Nations now accept that they are aboard a common vessel and are beginning to think globally. This is a phenomenon of our century and responds to the expansion of technology and its consequences for the species. There are no borders for problems such as the nuclear threat, desertification, the depletion of the ozone layer, deforestation, the greenhouse effect and population growth. The “One World” that our own Alberdi announced in 1880 (“Man realizes that his complete and definitive homeland, worthy of him, is the earth in all its roundness, and that in the domains of the ultimate man the sun never sets”) is a reality. Prominent politicians have begun to concern themselves with the integrity of the environment and the future of humanity.
For their part, many pessimistic intellectuals do not hesitate to identify the culprit behind the ills that are anticipated or already visible. Some important books identify it: Technology, the Challenge of the Century, by Jacques Ellul, and Technics and Civilization, by Lewis Mumford, are among the classics. Other, lesser works have expressive titles: Runaway Technology, by Ernst Braun, for example. The “Evil One” of our time has a name of its own: “technique” or “technology.” But this view of things is not accepted by everyone. At the other extreme are those who argue that we have no reason to worry about the consumption of resources and the need to preserve them. Two American economists, Barnett and Morse, point out that in their country the economic value of the capital each generation transfers to the next has historically been twice what it received; therefore, there is no need to worry about protecting the interests of future generations. No special ethics are required to replace the economic calculation that leads modern people to accumulate for those who are alive. Of the valuable assets each generation passes on, only a portion concerns the natural environment. The most important components of this inheritance are knowledge, technology, capital and economic institutions. “These, rather than natural resources, are the determinants of real per capita income.”
In between, many believe there is no point in debating whether technology is good or bad. It is a question of balancing opposing impacts: the balance between the need for larger harvests in a hungry world and the protection of life and health against the toxic effects of insecticides; the blessing of enabling more children to survive their first two years and the threat of a population explosion; the desire of the vast majority for more access roads to national parks and the desire of a small minority to walk through wild places and enjoy solitude. The impact of technology, Peter Drucker maintains, involves problems of choosing between values: between immediate benefits and long-term disruptions, between the interests of one group and those of another, between individual and collective well-being. These are complex political choices. The problem is to determine at what point benefits, public and private, threaten to cost more than they are worth, and at what point the “trade-off” must take place.
Technology, as the cultural phenomenon it essentially is, originates in ideas, conceptions and systems of thought. In Epistemology, Mario Bunge finds that technological processes have been guided, and often led astray, by certain moral convictions. First, that humanity is separate from nature and more valuable than it. Second, that humanity has the right, and perhaps also the duty, to subjugate nature for its own benefit, individual or social. Third, that humanity is not responsible for nature. Fourth, that the supreme task of technology is to achieve the fullest exploitation of natural and human resources—that is, to maximize GNP at the lowest possible cost, without regard for anything else. Finally, that technologists bear no moral responsibility and should have no ethical or aesthetic scruples; those belong to the people who formulate technological policy, particularly politicians. This is what he calls “developmentalist technoethics,” which has now begun to be questioned because it is suspected of justifying technology’s dark side. Yet no viable alternative has been proposed: a moral code that overcomes the negative aspects without rejecting the advantages of an industrialized society. Bunge concludes that it is time to study a new ethics of technology involving different goals, based on the knowledge we now have of nature and society—knowledge that barely existed when the previous code was formulated at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
According to some thinkers, the source of modern humanity’s behavior toward nature lies in the Old Testament: “And God blessed them and commanded them: be fruitful and multiply, and fill the Earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish in the sea and over the bird in the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the Earth.”
At a conference on “Theology of Survival” held in Claremont, California, a group of Protestant theologians virtually agreed that the traditional Christian attitude toward nature has sanctioned the exploitation and plundering of natural resources and overpopulation. The Hebrew Bible is responsible, particularly through its command to “subdue it.” A prominent historian, Lynn White Jr., wrote an article in the journal Science, also arguing that this idea from Genesis, together with the Judeo-Christian rejection of pagan beliefs in the divinity of nature, made it possible for Western society to “exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.”
But there are also those who rebel against this accusation against the Bible. For example, at a theological seminar sponsored by Israel’s Technion and held in Haifa, it was rejected following a scholarly analysis of the Book. Verses from Deuteronomy, Leviticus, the Book of Jonah and, above all, the Book of Job were recalled. These deny that humanity is the measure of all things and contrast an anthropocentric view of the world with a theocentric vision “in which all creatures are the work and concern of the One who made them.” According to Robert Gordis, a theologian reporting on this “International Symposium on Ethics in an Age of Pervasive Technology,” the authentic teaching of Judaism, contrary to that negative assessment, would be one of compassion for living creatures and respect for nature.
