Globalization Technology and Philosophy by David Tabachnick & Toivo Koivukoski

Author:David Tabachnick & Toivo Koivukoski [Tabachnick, David & Koivukoski, Toivo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

The Problem with “The Problem of Technology”

131

The first two arguments also seem to have been refuted by events.

It is undeniable that the contemporary environmental movement first arose in the United States and other Western democracies and every year becomes more widespread and powerful. There is a nontrivial sense in which almost everyone today in the United States is an environmentalist, albeit with varying degrees of fervor and influence. So how is this possible in the land of interest group politics and the capitalist ethos? Where is the flaw in the left-wing critique? What resources could exist within liberal capitalist culture for taming technology? Some answers emerge on the basis of the particular characterization of modernity and technology developed above.

It is a great, if common, mistake to assume, as the left-wing critique does, that in a pluralist liberal democracy all interest groups must be concerned with immediate, selfish goods. On the contrary, in modern societies, where life is grounded on the idea of progress, a concern for the future forms some part of everyone’s thinking, and future-directed, ideological interest groups tend rather to proliferate.

Certainly there is no structural reason, then, why an environmental movement could not arise in a liberal society. To see why it became in fact the ideological growth stock of the eighties and beyond, one might look at some further factors.

As we have seen, when technology comes to be viewed as an independent and dangerous force, the will to control it inevitably emerges from out of the technological attitude itself. Technology is, as it were, a self-regulating movement. And the fear of technology, once thus begun, actually fits perfectly into the liberal capitalist world-view, strange as that may seem. Skeptical regarding the good and happiness, liberal societies tend to measure progress negatively, in terms of the triumph over evil—over the barbarism and backwardness of the state of nature. But the

“negative orientation” of the liberal mind has one inevitable shortcoming: due to the very progress of society, these natural evils gradually recede, losing their power to ground and orient our lives. New evils must be found to take their place. That is, I believe, the psychological and existential meaning of liberal environmentalism. Ecological disaster has taken the place of the state of nature. The middle classes of the advanced industrialized nations, who can no longer feel the old, bourgeois sense of pride in the triumph of civilization over barbarism (and who have seen the demise of fascism and communism), have redefined progressivism in terms of saving the planet.

Yet it still seems, from the perspective of left-wing common sense, that this should not be possible. Liberal capitalism embraces a world of 132

Arthur M. Melzer

competition and strife, not of harmony with nature. Wholly committed to growth, technology, and the unbridled exploitation of nature, it contains no countervailing principle that might rein humanity in. It simply lacks the resources to check the human quest for power.25

The error here is to assume that liberalism’s hostility toward nature entails an unlimited trust in humanity.

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