Technology Is Not Morally Neutral
Far from it. And in a technopoly like ours, it wants nothing less than sovereignty over the entire culture.
In Season 2 of the Masterpiece series, Cranford, one of the plotlines concerns the coming of the railway to Cranford. Cranford is a small English village, and for many of its citizens, the prospect of the railway poses a threat. Why? Because the culture of Cranford is not built upon speed. Its manners and mores are attuned to the slow pace of rural life. But in a climactic sequence, several of the citizens most opposed to the railway agree to take a short test ride. As the train rolls through the lovely Staffordshire countryside where part of this sequence was shot, two horses can be seen scurrying away up the hill as the train passes by. I am quite sure the appearance of these two horses was not an accident, but that the director, Simon Curtis, wanted them there in order to contrast the chief rural “technology,” horse-power, with the new technology of the steam engine.
This sequence from Cranford is emblematic of what happens in what Neil Postman—in his prophetic 1993 book Technopoly—calls a “technocracy.” A technocracy is a culture characterized by conflict, conflict between the ways of traditional tool-using cultures, like that of Cranford, and what I like to call the modern, progressive technological mindset.
In 19th-century villages such as Cranford there were plenty of tools. But they were all hand tools, and more importantly, they all fell under the moral and religious authority of the village. By this I don’t mean that ploughs and joinery planes needed to be sanctioned by the local minister. I mean that in a culture such as that of Cranford, human invention took its point and purpose from what best served the overall flourishing of the community, a flourishing that always had a moral and religious point. Yes, a manufacturer could transport his goods more quickly by train. But what did that kind of speed and efficiency, that opening up of the village to national and even global markets, mean for the common good of such a small village community? Would small manufacturers be unwittingly harmed? Would the landscape be ravaged? Would the young be tempted to move away? These are the sorts of questions that no doubted bothered small English villagers in the 19th century with the invention of the steam engine.
In a technocracy, technology threatens the moral and religious authority of a culture. Less and less are tools integrated into the life of the community. Instead, as Postman writes, “they attack the culture. They bid to become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives.”
“Technocracy gave us the ideal of progress,” Postman continues, “and of necessity loosened our bonds with tradition—whether political or spiritual. Technocracy filled the air with the promise of new freedoms and new forms of social organization.”
This ideology of technological progress continues to define us in the 21st century—but with a far more disturbing twist.
Again, although it set itself up as a rival to it, technocracy did not obliterate moral and religious authority. But with the coming of what Postman calls “technopoly,” all conflict between technology and tradition pretty much ended, with technology emerging as the victor.
Postman defines technopoly as “totalitarian technocracy.” In this phase of culture, or rather anti-culture, the ideology of progress-through-technology eliminates all alternatives to itself. A “grand reductionism,” results, “in which human life must find its meaning in machinery and technique.”
Or as Postman chillingly puts it, in a technopoly all forms of cultural life must submit to the sovereignty of technology.
Remember Christo, the artist who used to wrap stuff, like the Pont-Neuf in Paris and the Reichstag in Berlin? In a technopoly, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion all become “wrapped” by technology, making culture as bewildering and bizarre as a Christo installation.
The students in my Philosophy of Technology course are often puzzled when I tell them that technology is not morally neutral. They, and we, have been put to sleep by the bland axiom: “Technology is morally neutral in itself; it all depends on how you use it. After all, I can use my scissors to open the Amazon box that just came in the mail, or I can use my scissors to kill someone. The scissors aren’t to blame. It’s the person who wields the scissors who defines the morality of their use.”
Such thinking is naïve. It takes no account of the way human inventions come to be within a cultural matrix.
Scissors are hand tools invented by someone in a tool-using culture for the purpose of cutting hair and fabric for clothes and furniture. To use them as a weapon is precisely to misuse them. An atomic bomb is an invention of a technopoly meant to kill people, both enemy combatants and innocent non-combatants, indiscriminately. The atomic bomb is not morally neutral; its devilry does not depend upon how one uses it. That is because it is the product of technopoly, where moral and religious authority has been usurped by the desire to conquer nature.
For the modern technological mindset that characterizes technopoly, “nature” is not something with which to harmonize, but rather something to subdue, master, and possess. Nature is mere “stuff” to be manipulated in order to satisfy our preferences. This mindset can be detected as far back as the late 17th and early 18th centuries, in thinkers such as Descartes and Bacon.
A smart phone is also the product of technopoly, though certainly one less destructive than an atomic bomb. Yet I would maintain that the smart phone is also not morally neutral. In what sense? Because it is not designed to contribute to our flourishing. It is designed—deliberately or not (the point is not to judge consciences)—to sabotage our flourishing. Why do I claim this?
Because the smart phone—or at least many of its most popular apps, like social media apps—was not invented to work with, complement, or help fulfill natural human flourishing as that has been traditionally understood. A social media app, for example, is not intended to help us achieve flourishing friendships. The very design of Facebook tends, wittingly or not (and I’m prepared to acknowledge that Mark Zuckerberg was trying to do some good for the world) to sabotage genuine human friendship.
What social media apps chiefly want us to do is stay on the platform long enough so that we will buy something from the platform’s advertisers. Keep in mind that social media accounts are free, and as the man said, “When the platform is free, that means you are the product.”
So what am I doing with a smart phone and with social media accounts?
It’s an excellent question, one I ponder all the time. Here is my answer:
Just because something is compromised, even critically compromised, does not mean that there cannot be legitimate, prudential (i.e. moral) use of it.
Nonetheless, because of the compromised nature of the smart phone and social media, we always have to be ready to do battle with them, to resist their intrusions upon our genuine flourishing. There may be a legitimate purpose to the use of YouTube (“For a class project I want to watch this guy reciting Beowulf in Old English”). But we still have to resist YouTube’s very design, which is to suck us down the rabbit hole of “Recommended Videos” so that we stay on the platform and watch the ads. Because if we’re not careful, we will soon be watching a video of someone’s parrot reciting Beowulf in Old English!
There is a point, however, at which a piece of technology can be so morally compromised that no prudential use can be made of it. Such is the technology of the atomic bomb and of the abortion industry. Whether a social media platform or some other piece of technology, like AI, has become so compromised that it can longer be used in a prudential light is a question that can only be answered with continued vigilance in the form of reflection, discussion, and prayer.
But like the good citizens of Cranford, we have good reasons to be suspicious. And in certain circumstances we may even have to go farther than they do—and resist the coming technology.
PHOTO CREDIT: Steam train in Grosmont Station by Steve Daniels, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons