The liberating role of modern technology

One of the lasting insights from Andrew Feenberg is that “modern societies emerge from the release of the power of questioning against traditional forms of thought.” Out of this unfolding came a new way of looking at things, whose impact has made science and technology the foundation for our modern culture. The traditional belief system of human society has since been replaced by a techno-rational sociopolitical order.

The 18th-century Enlightenment presented a mechanistic worldview. For Feenberg, the views of Galileo and Newton provided a model that explored the “machinery of being.” The French philosopher Rene Descartes saw science as man’s way of unmasking the secrets of nature. By means of experimentation, scientists predict reality, thereby putting man at the center of the universe. This background serves as the impetus as to how the emergence of modern technology has defined our Western way of life.

In its modern context, Feenberg says, there are two ways of looking at modern technology —the substantive and the instrumental viewpoints. From a substantive point of view, as explicated by Martin Heidegger, technology appears as autonomous from man. Technology has taken over all forms of values. Heidegger called this unfolding “enframing.” Modernity holds man in its spell by means of technical rationality, reducing human thinking into the calculative, forcing the German thinker to exclaim that, in the end, “only God can save us.”

From an instrumentalist point of view, technology appears as no more than a tool. As means to an end, devices are considered value-neutral. Nothing inherent is hidden beneath your cellular phone. The organization of society sets the purposes for modern technology. For instance, Americans often say that “guns don’t kill people”—a way of reasoning that seeks to justify gun ownership. Of course, the trouble with such an idea is that in reality, owning a gun influences human behavior. The human being and the gun as a device, according to Bruno Latour, are intertwined realities.

Karl Marx argued that human history is driven by its technological development. For him, modern technology fuels the chasm between the bourgeois and the proletariat insofar as the former owns and uses tools in order to control people; this control subjugates them and diminishes, if not annihilates, the value of their freedom. For Marx, technology controls humans. Factories are designed in such a way that efficiency is optimized in order to expend all human strength of workers.

Herbert Marcuse argued that technical manipulation often leads to social alienation. Consumer culture dominates the individual and transforms his desires into false needs. Happiness comes as some form of “delayed gratification.” As such, humans no longer think in a rational way. The individual is reduced to some form of technical rationality, and for this reason, he or she becomes one-dimensional. This suppression of human individuality was described by Marcuse as a catastrophe.

With the advent of consumer culture, people now see themselves, according to Feenberg, as devices regulated by some operating manual. But the problem is not with technology per se. The problem, Feenberg argues, is in man’s failure to establish “appropriate institutions for exercising human control over it.” Man has fallen into what Albert Borgmann calls the “device paradigm,” in which technology contributes to a “characteristic and constraining pattern to the entire fabric of our lives.” Technology, in this regard, has dominated human lives in ways that it is no longer human beings who choose but corporate interests, by means of the commodities people buy.

Modern industries make things, and the comfort these things provide is available to us. The pleasures that we seek in our modern age are manufactured as goods that consumer culture promotes. But this consumption-based economy impoverishes rather than enriches human lives. Borgmann, for instance, cites the idea of the so-called “couch potato,” or the person who spends most of his or her time watching entertainment shows on TV. The same person, Borgmann says, has diminished his or her ways of engaging with the world. Without meeting real people, faith in others is impossible to develop. Borgmann thinks that sometimes, technological innovation is “entirely parasitic.”

Yet, modern technology also possesses a redemptive character. Feenberg points to the idea of adaptability in which technology may be reformed. A more efficient MRT system, for instance, can serve as model for people-centered progress. Borgmann points to focal things in which the humanist aspect of technology may develop a positive culture of engagement for people, thereby giving technology a human face. The liberating role of modern technology thus implies the capacity of modern devices to ease the burden of people, and hopefully bring to the table the realization of the good life.

Christopher Ryan Maboloc teaches philosophy at Ateneo de Davao University. He has a master’s degree in applied ethics from Linkoping University in Sweden.