Philosophy
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Voltaire said that work keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and poverty. So why is it so hard for many young people to choose a job from this extensive list? (NB: I’ve had to do a certain amount of guessing in coming up with the advantages and disadvantages for each job.) Here’s an analysis that may help to answer this question. Finding work that appeals to one or that suits one has been a challenge from time immemorial. Of course this assumes that one has some degree of choice. The problem doesn’t arise for a slave or a feudal serf because your work is determined by your master. Where there is choice, the choices are partly determined by circumstances beyond your control. Such circumstances include the century you were born in, the country you were born in, your parents, your health, your talents and interests, existing opportunities, industrialism, automation, advanced technology, whether or not your civilization is in decline, and last but not least, dumb luck.
Many of the above circumstances have remained constant over the centuries, but there are four that have appeared quite recently for the first time: industrialism, automation, advanced technology and, in the opinion of many observers, a new kind of creeping totalitarianism. Whether or not our Western technological civilization, which has spread over the entire globe, is in decline is a matter of spiritual perspective and historical interpretation. But for reflective adherents of the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, it seems very likely that our civilization is headed for a Divine chastisement, for we have broken the first commandment, “I am the Lord thy God, Thou shalt not put strange gods before Me.” Two of these strange gods, idols that we worship above all else, are a growth economy and technological progress. There’s a symbiotic relationship between them: they support one another, and, in the short term, accelerate one another. The requirement for a growth economy to grow if it is to remain healthy, and the need to obey technology’s first law, ‘If something can be done it must be done,’ impacts almost every job.
Setting aside the possibility of a Divine chastisement (notwithstanding biblical stories of floods and captivities) in favour of the principle that there are no rewards or punishments, only consequences, what consequences can be seen or predicted as a result of making economic growth and advanced technology our primary social goals and the criterion for human well-being? According to the opinions expressed by French philosopher Jacques Ellul in his 1990 book The Technological Bluff—I think a better translation would have been “The Technology Trap” or “The Technology Con,”—and also others, some of those consequences are as follows:
The harmful effects of technology are inseparable from its beneficial effects.
The phenomenon of congestion is one of the unavoidable but undesirable consequences of technology. Each element of technology may be useful, but the totality crushes the individual and dislocates social life.
At each stage in its development technology raises more and greater problems than it solves.
Having created the problem of unemployment advanced technology is hardly likely to solve it. Politicians and economists who believe in a radiant technological future are dreamers.
Technological society leads to increasing numbers of people who cannot adapt to the inhuman rhythm of modern life with its emphasis on specialization. A class of people is growing up who are unexploitable because they are not worth employing even for the minimum wage.
The constant appearance of new technologies eliminates qualified workers who cannot readapt and acquire new professional skills. Wherever there is automation there is proportionately more unskilled than skilled labour.
Technology does not allow harmonious economic development. Every big technological innovation calls into question whole sectors of traditional economic activity.
If every worker produces more in the same time, there are only two solutions; either reduce personnel or reduce the hours of work.
Automation threatens to render possible the reversal of the relation between free time and working time: the possibility of working time becoming marginal and free time becoming full time. The result would be. . .a mode of existence incompatible with the traditional culture. Advanced industrial society is in permanent mobilization against this possibility.
Herbert Marcuse
According to Juliet Schor’s, The Overworked American, 1992, half the people with jobs are putting in 50 hours a week. North Americans work a month more now than they did in the 1950s, a month more than most Europeans do today, a good month more than Europe’s medieval serfs, and a good two months more than those slackers in ancient Athens.
The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.
C. Northcote Parkinson
Contrary to what pacifists and other humane persons would like to believe, wars, when they break out, tend to be popular. They offer the illusion of an escape from the boredom which is the lot of, particularly, technological man.
Malcolm Muggeridge
Politicians are always inclined to take the advice of experts, to accept the conclusions of technocrats.
The astonishing cultural ignorance of the technocrats, and of those politicians in thrall to technocrats, leads them into disastrous errors of judgement about human nature.
Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.
Sloan Wilson
Politicians are not cynical, but extremely sentimental and credulous. They will believe anything, of themselves or anyone else.
Malcolm Muggeridge
Consumer capitalism is dedicated to the proposition that production is good in itself, no matter what is produced. The net result is the massive production of absurd, empty and useless items, which we nevertheless take utterly seriously since we earn our living from them and dedicate our leisure time to them.
Industry has to produce at all costs, no matter what risks it entails. The state, in its desire to protect economic productivity, soothes the public with assurances. The public is ignorant and impotent and finally accepts the little-known risks as the price they have to pay for the pleasures that consumer technology hands out to them.
Dorothy L. Sayers
A little work directed to a good end is better than a great deal of work directed to a bad end.
Bertrand Russell
A gadget is a very complex device whose utility is totally out of proportion to the investment in time and money it involves. The gadget is now the main industrial product and an unlimited source of profit.
Technology, like so much else, is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Furthermore, by its own development it contributes to the diminishing of economic returns.
Contrary to popular belief and uncontested dogma it is not countries that have devoted most money to research and development that have the highest rate of productivity.
Technology has made possible the building of extraordinary machines that are beyond our social and economic capacity. The Concorde, for example, was a financial disaster from every standpoint and taxpayers had to make up the loss incurred by each flight.
Some vast scientific enterprises (such as the Large Hadron Collider) serve only to advance scientific knowledge and nothing else. Scientific discoveries do not necessarily give rise to practical applications. Science often remains on the plane of knowledge. That is not a bad thing in itself, but we shouldn’t try to justify the billions spent on these projects by inventing benefits that may not exist.
There is a mania for exploits, for technological achievements. This mania is partly an expression of pride and the desire for national prestige.
A great deal of modern entertainment consists of hymns of praise to technology.
It is now generally admitted that science is not neutral, and technology even more so. As a system evolves it imposes its own logic.
Technology produces more technology whether it makes sense or not, whether it’s needed or not.
Absorption in technology leads to a shortage of time.
Modern gadgets speed up society and make it more fragile, but they do not truly better the individual lot.
The media extols every gain in speed as a success, and the public accepts it as such. But experience shows that the more time we save, the less we have. The faster we go, the more harassed we are. I know that I will be told that we need to have all these means at our disposal and to go as fast as we can because modern life is harried. But modern life is harried because we have the telephone, the fax, the jet plane, etc. Without these devices it would be no more harried than it was a century ago when we could all walk at the same pace. “You are denying progress then?” Not at all; what I am denying is that this is progress.
Historically, technology has gone along with centralization and the concentration of power. “Without automobiles, airplanes, and loudspeakers,” said Hitler in October 1935, “we could not have taken over Germany.”
All needs, it is said, are cultural, so that a supposedly artificial need, when absolutely anchored in a culture (like the need for a car), is just as pressing as a “natural” need.
Of all the fruits of technology the automobile alone is beyond criticism. Some people are opposed to television and some to the computer, but almost none to the car. But the car is not simply a useful device like an umbrella. It ‘motorizes’ society utterly changing it in the process. Much of the urban environment has been planned in such a way that it is no longer livable without cars.
A new road does not respond to a demand but creates it.
Approximately one hour in five is worked in order to own and operate a car.
The computer is a gadget whose usefulness is far less than technology’s cheer leaders would have us believe. Yet even though it’s only a gadget, it can turn the world and humanity upside down and send us in the direction of nonsense.
Computer technology is leading economics into a world of greater and greater abstraction.
Enthusiasm for computers is not based on the usefulness and efficiency of computers, but on the illusion they give of being intelligent. But real intelligence consists of efficient preoccupation with essentials.
The proliferation of children who can reach the heights of computer proficiency brings to light a basic feature of the computer itself—it is infantile.
The computerization of our society is motivated by the same reason that motivated its industrialization. Not human well-being, but profit. All else is pretext and justification.
We may see a kind of state terrorism forcing people to become computer literate [what was written 35 years ago is coming to pass].
People who are deluged by information find it harder and harder to make decisions. An excess of information tends to paralyze the decision-making process.
An excess of information causes disinformation by the flattening out of all information. It becomes difficult to pick out in the flow what is important and what is ephemeral.
Excess of information goes hand in hand with a culture of forgetting. It is not a case of informing ourselves but of being fed information.
By and large the messages of advertising are not conceptual but subliminal. Advertising acts less by the creation of clear notions and definite opinions and more by enveloping us in a haze. There is less and less talk and more and more manipulation.
Advertising that explains too much misses the mark. It has been found long ago that advertising must not argue a case.
Those who are most susceptible to propaganda and advertising are the intellectuals, while the hardest to reach and to budge are those who are rooted in traditions, whose ideas are fixed, and who live in a relatively stable environment.
Happiness now consists of meeting needs, gaining wealth and culture and knowledge. It is not an inner state but an act of consumption.
Modern entertainment encourages us to live life vicariously. Once the habit is engrained the experience of empty time, which an earlier generation would have filled with conversation, relations with others, reflection or reading, becomes traumatic. Life will always appear empty to those who have no inner resources.
Technology doesn’t know where it’s going. That’s why it’s unpredictable and why it produces in society a general unpredictability.
The greater the power, the harder it is to master it.
The state is the prisoner of the technology that it thinks it directs.
When you place your faith in a thing like technology you make that thing your master.
People in the West have a belief in the absolute power of science. This is now the central theme rather than truth or happiness.
Civilization in the best sense merely means the full authority of the human spirit over all externals. Barbarism means the worship of those externals in their crude and unconquered state.
G. K. Chesterton
All science, all art, even human reason itself must serve the will of nature.
Adolf Hitler
Once and for all, we are not born free; and we never can be free. When all the human tyrants are slain or deposed there will still be the supreme tyrant than can never be slain or deposed, and that tyrant is Nature.
George Bernard Shaw
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
Mary McCarthy
The modern project of underwriting [altruistic] love with [institutional] power has failed.
Ivan Illich
The philosophy of the absurd leads to nihilism since if nothing has meaning, then nothing has value. The philosophy of the absurd has penetrated much more deeply than we realize and created a climate in society as a whole in which certain insidious things can develop.
For more than a century we have been descending step by step the ladder of necessity, the ladder of fate.
Technology is hurrying us into a situation of catastrophe.
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