The price of progress

In Hubris and Hybrids, Hard and Jamison adopt a posture which on the face of it attempts to mediate between unbridled technological enthusiasm and reactionary distrust of science. The former, heroic view of science and technology is one which casts all advances in knowledge as inherently salubrious to humanity, while the latter sees all such knowledge as inherently exploitative. (In the mere space allotted one cannot put too fine a point on the distinctions between science and technology. One supposes that lumping them together is something akin to throwing playwrights and linguists together in the same boat. Convenient enough, but not too rigorous. At its heart, the reading’s argument rests on the nature of applied technical knowledge.) The authors are careful in treading a middle road, recognizing the important weaknesses of both arguments. (There are moments of careless naïveté, as when describing the Pug-wash conferences (p 256); one must assume that any Iron Curtain and many Western scientists attending were carefully controlled by their respective handlers.) There is a third agency at work in the relationship between society and science, one which the authors mention repeatedly but which, in our reading at least, fail to fully critique. That agency is currency.

The implication in Hubris and Hybrids is that government co-opts science, technology and commerce in order to exercise control and wield power. Take but a single example: the realignment of American policy in the face of Sputnik is recounted as a narrative in which US government policy sought to harness technological innovation in order to foster economic growth. But Sputnik was a startling development only to the lay public who bought the propaganda of the day. In fact, the nascent American space program, perched as it was atop existing Peenemündian military launch vehicles, was the victim of American technological superiority. The US had successfully miniaturized its nuclear arsenal, in order to be able to deliver powerful warheads farther with smaller rockets. The Soviets, on the other hand, lagged behind in miniaturization. As a result their rockets had to be more powerful, as their warheads far outmassed their American counterparts. This was of course well known and understood by military experts and space program managers on both sides. When it came time to launch a satellite (and later humans), the Soviets had a significant leg up; one has only to compare Sputnik with America’s small, grapefruit sized Explorer (the first Soviet satellite was 6 times more massive than America’s first). Arguably one result of Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 speech was the commitment of billions to the private sector for technological development:

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

It might be argued that much earlier than the 1970s “… trans¬national corporations and transnational organizations have taken over much of the responsibility for setting the policy agenda” (p. 247). Kennedy’s speech, as heroic and inspiring as it was, serves as an example of a tendency already in existence. Is it the case that such projects represent government acting through the private sector, or the private sector exercising policy through government?

“…there has been a noticeable shift during the past three decades to assigning the main authority and responsibility to the private sector and the commercial marketplace when it comes to the political appropriation of technology and science.” (p. 251)

One may as well strike “political”. One may also wonder whether the commercial appropriation of technology is really a late 20th century phenomenon. As early as 1600 for example the East India Company, a commercial concern based in technology (navigation), was responsible for colonization and resource exploitation as an extension of British imperial policy. It virtually ruled India. In England, the Industrial Revolution broadly appropriated scientific and technological developments for commercial gain. And steam and electrical communication were quickly appropriated by commercial interests in order to “tame” the American West—and develop it.

“… it seemed … insufficient to support scientific research and technological development if there was not attention given to … how new ideas were actually turned into new products.” (p. 257)

In other words, commerce is, and has been since there was capital, the de facto method of defusing science and technology.

The implications are twofold: science and technology are at the service of commerce, as is government. Secondly, and perhaps more disturbingly, users of science and technology are inextricably bound up in commerce. As users of technology, beneficiaries of science, and consumers, we are bound to and benefit from social organizations whose primary interests are commerce. It is not, as the Deep Ecologists might imply, a case of “us against them”.

It is us against us.