Does Improved Technology Mean Progress?

Abstract

Marx traces the development of the "idea that technological improvements are a primary basis for -- and an accurate gauge of -- progress" in the United States, arguing that there has been a shift from a fundamental belief in this idea to a skeptical or negative view of technology in the second half of the 20th century. The standard explanation of this shift, Marx argues, is that the public's faith in progress through technology has been undermined by conspicuous disasters related to the destructive use or misuse, unforseen consequences, or disastrous malfunction of technologies (e.g. Hiroshima, Three Mile Island, Nazi Holocaust, Stalinist terror). He sees it as something more fundamental: "our very conception -- our chief criterion -- of progress has undergone a subtle but decisive change since the founding of the Republic, and that change is at once a cause and a reflection of our current disenchantment with technology." He sees the modern skepticism about technology (in the 1980s)—an antitechnocratic view—as a growing moral critique of the debased, technocratic vision of the progressive worldview has slowly gained adherents since the mid-nineteenth century. He contrasts the ENLIGHTENMENT BELIEF of the 18th century, which held that progress in science and technology should be in service of liberation from political oppression, with the TECHNOCRATIC BELIEF which emerged during the 19th century and detached scientific and technological progress from the goals of social and political liberation, emphasizing that progress in science and technology are themselves sufficient and reliable basis for progress. He argues that the DISTINCTION BETWEEN ENLIGHTENMENT (or REPUBLICAN) AND TECHNOCRATIC (promoted by industrialists and their suporters) BELIEFS is useful for sorting reactions to new technology. Like Jefferson, he suggests that when a new technology is proposed, we should judge its worth by asking what the PURPOSE of the technology is and EFFECTS may be. TECHNOLOGY, he concludes, MAY MEAN PROGRESS, but only if we ask: PROGRESS TOWARDS WHAT? What do we want our technologies to accomplish beyond immediate goals like efficiency, reduced cost and labor, etc.? GENUINE PROGRESS, he concludes, following the Enlightenment view, is SOCIAL PROGRESS. Tracing ideas about progress back to the ENLIGHTENMENT/REPUBLICAN era in the US, Marx argued that improved technology associated with the new factory system emerged with the forumulation and diffusion of the modern Enlightenment idea of history as a record of progress (see Rosalind Williams on this, as well). The fulcrum of the modern American worldview is the assumtpion that history is driven by the cumultative and inevitable expansion of human knowledge of and power over nature, which was expected to make possible improvmenets in all the conditions of life. Because the modern Enlightenment idea of progress as developed in the US and France, was also a revolutionary doctrine, its adherents also believed that new sciences and technologies were not ends in themselves, but instruments for carrying out social and political liberation. One of the interesting outcomes of these values was that they not only promoted technological development, but constrained it. For example, Thomas Jefferson did not want the European manufacturing system to come to America because he [in a technological determinist way] believed that a factory system would inevitably lead to the emergence of an urban proletariat, which was in opposition to his liberatory politics. By contrast, adherents of the 19th century view of TECHNOCRATIC IDEA OF PROGRESS (e.g. Daniel Webster) spoke for the industrial and business elite and saw TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION SUFFICIENT CAUSE in itself, assuming that HISTORY WORKS THROUGH CONTINUOUS, AND CUMULATIVE PROGRESS. For Marx, the detachment of technological progress from values of social and political progress was an INTERMEDIARY STAGE in the IMPOVERISHMENT OF THE 18TH CENTURY WORLDVIEW, for its adherents tended to see improvements in power, efficiency, and rationality as ends in themselves. Seen in this way, the technocratic view is that technological progress is sufficient in and of itself. Linked, e.g., to Fordism. And yet, even as the technocratic view held sway in the late 19th century, the REPUBLICAN VIEW REEMERGED IN OTHER FORMS, like the "political idioms as utopican socialism, the single-tax movement, the populist revolt, Progressivism in cities, and Marxism and its native variants." An ADVERSARY CULTURE emerged with a CRITICAL RESPONSE to the technocratic vision of progress, motivated by critics of industrialism, who saw it as dislocating and foreboding, what Thoreau called, "improved means to unimproved ends." Marx, then, locates the CONTEMPORARY US DISENCHANTMENT with technology not to technological catastrophe simply, but a shift in the idea in progress itself: "This moral critique of the debased, technocratic vision of the progressive worldview has slowly gained adherents since the mid-nineteenth century, and by now it is one of the chief ideological supports of an adversary culture in the United States."