As quotee of the following post, I wish to comment on it.
However, I beg everyone's indulgence that I do not
try to figure out who said what in my response.
Ed Goertzen wrote:
>
> ============Edward G commented: and at the end of the post appended an
> apporopriate and important section, (pp 46) from "technopoly" by Neil Postman
>
> John wrote:
> Regarding "A TECHNOCRATIC ASSESSMENT OF SCIENCE AND MORALITY"
[snip]
> Hi Brad,
>
> Your December 10th email was most interesting and worthy of comments.
> You [Brad] wrote: “I am well aware that I could not survive "in the wild", and
> that I'd probably be long since dead if it wasn't for antibiotics, etc.
> I am not against technology.
[snip]
>
> John's Comment:
> In writing this you kind of replied to my focus on the change
> in lifestyle that occurred in our scientific-technological age as
> compared with that which existed for millenniums. I added to that
> thought that we live in a unique age and the answer to the problems of
> our unique age calls for drastic changes. To my knowledge, Technocracy
> stands alone in understanding this unique age. Those people who are
> classified as “liberals” certainly fail to understand modern times, our
> scientific-technological age.
I am currently reading Robert Musil's Diaries. Musil quite
directly addressed the issue of the new millennium in his
great "novel": _The Man Without Qualities_. Edmund Husserl
addressed this issue, e.g., in what in my estimation may be
the most important text of this century (yes, I know
that's a pointless claim, since there are many highly important
contributions, some/many of which we may not yet be aware of
their having happen*ed*!): _The Crisis of European Sciences_ --
this book remains a societally undigested pointer to a
new humanity not in just a sci fi or even a marxist sense.
>
> You wrote about engineers and computer programmers and I’ll address this
> matter in the light of “men of science.” These men also live in, and are
> affected by, the operation of our socioeconomic structure our “Price
> System,” and therefore wear two hats, one as a scientist and the other
> as a businessman/woman. As a businessman/woman, they can be just as
> nasty as any other businessman/woman. In the business community,
> nastiness is all pervasive, it’s a stock-in-trade.
Even in their scientific personae, there is a lot of pettiness
among scientists: The story of the discovery of "The Double Helix"
(DMA) is a story of shame, esp. the way a certain women scientist
was treated [sorry, I forget her name at the moment:
Rosalind Franklin????] whose work was
crucial and who shortly after the discovery died of cancer] --
Crick and Watson did not comport themselves in a decent way, at
least according to what I've read.
>
> You [Brad] wrote: “I agree. Anent merchandising, I have the idea of a society
> in which everybody chose everything on the computer in such a way that
> nothing would ever get produced that didn't get
> consumed. In WWII, my father was in the Army Air Corps. He said they
> had a sign in the mess hall:
>
> “ ‘ Take what you want. Eat what you take.’ ”
>
> “(Almost sounds like "From each according to his abilities, to each
> according to his needs" -- now that I think about it....)”
>
> John's Comment:
> Your expression above is commonly accepted as
> communism/socialism. The people that compose this group – liberals –
> find anything short of “doing things for the common good” to be morally
> wrong. Technocracy is on the opposite end of the spectrum from this
> group and as a matter of fact has nothing in common with them. One of
> Technocracy’s statement is “The liberal is the last resort of the stupid
> and incompetent.”
I believe this was a major point of The Unabomber's Manifesto (I've
read it, and it's worth reading -- unlike some of the knee-jerk
reactions to it).
>
> ============Edward G commented:
> John seems not to have a clear comprehension of liberalism, confusing it
> with neo-liberalizm.
>
> The concept of liberalizm is that of freedom, especially individual
> freedom. It was born at the beginning of the 1st millenium with the concept
> of individual salvation. It remained cupid until the Protestant Reformation
> allowed it to begin to mature.
Interesting idea.
>
> The Protestant Reformation wrested the "Keys to the Kingdom" from the
> Papacy and offered it to anyone who would avail themselves of the opportunity.
>
> One who did was Henry VIII.
Another instance of The Sorrow and The Pity?
>
> Shortly thereafter the concept migrated to the area of governance and with
> Charles I's beheading the "Divine Right of Kings" followed the keys to the
> kingdom into the public arena.
[snip]
> While a good case can be made for individual (subjective) and relative
> morality, it is only a starting point.
> Individuals are notably impotent when it comes to propagating the species.
> It takes two to tango!
This strikes me as a rather inconsequential comment -- my guess is
that even Ayn Rand probably "coupled" with someone or other
at some time or other (right? wrong?).
> Not only two, but two with a common purpose. That's where neo-liberalism is
> left behind and real liberalism begins its progress to a civil society of
> voluntary association, that is in a development of moral rules.
[snip]
Voluntary association is the guiding principle of anarcho-syndicalism,
too.
Once again, I would urge everyone to get their friendly
librarian to get them a copy of a magisterial essay from
pre-Solidarity Poland:
Szczepanski, J. (1981). Individuality and society.
Impact of science on society, 31(4), 461-466.
[snip]
> Mind you, we are not playing “footsie” with words. In Technocracy we
> differ from communism/socialism philosophy in that we bypass morality
> considerations.
I have to wonder what "Technocracy" is. As Arnold Gehlen wrote
in his _Man in the Age of Technology_: while the technician's
work becomes increasingly necessary to the operation of
technological society, the technician's *judgment* QUA
TECHNICIAN (which is
banausically oriented to instrumental means-end calculations)
is ultimately of no value --> Gehlen does not use the word, but
classical Greek "phronesis" -- practical wisdom -- is needed
to steer the technological society, and technical training
does nothing to help a person acquire this -- even
a "PhD" (i.e., journeyman's certificate) from a prestige
university in computer science does not help: I have
long proposed that a certain university be renamed:
Harvard Tech
[snip]
> ============Edward G commented:
> The concepty of a society bereft of moral law eludes me. Moral law is the
> law to which we subscribe in order to have an organized society.
There simply is no such thing as a "technical decision", *except*
in terms of optimizing means to achieve politically/morally
chosen ends -- and, yes, technical activity also plays a
key role in telling us what are the things *about which* we need to
politically/morally decide. Even the decision to *act technically*
cannot be per se a technical decision, but rather a *human* (political/
moral/etc.) decision to act technically.
>
> To abandon moral law and place money in its place, (technocracy is but the
> logical and progressive extension of bureaucracy and buraucracy originated
> semantically as 'counting table')
And bureaucracy, while it may be *necessary* on a bloatedly
overpopulated little planet (like there is little room for
democracy on a sinking Titanic...) is the antithesis of
fully human association which, as Hannah Arendt / Habermas / et al.
argue, is an-archic in the sense that it exists only in the
free association of peers, e.g., the classical Greek polis.
[snip]
> Bunches of good cheer,
>
> Peace and goodwill
[snip]
> "The technocracy that emerged, fully armed, in nineteenth century America
> disdained such beliefs, because holy men and sin, grandmothers and
> families, regional loyalties and two thousand-year-old traditions, are
> antagonistic to the technocratic way of life.
Excuse me, but these things are also anathema to the 19th Century
American transcendentalist/Unitarian tradition, as set forth, e.g.,
in William Ellery Channing's "Baltimore Sermon" of 1819, which,
according to the 1969 reprint, was, after Tom Paine's "Common Sense",
the second most widely circulated document in America in its time.
America has better things in its past than Mickey Mouse.
[snip]
> "In reviewing nineteenth-century American history, one can hear the groans
> of religion in crisis, of mythologies under attack, of a politics and
> education in confusion, but the groans are not yet death-throes. They are
> the sounds of a culture in pain, and nothing more. The ideas of tool-using
> cultures were, after all, designed to address questions that still lingered
> in a technocracy. The citizens of a technocracy knew that science and
> technology did not provide philosophies by which to live, and they clung to
> the philosophies of their fathers.
"The citizens of a technocracy... knew that science and technology
did not provide philosophies by which to live" doesn't seem to
me right. Was America in the 19th Century a technocracy?
(Maybe it was a Robber Baron-ocracy?) If science and technology do
not provide pilosophies by which to live, then, pray tell,
what does the word "technocracy" mean to you, since you seem to
use it in a positive way? [Maybe I've got my respondents mixed up
here?]
[snip]
> The technological was the
> stronger, of course, but the traditional was there-still functional, still
> exerting influence, still too much alive to ignore. This is what we find
> documented not only in Mark Twain but in the poetry of Wait Whitman, the
> speeches of Abraham Lincoln, the prose of Thoreau, the philosophy of
> Emerson, the novels of Hawthorne and Melville, and, most vividly of all, in
> Alexis de Tocqueville's monumental Democracy in America. In a word, two
> distinct thought-worlds were rubbing against each other in
> nineteenth-century America.
There seems to have been a "tradition" in 19th Century America which
was non-tradition*al* -- Emerson, Whitman, Channing, et al. I can
vouch for it being quite possible to "grow up" in America in
the 1950s and to have no idea such a "tradition" ever existed --
I even must have gone past Harry Stack Sullivan's Towson, Maryland
home many times as a teenager, and never even have heard his
name....
> With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds disappears.
> Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous
> Huxley outlined in Brave New World.
Jacques Ellul is *one* good source here. Just about anything he wrote:
_The Technological Society_, _The Technological System_,
_The Technological Bluff_ (in chronological order
of publication....)
[snip]
> It
> makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by
> redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by
> history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit
> its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian
> technocracy." "Technopoly" by Neil Postman 1992 Pp. 46
Alas, the physics image of "singularities" ("black holes") does
seem apposite to our current devolution asymptotically
toward zero in "product cycle times", and -- I would argue --
toward the correlate of total haste resulting in total waste.
For, to quote Heidegger ("the baby and not the bathwater"),
quoting Holderlin:
The mindful god abhors untimely growth.
>
> End
>
> Peace and goodwill
>
> Ed Goertzen,
> Oshawa,
> L1G 2S2,
"Yours in discourse"
\brad mccormick
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
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