Moblog 2 - Is Tech Evil?
Posted @ [20 Aug 2005, 01:49:08 PM]
I thought it'd be apt to put a poem taken from our curriculum and paste it here:
Crow's Account of the Battle
There was this terrific battle.
The noise was as much
As the limits of possible noise could take.
There were screams higher groans deeper
Than any ear could hold.
Many eardrums burst and some walls
Collapsed to escape the noise.
Everything struggled on its way
Through this tearing deafness
As through a torrent in a dark cave.The cartridges were banging off, as planned,
The fingers were keeping things going
According to excitement and orders.
The unhurt eyes were full of deadliness.
The bullets pursued their courses
Through clods of stone, earth, and skin,
Through intestines pocket-books, brains, hair, teeth
According to Universal laws
And mouths cried "Mamma"
From sudden traps of calculus,
Theorems wrenched men in two,
Shock-severed eyes watched blood
Squandering as from a drain-pipe
Into the blanks between the stars.
Faces slammed down into clay
As for the making of a life-mask
Knew that even on the sun's surface
They could not be learning more or more to the point
Reality was giving it's lesson,
Its mishmash of scripture and physics,
With here, brains in hands, for example,
And there, legs in a treetop.
There was no escape except into death.
And still it went on--it outlasted
Many prayers, many a proved watch
Many bodies in excellent trim,
Till the explosives ran out
And sheer weariness supervened
And what was left looked round at what was left.Then everybody wept,
Or sat, too exhausted to weep,
Or lay, too hurt to weep.
And when the smoke cleared it became clear
This has happened too often before
And was going to happen too often in the future
And happened too easily
Bones were too like lath and twigs
Blood was too like water
Cries were too like silence
The most terrible grimaces too like footprints in mud
And shooting somebody through the midriff
Was too like striking a match
Too like potting a snooker ball
Too like tearing up a bill
Blasting the whole world to bits
Was too like slamming a door,
Too like dropping in a chair
Exhausted with rage
Too like being blown up yourself
Which happened too easily
With too like no consequences.So the survivors stayed.
And the earth and the sky stayed.
Everything took the blame.Not a leaf flinched, nobody smiled.
- Ted Hughes
Our lit teachers have told us that one of the central concerns of the poem is how "man is trapped by the woes he has made of his construction of the universe." and while they could go on ad nauseam about the literal value behind the poem's use of alliteration, imagery, tone and what naught, I only want to say that really, we can't say that technology is evil. Nor can we say the same for nuclear science or weapons in general. They are neutral entities made to serve man. The only thing that can possibly make it evil is the insertion of an entity that is able to carry moral values and turn it against man. What nuclear technology has given us is a greater magnitude in which we do things; the direction (yay vectors) is determined by the user.
Of course the other side of this debate would say that WMDs are evil simply because they were created to destroy. But we all know that WMD technology was intended first and foremost as a means of energy creation - only later was it adopted by the military. In any case, even if WMD are evil because they are meant to destroy, that is not necessarily a bad thing, because it involves the right of a nation to self-defense and using WMD as a form of deterrence. after all, the light saber can be used by both Jedi and Sith alike.
i think that is what George Lucas was thinking.
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Posted @ [20 Aug 2005, 06:30:22 PM]
DISCLAIMER: This post might make you think....brain cell activity is inevitable. Depart immediately for another page if cell activity is not desired at this point in time. :)
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This long post comes about in response to Quimoz's post on technology and evil. In it, he suggested that technology can't possibly be evil in and of itself - surely we must attribute evil to the human person who uses that technology? It's a question that's exercised me for quite a bit - I mean, Quimoz's position is arguably the most sane and logical thing that one could argue. But I've not been satisfied with it - it seems to me that there's got to be something more that we can say from a philosophical/ethical standpoint.
One of the big thinkers I'm aware of working in the area of technology and ethics is Andrew Kimbrell. Kimbrell was policy director with the Foundation on Economic Trends, based in Washington, some years back, together with Jeremy Rifkin, and the two of them were significant in opposing biotechnology companies when they first began gaining legal and political footholds in Washington D.C.. A lecturer and a prolific writer, Andrew Kimbrell today directs the International Centre for Technology Assessment, a little think tank that actively works on a number of fronts, including genetic engineering, global trade, food safety and environmental protection. In what follows, I'm going to try and summarize some of Kimbrell's ideas from an address he gave to the E.F. Schumacher Society (Schumacher was the famous economist who wrote the book 'Small is Beautiful') in 2000, because they strike me as really provocative.
Hot and Cold Evil
In his address, Kimbrell made the distinction between what he called 'hot evil' and 'cold evil': 'hot evil' scenarios are ones in which evil is obvious - scenarios of greed, crime, prejudice and hatred. With 'hot evil', a human hand/heart/person can easily be discerned.
'Cold evil', however, is harder to detect and pin down, because it is systemic. When we look at many of the eco-catastrophes that we're faced with today - global warming, acid rain, species extinction - the litany goes on - we can't help but ask: "which evil people are responsible for this?" And even as more food is produced, hunger increases at such an astonishing rate that close to one billion people starve every day. Who is starving these people?
Kimbrell says that this is the problem of modern ethics. He writes that: "Evil has never been so omnipresent as it has been over the past century, so perilous to the earth and to the future of humanity. Yet there seem to be very few evil people...the very idea of our society being characterized by masses of evil people seems somewhat comical. All in all, there seem to be a striking paucity of modern Mephistopheleses." He goes on to say that it's not like there are shouts of satisfaction or high-fives in corporate boardrooms at the deaths, injuries or crimes against nature that these organizations often perpetrate. So: what we have today is an evil that apparently does not require evil people to purvey it, to bring it about.
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Welcome to the Technosphere
Sociologists refer to the state that people were in prior to the setting up of cities (i.e. in the prehistoric era) as the 'natural milieu'. About 7000 years ago, human beings were able to partially separate themselves from nature - with agriculture and other basic technologies, they could exercise some form of control over nature, and thus organize themselves into larger and more complex societies - this we can refer to as 'the social milieu'. Most historians, it seems, still place us in an 'advanced' stage of the social milieu, but some sociologists, beginning with French sociologist Jacques Ellul, argue that over the 20th century, a large segment of humanity has entered what he calls 'the technological milieu'. It's no longer nature or society that dominates our lives, but technology.
Kimbrell says that the technosphere is a lot more pervasive than we think: it isn't just the massive and interconnected systems of machines we use, but the technocratic organizations (including corporations and govt bureaucracies) that are required in order to manage and run this massive global technological infrastructure. In a totally insidious way, the technosphere has become our primary environment, replacing the earlier milieus: "Our homes, workplaces, transportation, food, energy, entertainment, leisure, education, and government have all been almost completely absorbed into the technological grid. If we tally the time spent in cars, in office cubicles, in front of TVs and computers, using telephones, Palm Pilots and all our other gadgets, it becomes clear that we spend the vast majority of our waking hours with technology and working for the corporations and bureaucracies required to run the vast technological system in which we live. Each of us lives more and more in a kind of technological cocoon, where much of our action and communication are determined by, and mediated through, the technological grid. " (emphasis mine)
Further, living fully in the technosphere is now seen as the ultimate goal of human endeavor, Kimbrell argues. Look, for instance, at how we patronizingly refer to societies still living in natural or social milieus as “undeveloped" or "underdeveloped", no matter how sustainable their relation to the natural world or how sophisticated their social organization, arts, or philosophic and religious beliefs. 'Being developed' in the minds of most people around the world today means being part of the technosphere. The technosphere provides us with the basis of our collective and individual dreams and desires - from visions of an endless array of products to our hopes for new techniques that will cure all disease, feed the world, and conquer the solar system.
And so we arrive, then, at Kimbrell's central thesis, in which he links the technosphere to issues of good and evil: "Clearly, living in the technosphere raises very different ethical questions and responsibilities than did the past milieus of human existence. We find ourselves not only in a novel physical environment, the technological system, but also in a new ethical landscape...Whether it’s a hammer or a nuclear bomb or a piano or genetic engineering, technology always represents power, an extension of human power. And the question always arises, Is that power appropriate? Simply put, when power is inappropriate, evil results."
Kimbrell thus builds upon the sociological idea of the different spheres, to differentiate between the types of evil, and the evolutionary path evil has taken: when humanity was still in the social sphere, ethics tended to be a matter for the individual. Right and wrong were choices each of us could make. Evil was generated by the emotionally unstable, vulnerable, or violent individual or on those who were confused or misguided, and it had a tendency toward the irrational. While passionate, feverish “hot evil' is still clearly with us, it's been largely usurped by an automatic, systemic “cold evil" in which we are all complicit.
Kimbrell shows how contemporary theologians, too, are thinking very much about the issue. He quotes the theologian Alfred Schutze, on this evolution of ethics in our technological times:
Whereas only a few centuries ago evil, so-called, had to be considered pertinent to moral behavior, more specifically the backsliding or weakness of the individual, today it also appears in a manner detached from the individual. It shows up impersonally in arrangements and conditions of social, industrial, technical and general life which, admittedly, are created and tolerated by man. It appears anonymously as injustice, or hardship in an interpersonal realm where nobody seems directly liable or responsible. . . . It has become the grey eminence infiltrating all areas of human existence . . . .
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Anatomizing Cold Evil
One of the key features of cold evil, according to Kimbrell, is the concept of 'technological distancing' - the physical and psychic distance that technology creates between the doer and the deed. I'm going to quote a huge chunk now, because it gets really fascinating:
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In his provocative book Faces of the Enemy, psychologist Sam Keen quotes a pilot who served in Vietnam and who directly experienced “the pilot’s dilemma.” “I was OK so long as I was conducting high altitude missions, but when I had to come in and strafe and I could see the faces of the people I was killing, I got very disturbed.” Technological distance creates the faceless quality so emblematic of cold evil. Computer scientist and author Joseph Weizenbaum noted this distancing and the ethical task it creates when he critiqued a massive bombing strategy outlined by a Department of Defense science panel during the Vietnam war:
These men were able to give the counsel they gave because they were operating at an enormous psychological distance from the people who would be maimed and killed by the weapons systems that would result from the ideas they communicated to their sponsors. The lesson, therefore, is that the scientist and technologist must, by acts of will and imagination, actively strive to reduce such psychological distances, to counter the forces that tend to remove him from the consequences of his actions. (“Closing the Distance” in Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines, Systems and the Human World, ed. Richard Rhodes)
Needless to say, our military scientists and technologists have yet to demonstrate the “acts of will and imagination” called for by Weizenbaum to breach psychological distancing. Far from it. During the Persian Gulf War enemy troops and houses were viewed by pilots as so many blips on computer screens, blips which disappeared after a “hit” - a kind of desert Nintendo. Television stations such as CNN seemed particularly enamored with the images of the computer-generated “hits.” It was not until long after the war that we learned about significant human “collateral damage” caused by the weapons’ surprisingly large margin of error.
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Cold Evil and Us
What's scary is that technological distancing goes on not only in the realm of high impact military technology, but it's inbuilt into the way modern technocracies work: the way in which big businesses and government organizations function (schools, even....think school ranking and how schools justify who they take in...). Big businesses routinely make decisions about the risk of the products they manufacture. Typically, they weigh the cost of adding important safety features to their products against the potential liability to victims and the environment and then make the best “bottom line” decision for the company. More often than not, safety or environmental measures lose out in this calculation. People or nature thus become “distanced” into numerical units relegated to profit-or-loss columns. The corporations then decide how many units they can afford to have harmed or killed by their products.
We witness daily the way the modern corporation has become distanced in time and space from its actions. A pesticide company has moved to another country or even gone out of business by the time—years after it has abandoned its chemical plant—the local river have become hopelessly polluted, fish and wildlife decimated, and there is a fatal cancer cluster among the families relying on the local water supply. The executives of a tire-making company are thousands of miles or even a continent away and don't hear the screech of wheels and the screams as their defective tires burst and result in fatal crashes. One major example Kimbrell raises but which I won't go into here is the IMF and World Bank's Structural Adjustment Plans (SAPs): it's now estimated that as many as 19,000 children die every day from disease or malnutrition as a direct consequence of the SAPs mandated by the IMF and World Bank. Yet despite its horrific toll, the cold-evil practice of structural adjustment went without ethical censure until quite recently. Contrast this indifference with the public and media outrage that would erupt if a group of terrorists, driven by hot-evil hatred, killed thousands of children a day.
Cold evil’s distancing is also profoundly present in those who work for corporations and other technocracies. Think about what your parents or friends who are working do: whether they're processing financial statements at a bank, doing welding at a plant that builds military aircraft, teaching in a classroom - most people’s work represents a tiny cog in the great machine of production. As a result, we become psychologically numbed and removed from the ultimate consequences of the collective work being done. Kimbrell argues that we thus fall into what E. F. Schumacher termed “‘the sullen irresponsibility” of modern work. Moreover, even if a worker were somehow able to overcome this irresponsibility, to breach the distance and cry out against the immorality of modern production (“I reject this alienating labor. Stop the machines; they're destroying nature, society, and the dignity of work!”), that person’s employment would quickly be terminated.
Virtually all big businesses and government bodies are run in such a way that any underling who begins to demand an ethical basis for work and production is quickly punished. Each of us is caught, therefore, in a kind of job blackmail. By allowing ourselves to become numbed by inhuman, meaningless work and to become fully distanced from what we actually produce, we forsake responsibility for the consequences of our production system. We sell our moral birthright in order to “pay the bills.” Kimbrell's conclusion is pretty dire: "The distancing endemic to our huge technological system and the massive private and public technocracies that run this system have turned workers, the vast majority of us, into ethical eunuchs and even unintentional criminals."
So, Quimoz....is technology evil? Andrew Kimbrell would argue that it is, In the sense that it detaches us from consequence and it locks us into systemic forms of injustice. It's not evil in the traditional sense - rather, we need to drop the old moral lenses. With this newer form of evil, the results are there, but responsibility has been dispersed to the great masses.
Read Andrew Kimbrell's full lecture here.
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Posted @ [22 Aug 2005, 01:55:15 AM]
Admittedly, I didn’t get half of the overwhelmingly cheeeeeemmmm post based upon Kimbrell's lecture. I did digest some bits and pieces here and there and I think I’d agree pretty readily. (Maybe because I only want to understand what I already agree with, but never mind me)
Just because something bad happens, does it mean that there is an evil hand behind it?
My understanding of cold evil is the act of omitting evil as juxtaposed to committing evil. ( sorry if I’ve read it wrongly) Which has really posed the philosophical question ever since time immemorial: if you held the power to save someone –say in the case that your friend is going to fall off a cliff-, and yet chose not to – because maybe at the same time a robber was getting away with your money-, is that considered murder? Because if so, than we are all guilty. We could easily forgo blogging, and our other leisurely devices to make a little bit more money to help the starving children of
The First World wastes 7 times as much food as the amount needed to feed the third world and now, like never before, with technology, we have been granted the ability to actually end poverty in our time. All we need is some infrastructure adjustments, have fair trading treaties and give them the necessary humanitarian and development aid and than in our lifetime, we would have saved nations. But even though technology allows us to do so, many first world nations chose to neglect the problem, with the
While writing the earlier post, it had occurred to me, what than about simple handguns. Similar to the concept of technological distancing, what the handgun does is that it makes killing so much easier - all at the pull of a trigger. And while the handgun won't be the root cause of the murder, it certainly acted as a catalyst to the whole process. Than again, it might have played more than a role of a catalyst, because if tools of murder were made less available, how many (or how much) people would still attempt to take away life?
And shooting somebody through the midriff
Was too like striking a match
Too like potting a snooker ball
Too like tearing up a bill
Blasting the whole world to bits
Was too like slamming a door,
Too like dropping in a chair
Exhausted with rage
Too like being blown up yourself
Which happened too easily
With too like no consequences.
I think that is the issue than becomes about what our criteria for ‘evil’ really is than? At the moment, the taking away of life is ‘evil’ and ‘evil’ is the taking away of life. But even though weapons might be created to do exactly that, it need not be evil in itself. There are cases in which evil is necessary for the greater good. Consider Harry Truman, who was put in the difficult position of choosing how to end World War 2. His rationale for choosing the atomic bomb was that if the US had decided to alternatively invade and enter upon Japanese shores, instead of the 240 000 Japanese that had dies, God knows how many more would. Millions maybe; the propensity of a higher death toll in direct combat is so much likelier to be higher. Mathematically, moral calculus tells us that the than nuclear technology in fact 
saved more lives than it took. Death was inevitable anyways.
There are also cases in which people believe that war is jusified for a 'higher'cause. The 9/11 attacks surely are thought to be justified by Islamic fundamentalits. And yet, no one can really blame them for thinking along those lines. It is, after all, what they believe, with all sincerity and genunineness, is god.
In other occasions, military technology doesn’t only aid in ending war, but also in preventing war. One of the reasons why the cold war never escalated into a ‘hot’ war (so to speak) was because both parties, both theAnd speaking about the cold war, advancements in military technology leads to another problem related to the one above – that is an arms race (which's seeds we see growing in India and Pakistan). Knowing that weapons can act as deterrence, it would also imply that he with the bigger gun is he with the better deterrent. Both sides don’t liked being restrained by the other’s deterrent, tries to outdo each other’s deterrent and invests heavily into the technology that develops weapons. So now, the initial deterrent that could be easily attained with arms that needn’t be able to destroy the earth 50 times over has exploded into one that with mushroomed tensions, such that if war was risked, it would only take away more lives and cause more deaths when the end result with or without this unnecessary technological advancement would be synonymous.
The reason why this logic may not have applied to the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is because technology has begun to border the law of diminishing returns, where the differences in consequences of having one nuclear bomb versus having a nuclear bomb that has an amplified damage to a factor of 10 but only affects the same radius is almost insignificant. In Truman’s time, the A-bomb was able to end the war because of the disparity of power between the
I’m not sure if that was coherent, but it sure gets a load off my chest for now. =p
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in any case, i think technological distnacing makes hell lot of sense. i just sometimes wonder whether the benefits brought about by technology might outweigh the detriments. considering the purposes of which it is used, such as a deterent, it may well be a necessary evil.
But let's think about it in the sense of a corporation (not hard technology as we traditionally understand it, but which Kimbrell identifies as a key feature of the technoscape nonetheless). Corporations have their own inner logic of relentless expansion and an elimination of competition. So you may have some really nice people who hold on to key management positions in the corporation, but ultimately their 'nice'-ness or human goodness is subsumed by the dictates of the corporation's mission: to make more and greater profits for its shareholders.
So where my understanding differs from yours is that it's not really "the fault of man and his self-centred nature". The fault, really, is structural, but it has gone so deep into the structure of our society that it doesn't really make sense to talk about the issue in terms of individual choice any more. I'll need to revisit Kimbrell to find out what he says about how we can understand corporations and bureaucracies as part of the technoscape, though.
Your handgun example is wonderful - it's technological distance in a basic form. Transform your handgun into a huge military complex that houses say a hundred nuclear warheads that can be fired across the distance of a whole ocean or continent, and you begin to see how technological distance is functioning in our day and age.
Again, not sure if I agree with your comment on fundamentalism: "no one can really blame them for thinking along those lines." Here, I'm much more inclined to see the matter as one of personal choice (am I being inconsistent? Not sure.).
Also, military technology may have helped in staving off an actual war, but look at the arms race it led to (as you point out). AND we're not even through with the fallout from that yet: constant fears of Russia's nuclear warheads falling into rogue hands. Okie, enough from me for now. :)