In his Republic, Laws, Statesman, Plato asserts statecraft is a techne, one of the practical arts.
Much like architecture, weaving, shipbuilding, statecraft is a field that has it's own special knowledge, and skills. Politics therefore should be left to professionals.
The works he had in mind were good constitutions, well crafted works of lasting value. Compares this to shipbuilding, ie, laying the keel for a mighty vessel.
Techne serves as a model for politics, but not the other way around.
He was respectful of the power of the material arts, but suspicous of them. Therefore he would exclude Craftsmen from citizenship, and Citizens from the material arts. (By Citizenship, I believe he is discussing the "lawmakers").
The framers of the American Constitution worked to devise a "science of politics"; a method to take abstract principles of government like power, liberty, and public good to their tangible manifestations in the divisions, functions, powers, and limits of the Constitution. These men saw the Constitution as an ingenious political/mechanical device.
Even as the lawmakers of the new republic were creating their masterpiece, another type of institution-alization was taking shape in the U.S. and Europe. The industrial revolution was organizing people and resources in it's own manner.
Jefferson believed civic virtue & material prosperity were mutually exclusive.
Indolent pleasure-seeking habits of luxurious living subvert qualities of frugality, self-restraint and self sacrifice needed to maintain a free society. Therefore, any society that wishes to maintain civic virtue should approach technology with the utmost caution.
In the 1840s and decades since, the notion that industrial development could be shaped or limited by Republican virtues faded from common conversation, finally derided as romanitcism, and pastoralism.
Taking place of this belief came the belief that the pursuit of economic advantage is actually a civilizing, moderating influence in society, the very basis of a stable government.
Rather than pursuing the fierce passion for glory... it is better to pursue one's self-interest, an interest that inclines one thwards rational behavior.
Framers of the constitution were convinced by this argument. Americans would act in a self-interested manner, employing the means necessary to generate wealthCompetition would provide an automatic check on concentration of power.
Thus republicanism and capitalism were reconciled at the time of the founding of the US.
By the mid -ninteenth century another idea had reinforced this pattern, the idea that abundance = freedom.
The country was rich in land and resources; people liberated from traditional social bonds were free to explore that bounty in whatever ways they could muster.
New technologies were seen as undeniable blessings; enabling the bounties to be extracted faster, multiplying the product of labor.
Factories, steamboats, railroads, telegraphs, etc., were seen as the essence of freedom, bringing the conveniences and luxuries of life to the many instead of the few.
The sheer abundance of resources in America seemed to make sure there was a surplus, giving everybody enough to be happy.
FDR stated if he could put one American book in the hands of every Russian,it would be the Sears Roebuck catalogue.
The form of technology you adopted made no difference, if you had cornucopia in your grasp, it's shape did not matter.
America was not alone in it's quest for new technology. Great Britain had also become enamored with new technology. No concern was evident on any future complications in America or Great Britain. The belief was, any problems created by new technology could be solved by new technology.
The problem with this logic, as obvious as it may seem, was suprisingly difficult to discover at the time.
"The elementary truths of political science and statecraft were first discarded, then forgotten. It should need no elaboration that a process of undirected change, the pace of which is deemed too fast, should be slowed down, if possible, so as to safeguard the welfare of the community."
Through this process of discarding previously held cultural norms, the only concern was keeping up with the pace of "progress". The machine of progress was ok the way it was, the only thing needed was to keep it oiled and well maintained. The process would take care of itself. Either keep up with progress, or be left behind by the rest of the world, a precondition of cultural decline.
The concern now is not the effect technology has on the society, but how efficient is a given process. "By demonstrating the efficiency of a given process, it was given an aura of scientific truth, social consensus, and compelling moral truth." One problem with this is, by who's standards is a process "more efficient"?
Over the past couple of centuries,an interconnected system of manufacturing, communication,transportation and the like have arisen. Having the perspective of 20/20 hindsight, we can appreciate the way various resources have been organized. This organization is not by any particular scheme, or central plan; but bit-by-bit, industry-by-industry. This organization, a defacto constitution of sorts, the constitution of a sociotechnical order. There are several characteristics of this ordering of resources that are of interest to us.
First, is the property of central control over various events in the different technologies. Operating without any overriding checks and balances as in the US Constitution, the soctech system has, in effect become a regime, not a democracy. There is a suprising amount social control exerted over employees in these various systems, something not tolerated by the government; but, accepted mostly as a matter-of-fact within business organizations.
Second, is the tendency towards gigantism. Whether by impressive economies of scale or not, or just by the naked power of any large human organization,the trend is moving towards large corporate conglomerates. People find themselves accustomed to working day to day in environments our predecessors would call gigantic.
Third, is the way in which the rational arrangement of sociotechnical systems has tended to produce its own distinctive forms of hierarchial authority. Legitimized by the driving force of "efficiency", human roles and relationships are structured in rule-guided patterns of elaborate chains of command. Thus far from being a place of democratic freedom, the workplacehas become undisguisedly authoritarian. At higher levels, of course, professionals still claim their special authority and independence through their scientific and technical expertise. This system was a godsend to replace the social systems based on tradition and religion began to crumble. It was a godsend for inequality.
Fourth, is the tendency of large heirarchally arranged entities to crowd out and eliminate other forms of human activity. Hence, industrial techniques eclipsed craftmanship, technologies of agribusiness made small-scale farming all but impossible, high speed transportation replaced other means of getting around,and so forth. It is not merely that useful devices and techniques from the past have been rendered obsolete, but entire ways of life that employed those techniques have vanished.
Fifth, are the various ways that large sociotechnical organizations have managed to control the social and political institutions that used to control them. Human needs, markets, and and political systems that might regulate technology based systems are often subject to manipulation by those very systems. For example sohisticated marketing campaigns are now used to redifine people's needs to suit the product being offered. This is used as much to define presidential campaigns as much as selling Coca Cola, aspirins, diapers,etc.(with similar results)
If we compare the process through which todays sociotechnical constitution evolved versus the process employed by the framers of the US Constitution the contrast is striking. Clearly the founding fathers considered all the crucial questions in classical political thought.
"A particular feature was included in the US Constitution because they considered it and deliberately chose the result. They understood the document they were crafting would direct the growth of a nation for a good long time, so they exercised their craft carefully. To realize this responsibility required a depth of knowledge about political institutions and sensitivity to human motives altogether rare in human history. The result of their work resulted in two centuries of relativey stable government in the United States, a sign they practiced their craft well." Of course there are founding fathers of the sociotechnical constitution as well. The inventors, engineers, technicians, craftsmen, and managers who have who have fashioned the material and social dimensions of new technologies. Some of their names have become household words as well, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford and so on. Some whose names are not household words have accomplished as much. In one sense the founders of technological systems are no strangers to politics; William Mulholland's fierce fight to bring Owens Valley water to Los Angeles' desert climate is a case in point.
But the qualities of political wisdom we found in the founders of the US Constitution are woefully lacking in those who design, manufacture, and promote vast systems.Here the founding fathers have been concerned with profits, organizational control, and the pleasures of innovation, with little or no concern on the implications of their work on the overall structure of society or its justice.
For those who have embraced the formula of freedom through abundance, however, questions about the proper order of society do not matter very much. They are convinced that all technology--whatever its shape, size, or complexion--is inherently liberating. For reasons noted previously, this is a peculiar faith indeed.
It is true that on occasion agencies of the modern state have attempted to "regulate" business enterprises and technological applications of various kinds. On balance however, the extent of regulation has been very modest. In general, the rule of thumb has been if a business makes goods and services widely available, at low cost nad with due regard for for public health and safety, and a reasonable return on investment, the republic is well served.
In recent times the idea of recognizing limits upon the growth of certain technologies has experienced something of a revival. Many people are prepared to entertain the notionof limiting a given technology if:
1) Its application threatens public health or safety
2) Its fuse threatens to exhaust some vital resource
3) It degrades the quality of the environment (air, land, water)
4) It threatens natural species and wilderness areas that ought to be preserved
5) Its application causes social stresses and strains of an exaggerated kind
Along with ongoing discussions about ways to sustain economic growth, national competitiveness, and prosperity, these are the only matters of technology assesment that the general public, decision makers, and academicians are prepared to take seriously.
While such concerns are valid, they severely restrict the range of moral and political criteria that are permissible in public deliberations about technological change. Unless one can demonstrate conclusively that a technological practice will generate some pjysically evident catastrophe--cancer, birth defects, destruction of the ozone layer, or some other--one might as well remain silent.
The conversation about technology and society has continued to a point at which an obvious question needs to be addressed: Are there no shared endsthat matter to us any longer other than the desire to be affluent while avoiding the risk of cancer? To argue a moral position these days requires that one speak to (and not stray from) peoples love of material well being, their fascination with efficiency, or their fear of death. The author does not wish to to deny the validity of these sentiments, only to point out that they represent an extermely narrow mindset. For the most part we continue to disregard a problem that has been brewing from the earliest days of thew industrial revolution--whether our society can establish forms and limits for technological change--forms and limits that that derive from a positively articulated idea of what society ought to be.
As a way of beginning, the author suggests let us consider that every political philosophy in a give time implies a technology or set of technologies in a particular pattern for its realization. What appear to be purely instrumental choices are better seen as choices about the form of social and political life that a society builds, choices about the kinds of people we want to become.
Just as Plato and Aristotle posed the question, what is the best form of political society? so also an age of high technology ought to ask, What forms of technology are compatible with the kind of society we want to build?
Answers to that question often appear as subliminal themes or concealed agendas in public policy that seem to be about productivity, profitability, and economic growth. A perfect set of examples can be foundamong the dozens of sophisticated energy studies conducted in a response to what was called the "energy crisis".
What would it be?
nuclear power/benign scientific priesthood
coal and oil/ large multinational corporations
synthetic fuels/synthesised-administered by the state
soft energy/from you and your neighbors
Whatever ones position might be, the prevailing consensus required all parties base their arguments on the familiar premise of efficiency.Regardless of how the outcome might affect the distribution of wealth and social power, the caes had to be stated as meeting the conditions of technical or economic efficiency.
Much the same strategy often appears in the arguments of those who favor demicratic self-management, decentralization, and human scale technology. Because the idea of efficiency attracts a wide consensus, it is sometimes used as a conceptual Trojan horse by those who have more challenging political agendas they wish to smuggle in. But victories won in this way are in other respects great losses. For they affirm in our words and in our methodologies that there are certain human ends that no longer dare be spoken in public.
In our time, techne has at last become politeia--our instruments are institutions in the making. Because technological innovation is inextricably linked to processes of social reconstruction, any society that hopes to control it's own structural evolution must confront each significant set of technological possibilities with scrupulous care.
From it's perspective, each significant area of technical/ functional organization in modern society can be seen as kind of a regime, a regime of instrumentailty, under which we are obliged to live. Thus there are a number of regimes of mass production, each with a structure that may be interpreted as a technopolitical phenomenon. For instance, there are the regimes of television, manufacturing, communications etc.
The important task becomes therefore, not that studying of "effects" and "impacts" of technical change, but one of evaluating the material and social infrastructures specific technologies create for our life's activities. If it is clear the social contract implicitly created by implementing a particular generic variety of technology is incompatible with the kind of society we deliberately choose--that is, if we aqre confronted with an inherently political technology of an unfriendly sort--then that kind of device or system ought to be excluded form society altogether.
What the author is suggesting is a process of technological change disciplined by the political wisdom of democracy. It would require qualities of judicousness in the populace that have rarely been applied to the judgement of instrumental/ functional affairs. Faced with any proposalfor a new technological system, citizens or their representatives wuold examine the social contract implied by building that system in a particular form. They would ask penertating questions such as... How does this technology fit with the best idea of who we are and who we want to become as a society...Who will gain and lose pwoer in the change...Are the conditions produced by the change compatible with equality, social justice, and the common good...? The previously concealed importance of technological choices would become a matter for explicit study and debate.
A crucial failure in modern political thought and political practice has been an inability or unwillingness even to begin the the project the author suggests here; the critical evaluation and control of our society's technical constitution. The silence of both liberals, and Marxist theorists is obvious in this area. Each group wishes to create more abundance by whatever technological means (or monster) available, believing each new technology to be politically benign. Many crucial choices about the forms and limits of our regimes of instrumentality must be enforced at the founding, at the genesis of each new technology. It is here that our best purposes must be heard.