Confronting Technology

Albert Schweitzer wrote that there were three important forms of progress: technological, social and spiritual; he regarded the last as the most important, since it implies the wisdom to make the right choices about the other two forms of progress. This volume has been designed as a reader in six parts addressing the problem of technology as a whole, historical origins and critiques, 20th-century assessments and ecological critiques, and the prospects for technotopia. Sources include Plato, Francis Bacon, Thoreau, Marx, Whitehead, Heidegger, Roszak, Illich, Arne Naess and Henryk Skolimowski. There is a particularly interesting interview with Jerry Mander on what he calls megatechnology where many technologies intertwine to make new technologies. Our faculties are now evolving with our technologies, producing a new form of evolution whereby we tend to adapt and adjust to our machines rather than have our machines adapt to us. Mander does not accept the argument that technology is neutral - for instance nuclear and solar power have very different consequences, which always have to be considered in the systemic context. The volume as a whole provides a much wider critical and informed view on technology and its development than is available elsewhere. One can also observe, in terms of Iain McGilchrist's arguments about the dominance of left hemisphere thinking, that technology is a way of reinforcing this trend at the expense of the qualitative dimensions of life.