The Closing Circle by Barry Commoner & Michael Egan

Author:Barry Commoner & Michael Egan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2019-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE SOCIAL ISSUES

The preceding sections of this book were concerned with the origins of the environmental crisis. The analysis makes it plain, I believe, that the crisis is not the outcome of a natural catastrophe or of the misdirected force of human biological activities. The earth is polluted neither because man is some kind of especially dirty animal nor because there are too many of us. The fault lies with human society—with the ways in which society has elected to win, distribute, and use the wealth that has been extracted by human labor from the planet’s resources. Once the social origins of the crisis become clear, we can begin to design appropriate social actions to resolve it. These are the concerns of the present chapter.

In modern industrial societies the most important link between society and the ecosystem on which it depends is technology. There is considerable evidence that many of the new technologies which now dominate production in an advanced country such as the United States are in conflict with the ecosystem. They therefore degrade the environment. How can we account for this fault in modern technology?

At this point, it is important to take notice of the special status of science and technology in modern society. Technology often seems to act like an autonomous force, relatively independent of and more competent than the mere human beings who practice it. For example, confident prediction of future events is usually regarded as beyond the capability of ordinary people. Not so for technology. According to a leading technophile, Simon Ramo:

Gather any group of competent technologists, put them to the job of trying to anticipate developments in their fields of expertise, and there is a very good chance that they will list a substantial fraction of the important things that will indeed happen in the period that they indicate.

Technology, it seems, has a crystal ball—that works.

One reason that technologists tend to be so certain about the technological future is suggested by one of the most astute observers of the social role of technology, John Kenneth Galbraith, who states:

It is a commonplace of modern technology that problems have solutions before there is knowledge of how they are to be solved.

In this brief statement, Galbraith has brilliantly characterized technology: it is built on faith—in itself. Indeed, the power of technology is so evident and overwhelming as seemingly to intimidate even its critics. Thus Jacques Ellul, one of the severest critics of effects of technology on human values, writes:

Technique has become autonomous; it has fashioned an omnivorous world which obeys its own laws and which has renounced all tradition. . . . Technique has progressively mastered all the elements of civilization . . . man himself is overpowered by technique and becomes its object.

Thus both the proponents of technology and those who favor the “counterculture” seem to look on technology as a kind of self-sufficient, autonomous juggernaut, relatively immune to human fallibility and somehow ungovernable by human will. Those who admire the competence of technology suggest that human beings need to accommodate to it.

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