Imagine two cities. Generations ago, their citizens lived contentedly in the same community until a fundamental disagreement split them apart. The older, unified city was led by a group of legislators who put a priority on family, education, and the common good. They had learned from the wisdom of their ancestors and their own practical experience that these priorities brought with them a happy life. This same city also had a large group of exceptional craftsmen whose task it was to build the schools and monuments the citizens took pride in as well as the roads and docks which allowed for the commerce that helped pay for such civic works. With all of their talent, the craftsmen argued that if less money was spent on public services and more invested in manufactured goods for development and trade, their city could become even more resourceful and prosperous. But the legislators reminded them that the crafts they made helped to support the city and that the city was not there simply to support their crafts. Tired of serving this idea of the good life and fed up with the stubbornness of the legislators, the craftsmen picked up their tools, crossed the river, and started their own city.
For a long time, the two cities on either side of the river thrived in their own ways. The first city kept its modest size and economy, but its outstanding educational system attracted families to come and stay. Its citizens were happy and everyone agreed that it was a good place to live. But they were eventually faced with a major crisis caused by their neighbours across the river. Guided by the vision of those ancient craftsmen, the second city had become a centre of technological innovation, growing very large, with a rapidly expanding economy and high levels of employment. While they did not invest in public services, its citizens had become incredibly wealthy through their skill and industry. To meet the demands of its growing and crowded population, the leaders of the second city used their expertise to reroute the river to support its agricultural and manufacturing sectors, leaving what remained of the water flowing downstream polluted with waste. Unfortunately, this has made life very difficult for the citizens in the first city. Seeing no future in staying, more and more of their young people decided to leave and move to the other side of the river. Their schools half full and suffering from a degraded environment, the first city’s legislators now have to decide whether to accept an offer to join the second city that is in the process of overwhelming them. For them, it is more than a choice between two cities, but a choice between two different ways of life.
Of course in the real world we want the best of both cities: tradition, family, education, happiness, and the stability afforded by an agreed standard of the common good as well as innovation, continual growth, and wealth. Yet regrettably, most people today are forced to choose one set of priorities over the other. Unable to escape the overwhelming demands of our modern technological society, it often seems that there is no choice at all. Like the tale of the two imaginary cities, it seems we have experienced a Great Reversal. It is “great” because it is much more than an isolated event experienced in the here and now, but rather is an undercurrent of history running from the origins of Western civilization all the way to the present. It is a “reversal” because we have flipped our priorities, placing the impetuses of technology above our judgments about what makes for a good life. The major consequence of the Great Reversal is the narrowing of human thought and action so that they fit within the confines of our technological society, leaving us unable to think and act upon new ideas that may stand outside of its powerful demands.
We have been aware of a “problem” of technology for a long time. For at least the last two centuries, poets and philosophers have articulated a deepening antipathy to the transformation of both the natural world and the way we live in the wake of the industrial and scientific revolutions, as factories began to crowd our skylines and pollution from smokestacks began to clog our air.1 But, even before the industrial revolutions or the even earlier scientific revolution there was already available a much older forewarning of the underlying problem of technology. Over two thousand years ago, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle realized that human society was determined by two main governing principles, ruling virtues or “directing faculties” through which we could understand the world and our place in it. On the one hand, technical knowledge or techne allowed us to build the physical infrastructure of our communities, what the Greeks called the polis, and all of the tools and crafts we use in our everyday lives. Through the lens of techne, we see the world as something to be worked upon and organized in such a way that it becomes useful to human beings. Trees become lumber, rock becomes stone blocks for building, and animals become food and material for clothes. On the other hand, good judgment or phronesis allowed us to pass on and modify the ethos or cultural character of the polis from generation to generation. Through the lens of phronesis, we see the way particular traditions, customs, habits, and laws of a community can be applied to daily decisions, while at the same time we also consider the unique and changing circumstances of current human events. In other words, rather than viewing ethics and politics as products of technical thinking, Aristotle argued that they were instead founded on the always changing judgments of human beings. But, because phronesis embraced the diverse and unpredictable practices of human beings, it necessarily lacked the certainty associated with the products of technical knowledge and thus often left the future direction of the polis in difficult ambiguity.2
From here, Aristotle identified a tension or struggle for supremacy between these two ways of seeing the world. If techne were to become the supreme directing faculty that determined the course and character of the polis, then life and society could be produced in a predictable and reliable manner in the same way a craftsman produced his crafts. By overcoming the role of chance and the unknown, the technically run polis would be safe and secure, eliminating the uncertainty associated with phronesis. The problem, Aristotle warned, is that this would also require human beings to be treated as mere material, worked upon and organized so that they too would become predictable, reliable, and useful. It is with this problem in mind that Aristotle decided that phronesis rather than techne should be the supreme directing faculty of the polis. Even though it cannot claim to provide guaranteed results, the phronesis-run polis would still grant the room that the unique character of human beings needed to flourish. In this city, the citizens would determine the character of its crafts rather than craftsmen determining the character of its citizens.
But now Aristotle’s warning has been largely ignored or forgotten. We have chosen to live in the “second city,” so to speak. We have accepted the primacy of a technological vision of life and society and have subordinated the role of good judgment. The first and foremost objective of this book is to understand how we arrived at this place, outlining the movement away from Aristotle’s warning towards this Great Reversal of the judgmental and technical and why, in its aftermath, we face our present problem of technology. The idea here is to uncover this important but perhaps unfamiliar history beginning with a consideration of Aristotle’s articulation of the differences between phronesis and techne and then highlighting changes in the relationship between these two directing faculties as expressed by later political philosophers. So, while the majority of the following chapters are focused on examining key passages in some of the great works of political philosophy, the larger effort is to highlight the significance of this largely unrecognized history of ideas and its relevance to our contemporary technological dilemma.
Accordingly, the secondary objective of this book is to show how all of this bears out Aristotle’s warning that in a technically run polis or, put differently, in a technological society human beings become ever more worked upon as mere material and how this kind of treatment may actually bar the practice of phronesis. One way to comprehend this is to look at relatively recent breakthroughs in neuroscience and biochemistry that have given us powerful drugs that overcome chronic depression and alleviate anxiety, clearing the way for individuals to live fuller and more complete lives. With increasing skill, we are able to quantify the mind and control its function. As our ability expands, as these drugs become more prevalent in their use and broad in their application, they will no longer be just therapies to treat disease but a means to further control the function of our psychology, enhancing and manipulating our emotional and intellectual states of being. We see a similar possibility in the new field of therapeutic cloning. The discovery of stem cells that can be manipulated to develop into any type of human tissue offers great promise to cure diseases and provide an endless supply of perfectly matched organs for transplant. It is easy to see that, as our ability to quantify the foundational make-up of the human body expands, this therapy will extend beyond medical uses towards a more liberal control of the physical self, augmenting it to make us stronger and faster as well as enhancing our sense organs in any way we desire. In both instances, the original human judgments about what would make us happy and healthy are replaced by an effort to quantify and control what we think and feel. This technologically prescribed ambition may end up subordinating the original non-technological standard derived from our good judgments. Herein lays the disturbing possibility of what can be called a “technological relativism” that leads to a “technological nihilism.” If we have no directing faculty outside of technology, then future technological advancement can only be guided by the expansion and refinement of the technical means to quantify and control the world and ourselves directed towards no end in particular, whether happiness or healthiness. In turn, the manipulation of the natural world and human nature may very well transform our minds, our bodies, and the planet into something unrecognizable.
A third objective of the book is to explore the possibility of a “phronesis revival” to counter this possible future. The point is that, while we may be on the cusp of a momentous closing off or obstruction of our capacity to judge, there may still also be time to relearn its practice. This “phronesis revival” has been promoted in one way or the other by many leading contemporary philosophers and political thinkers. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Alasdair MacIntyre, to name a few, all turn to an exploration of ancient Greek philosophy and phronesis in particular in an attempt to revive ways of thinking and acting outside of the purely technical.3 Their work is inspired by a common anxiety that we have become incredibly narrow-minded in the way we live and think – filtering almost all of our thoughts, choices, and decisions through the constricted lens of technology. Because for them the modern world has closed off alternative ways of understanding and living, they have looked to the origins of our civilization – to the philosophers of the ancient world – for guidance and insight, and to revive our flagging sense of community and self. In some part, what is argued in the chapters below attempts to do the same.
As a result, this project might be considered a part of what is called “virtue theory” or “virtue ethics.” This is to some degree warranted considering that Aristotle, one of the central figures in the chapters that follow, is a common source and inspiration for many contemporary virtue theorists. MacIntyre’s 1981 classic of the field, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, for example, is an investigation of the negative consequences of the modern rejection of Aristotelian ethics and a qualified endorsement of their restoration, arguing that “the Aristotelian tradition can be restated in a way that restores intelligibility and rationality to our moral and social attitudes and commitments.”4 Similarly, this book explores whether the revival of the practice of the Aristotelian virtue of phronesis can be an effective response to the negative consequences of technology. However, in addition to a more specific focus on the relationship between virtue and technology, what is endeavoured in the subsequent chapters is an attempt to go beyond a history of the development of attitudinal and institutional impediments to the practice of virtue to also include a consideration of the prospect of the impending psychological and physiological obstruction of our capacity to learn and practice virtue. As touched upon above, the increasing effectiveness and popularity of psychopharmaceuticals and the imminent arrival of readily available therapeutic genetic treatments suggests a tipping point where traditional routes to the development of good character will become even more inaccessible and less likely to be retrieved.
This book might also be viewed as participating in a study of the history of political ideas or the history of political philosophy; especially the “historical review” section covering chapters 2 through 5. In general, such studies attempt to highlight prevalent political ideas that link or distinguish historical periods often towards commentary on the composition and character of current politics and society. This approach is well illustrated by Arendt’s The Human Condition, a wide-ranging inquiry into changing ideas about and articulations of “human activity” from the Athenian polis to the politics of the mid-twentieth century. While this present work does not claim a place alongside Arendt’s, it does share a similar breadth, spanning the period between ancient Athens to the early twenty-first century, as well as a similar method, in this instance examining the significance of changing ideas about and articulations of the technical and judgmental. And while Arendt, as well as Gadamer and Habermas, have all engaged in serious consideration of the influence of technology on political life within their larger studies, what is attempted in this book might be distinguished as a more particularly political philosophical outline of the origins and evolution of the idea of technology.
In turn, this approach also functions under the notion that prevailing theories of the meaning of the world and the place of human beings in it can have a major effect upon how we actually live. This notion stands in opposition to the environmental determinism that informs Jared Diamond’s very popular 1997 book Guns, Germs and Steel. Where Diamond argues that civilizations rise and fall almost entirely due to material conditions, such as whether they have a good climate to grow nutritious crops or to domesticate the right kind of animals, the “history of ideas” suggests that intellectual outlook in many ways initiates and directs the course of a society. For example, ideas about human liberty and equality were the inspiration for the American and French Revolutions of the eighteenth century, and it was the later spread of these same ideas that similarly inspired the rise of democratic governments throughout much of the world. So, even though there were no drastic shifts in the climates of or material conditions in these countries, the introduction of the ideas behind democracy nonetheless spurred fundamental change. This is certainly not to say that things like climate or access to nutritious food or some new tool have no role in civilizational change or human development, but instead that they are not in and of themselves the sources of that change or development. The proposition here then is that our idea about technology and how it has changed is largely responsible for the creation and growth of our technological society.
Of course, this description also suggests a further alliance with the “philosophy of technology.” Prominent philosophers of technology such as Jacques Ellul, Hans Jonas, Langdon Winner, Don Ihde, and Andrew Feenberg engage in specific examinations of the social, cultural, and political origins as well as the philosophical import of technology. A basic disagreement among these thinkers concerns whether technology is an autonomous force or a direct consequence of reigning institutional structures.5 The first approach is steeped in the idea that technology cannot be controlled or directed by humans because all our institutions and even our ways of thinking are themselves products of technology, leaving us helpless to limit its advance even as it threatens us. The second approach presents “bad” technologies (that cause pollution or ill health, for example) as the outcome of embedded inequalities and injustices within society. Because wealthy and powerful elites control and benefit from the technological infrastructure as it is, there is no impetus to develop “good” technologies. What follows might be considered a third way to think about technology. Rather than viewing it as independent from our influence or simply the tool of the establishment, the argument presented below is that somewhere along the line we began to relinquish the deeply rooted intellectual and practical capacities that allow us to understand and regulate the role of technology in our lives. In turn, we are at present left very diminished in our ability to argue against its advance and feel helpless to prevent its further infiltration into the innermost recesses of our bodies and minds even as it threatens our very humanity. Again, one of the objectives of this book is to explore whether we may still be able to recover and develop these capacities and realize that we still have time to decide how far we want to allow technology to determine our existence and our future.
To sum up then, the main objective of this book is to provide a history of the changing relationship between the judgmental and technical through an analysis of some of the great texts of political philosophy towards understanding how this history is relevant to our present concerns about technology. The second objective is to highlight how our efforts to control the natural world and human nature through the application of technology stem from the decline of judgment and the ascendancy of technical knowledge. And, as just mentioned, the third objective is to explore the possibility of the return of good judgment as a way to limit the role of technology in our lives and understand how our technological society may obstruct or impede this return.
Even though these three objectives are linked by a common or overarching argument, this book can be read in different ways. For readers only interested in problems directly associated with contemporary technology, chapters 1 and 7 are designed as wide-ranging assessments of some of the philosophical, political, and social reasons why we have difficulty in regulating its influence and explore the way in which phronesis might be an appropriate response. As first and last chapters, a good part of each is spent either laying out the argument to come or summarizing what has already been presented. Even still, they are relatively self-sufficient and can be read independently of the other chapters. Chapter 6 should be added for those also interested in other responses to the deprivations of technological society, particularly those of Martin Heidegger, as well as the way phronesis re-enters the discourse. As mentioned above, the “historical review” section made up of chapters 2 through 5 presents the main “history of ideas” portion of the book, which surveys different articulations of the relationship between the judgmental and technical in the great works of political philosophy. These chapters may be valuable to specialists with an interest in any of these texts and, more obviously, to those looking for what might be called an alternative history of the idea of technology. Importantly, the effort behind these chapters has been to maintain focus on the primary texts and each thinker’s discussion of ideas broadly related to good judgment and technical knowledge. While some relevant discussions and interpretations have been provided in notes at the end of each of these chapters, this historical review is not at all an attempt to provide an appraisal of the very extensive scholarly writing available on any one of these political philosophers. Again, the more modest but still, it is hoped, useful attempt is to highlight these thinkers’ ideas about the judgmental and technical.
Before moving on, two further notes of caution or clarification are warranted. Outside of its academic roots or relationship to a particular school of thought, this book also provides some observations on the influence of certain technologies. In chapter 1, for example, there is a discussion of reproductive and therapeutic cloning, while in chapter 7 there are brief commentaries on psychopharmaceuticals, steroids, plastic surgery, and gastric bypass surgery. There is no attempt or claim in these sections to offer in-depth assessments of the efficacy or function of these technologies as such. Limited technical details are provided, but only to give a context for how these technologies relate to the larger arguments introduced above. Furthermore, there is also limited analysis of processes and policy decisions on the regulation of particular technologies. So, while the discussion of cloning in chapter 1 looks at some of the controversy surrounding the ban on stem cell research in the United States under the Bush administration, it is not an attempt to offer a comprehensive evaluation or recommendation of specific policies or legislation. Instead, as a work of theory, it is hoped this book will prompt new thinking that may lead to a possible recovery of the practice of some of the virtues upon which our civilization is founded.