Abstract
This article explores the social and historical conditions under which “people changing technology” overshadows that of “technology changing people” through its influence on human life, society, and the biosphere. Social construction and determinism are thus two sides of the same coin. However, both ignore the inseparability of thoughts and action from lives, lives from communities, and communities from their historical journeys. This hides from view the possibility of technology becoming a secular myth, in the sense of cultural anthropology. The current discipline-based intellectual and professional division of labor treats the living world as if it were structured the way technology is. As a result, human life has become “digitized,” since the process of industrialization transformed human life and society to make the computer and information revolution both possible and necessary. It has also misdirected our sense of responsibility for technology.
Keywords
Painful Memories
Perhaps the ideological fog that began to shroud technology shortly after the Second World War may be lifting a little as a consequence of certain features of our civilization becoming less easy to dismiss. Nevertheless, to be branded a technological determinist or pessimist continues to halt any discussion regarding one of the most pressing issues we all face in our various disciplines and specialties. Those who inquired about the far-reaching effects technology was having on human life, society, and the biosphere were, almost without exception, branded as determinists or pessimists who lacked faith in technology and hope for the future. It was a great secular religious divide. Perhaps the time has come to revisit the fundamental question of our responsibilities for our technological creations.
The concepts of technological neutrality, determinism, and autonomy may be interpreted as actual or potential, social or historical relations between a society and its technology. For example, almost all traditional preindustrial societies created and evolved technologies and their associated artifacts that bore the stamp of their time, place, and culture. Were this not the case, much of archaeology would have been impossible. Even life and death situations bore this stamp. Every community made swords differently, even though in battle their performance was paramount. In other words, for much of human history, societies were able to shape their technologies according to their cultural values and the necessities imposed by local conditions.
At some point during the process of industrialization, this must have changed. Schumacher (1975) found it necessary to create the concept of an appropriate technology, presumably because he felt that most of the technologies he encountered were inappropriate with respect to the values of the cultures that employed them. This should have come as no surprise because our technology today is more universal than it is culture specific in character. The implication is that we no longer feel it necessary or desirable to impose our historically very different values, or that we encounter something in these technologies that makes this subjection difficult or impossible, or both. In the same vein, humanity invented the concept of sustainable development because that kind of development could no longer be taken for granted as a consequence of an incompatibility between contemporary ways of life and the biosphere, depending as we do on a more universal science and technology.
During the last hundred years we have created a discipline-based approach to technological knowing and doing in contrast to previous approaches, which were embedded in experience and culture (Vanderburg, 2005). Disciplines such as fluid mechanics, heat transfer, stress analysis, operations research, process engineering, and circuit theory have the same mathematical basis all over the world. Hence, the more our contemporary technology depends on these disciplines, the more universal will be its character; and the greater this universality, the higher its level of inadaptation to a place and a culture. Somewhere along the way the relations between societies and their technologies have become transformed.
The Spectrum of Possible Relations Between Society and Technology
I will briefly summarize a previously developed classification of the possible relationships that can exist between societies and their technologies (Vanderburg, 2005). As a consequence of our being a symbolic species, the relations with our surroundings are always reciprocal. We affect our surroundings as we express ourselves in our behavior. Some of these expressions may become regarded by others as among the best creative responses to particular situations. As more people imitate and creatively adapt them, some responses may find their way into the vocabulary of a language, the working technology of a society, its institutions, and much more. Together, these adaptations evolve the cultures and ways of life of our societies. By a culture I mean the symbolic design for making sense of and living in the world that is passed on from generation to generation by means of socialization—a design that encompasses all the creations of a community. Culture is distinguished from everything acquired from biological evolution (Vanderburg, 1985). The reverse interaction between people and their surroundings involves the symbolization of these experiences by means of neural and synaptic changes to the organization of our brain-minds. These affect us in subtle ways of which we have little or no conscious awareness but which, over the course of generations, can lead to cultural mutations. In other words, as people affect their surroundings, these surroundings simultaneously affect them.
In the course of industrialization, our surroundings were influenced by technology in unprecedented ways. Every year people were enveloped by more machines. Every year, these machines became larger and faster. Every year, there were more factories and offices full of machines; and jointly, this led to an ever greater economic output and people being surrounded by more and more technological artifacts. Moreover, all this could not happen without industrial centers. These created a new urban habitat, which interposed itself between an ever greater portion of humanity and what was left of nature (Vanderburg, 2002). Today, almost every daily-life activity is directly or indirectly influenced and/or sustained by one technology or another, and our surroundings have become an urban-technological-information life-milieu, which has interposed itself between human beings and the previous two life-milieus, namely, nature and society (Vanderburg, 2005). It would appear, therefore, that as industrialization advanced, “people changing technology” was accompanied by a growing influence that may be designated as “technology changing people.” The latter influence is bound to be more and more universal because of the discipline-based technological methods and approaches. When our life-milieu is permeated by technologies of all kinds, their joint influences on the organization of our brain-minds, by means of which we symbolize our lives in the world, are bound to be substantial. Since we do not directly experience these modifications of the organizations of our brain-minds, there is a tendency to live as if our psychosocial and cultural makeup (human nature, as it were) is relatively constant and that change is caused by what we experience directly. For example, we continue to behave as if a mass society is much like any human community, except that mass production, mass consumption, and mass media have been added. Doing so creates the illusion that we have gained a lot through all the possibilities offered by our smartphones, computers, social networks, and so on; and that we have given up very little if anything, to make room for all this in our lives and communities. However, almost everything that has occurred during the last two centuries may be regarded as a transformation of human life and society, which has made the computer and information revolution both possible and necessary (Vanderburg, 2011).
It is possible to arrange the relations between societies and their technologies along a spectrum where, on the one end, they involve technologies that are highly culturally and environmentally very appropriate, while on the opposite end, the technologies are much more universal in character and thus inadapted to a local time, place, and culture. On one end of the spectrum, the influence people have on technology is greater than the influence their technology has on them, while on the other end, the reverse is the case (Vanderburg, 2005). Concepts such as technological neutrality describe the end of the spectrum where people have the most decisive influence, while concepts such as technological determinism and autonomy may describe relationships between societies and their technologies in which the influence of the latter on people appears to be the more decisive one. In the middle, we encounter the technologies of the so-called underdeveloped societies, which are neither traditional/cultural nor universal. Industrialization thus appears to have expanded the possible range of relations between societies and their technologies in which the influence of technology on people may be greater than the influence they exercise over it. There may have been earlier tendencies in this direction, creating what Lewis Mumford (1968) referred to as megamachine societies.
In suggesting these possible relations, nothing definitive has been established. Each particular relation between a society and its technology must be carefully assessed by social and historical analyses. Such analyses must establish to what extent technological development can be explained in terms of the values and aspirations of a society and to what extent these values and aspirations were accommodated to it. Because of the reciprocal relations that exist between people and their surroundings, there can never be an absolute neutrality, determinism, or autonomy. There will always be the two kinds of influences we have referred to as “people changing technology” and “technology changing people.” It should also be emphasized that where a particular relation between a society and its technology fits on the above spectrum can never be determined philosophically. Moreover, this characterization is not value-neutral, resting as it does on our universal acceptance of the fact that slavery is not an acceptable form of human life. If it is found that technology changing people appears to be the most decisive influence, we have identified a situation where technology alienates people. Our freedom must always be examined in relation to what alienates us and vice versa.
The Possibility of an Autonomous Technology
When a social and historical situation appears to be characterized by “technology changing people” having a much more decisive influence than “people changing technology,” there may be strong social and historical tendencies toward technology being a decisive factor, but this does not make it deterministic or autonomous. Before the relationship between a society and its technology can be designated as such, three additional changes must take place. First, the scope of the role of technology must be greatly expanded to cover much of the way of life of a society. Second, as the limits of the role of a technology diminish, a culture must bestow on it a very high, if not the highest, value. Third, the growing role of technology in human life implies a diminished role for culture in general and for knowing and doing based on symbolized experience in particular. We will briefly examine these three conditions, which must occur before there can be any question of an autonomous technology.
From Technology to Technique
Max Weber (Gerth & Mills, 1963) was the first to warn humanity of the threat posed to its freedom by an entirely new phenomenon he called rationality, which was beginning to take shape during the latter half of the 19th century in the industrializing societies of Western Europe. Although the contemporary anthropological concept of culture did not yet exist, the rational approach was implicitly recognized as being very different from the cultural approach based on the symbolization of experience. Moreover, this rational approach was becoming coextensive with the cultural approach, as it had already spread to science, industry, the military, and the state; and there was no reason to believe it would stop there. It went hand in hand with the new ways of organizing human activities by means of organizations that Weber called bureaucracies. Since the work of Weber was unknown in France until after the Second World War, Jacques Ellul (Vanderburg, 2002) independently warned against the rise of the phenomenon of technique, roughly half a century later. Simply put, he observed that the technical approach had come to dominate the cultural approach in almost every sphere of human life. My theory of culture (Vanderburg, 1985) was an attempt to provide an account of how the symbolization of experience by means of a culture had guided human communities prior to the rise of rationality and its mutation into technique. It would be a serious mistake to identify rationality or technique with technology. Both phenomena have at their core an approach to knowing and doing that is fundamentally different from the one based on symbolization and culture (Vanderburg, 2005). However, neither the rational approach nor the technical approach can ever replace the cultural approach, on the basis of which babies and children continue to learn to make sense of and live in the world, and which continues to be essential for living the remainder of their lives. During the second half of the 20th century, the phenomenon of technique had grown to the point that, in addition to “people changing technique,” there was a considerable reverse interaction of “technique changing people” (Vanderburg, 2005). This latter reverse influence was much greater in scope and depth than “technology changing people” could ever be. It has resulted in a fundamental transformation of the role of symbolization and culture in human life (Vanderburg, 2011).
Technique and Myths
Before there can be any question of an autonomous technique, its symbolization must undergo a dramatic change. Several aspects of this symbolization manifest themselves in our daily lives. In contemporary mass societies, the symbolization of our experiences of science, technology, and technique create mental images, which the mass media help turn into public opinions and worldviews. Furthermore, this symbolization relates everything to everything else in our lives and our world, and these relations are expressed by means of metaconscious values (Vanderburg, 2005). These can explain why most laws are spontaneously obeyed and how the morality of a community evolves along with its way of life. What these metaconscious values may be for science, technology, and technique may be induced from the following thought experiment. Suppose that tomorrow morning we woke up in a world from which science, technology, and technique had been removed. Who would we be? How would we live? And, what would our world be like? Surely our lives and our world are unthinkable without these things, in which case they have made us and our world who and what we are. These human creations are unlike anything else in our experience. They are so fundamental and essential that intuitively we sense and behave as if they are the most valuable entities we know, to the point that few, if any, people can think of something more important for our society. Does this mean that science and technique are the scientific equivalent of the cultural gods of the past: the creators and sustainers of our world? In other words, these human creations may well be attributed the status of secular myths (in the sense of cultural anthropology) and play the same roles in our contemporary cultures.
Whenever I have asked professional audiences to provide me with a brief list of some of the things contemporary science may never know and what technique may never be able to accomplish, they have a difficult time coming up with ideas. Does this put us in the situation so well described by Maslow to the effect that, if your only tool is a hammer, all your problems look like nails? Would any of us hire a contractor who is convinced that the only tool he or she requires is a hammer? Banging away at a cracked window or a leaky toilet would only create destruction. We would only hire such a contractor if we were convinced that the hammer was omnipotent in its abilities. Elsewhere, I have argued that this is exactly the situation our civilization finds itself (Vanderburg, 2005). When was the last time we decided that a technology was inappropriate for the situation and that we had to find a different approach? If this is the case for technology, is it also the case for technique? Living as if some of our creations appear to have no limits is to treat them as the omnipotent gods were treated in the past. Something that is extremely important is turned into an absolute good.
Finally, our civilization is characterized by a confusion between the regulation of technology and “technology-bashing.” Our dilemma is the following. If our civilization lives with its most powerful creations by treating them as possibly the greatest good in our individual and collective lives, and if we have difficulty conceiving their limits, how do we deal with situations that appear to contradict this as a consequence of science and technique doing harm to human life, society, and the biosphere? The most common way of dealing with people who see these contradictions is to dismiss them as technology “bashers” or to brand them as subversive liberals, tree huggers, or pessimists. It is the secular equivalent of how heretics were treated in the past. At the same time, we would not dream of accusing our thermostat of “bashing” the furnace, even though it is constantly “criticizing” its effects on room temperature. We know that without this “criticism” the furnace could not serve its purpose of keeping us comfortable as indicated by the set-point on the thermostat.
Another common reaction is the admonition to the effect that we must be realistic. Every technology has exhibited a variety of problems during its early phases, and most of these are later resolved. If this were not the case, we would not be where we are today. Hence, there is no need to worry. Besides, if we do not develop or adopt this or that technology others will, and our nation will slide into backwardness. Such a “realistic” approach leads to the above reaction to technology. Every technical possibility must be pursued, and whatever problems occur must be accepted as an inevitable part of development. There can be no question of asserting our values. In other words, there is no longer the equivalent of the set-point on the thermostat in contemporary mass societies. All that remains appear to be the values that are symptomatic of “technique changing people.” With our values and aspirations thus accommodated, we end up serving the very entities we created to serve us. We have simply changed the form of humanity’s ongoing struggle between freedom and alienation. The only thing that is new is that our civilization has convinced itself that it is free from all of that because it is essentially secular.
From a historical perspective, the likelihood that we are indeed becoming a secular species appears remote. Before there were any settled communities, when people lived by food gathering and hunting, the human group was immersed in the life-milieu of nature and all their moral and religious expressions reflected this life-milieu having become the central myth or sacred. When societies interposed themselves between human groups and nature, the society became the primary life-milieu, and moral and religious expressions became rooted in this new sacred. Today, our scientific, technical, information, mass media, and urban life-milieu is of our own making and thus may give rise to a secular sacred and myths (Ellul, 1975). This very possibility remains largely hidden behind a fundamental methodological error. We almost always examine the influence technology has on human life and society in terms of the influences of its constituent elements: nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, communication technology, and so on. It is the equivalent of attempting to understand the influence water has on paper in terms of the influences of hydrogen and oxygen! The table of contents of a great many books on the subject of technology and society manifest this error. This is not to say that there is any problem with examining the constituents of technique one at a time, and important insights can be derived from such analyses. However, a higher level of analysis is also required before we can understand where we are taking science and technique, and where these creations are taking us by their vast influence on our lives.
From Symbolization to Discipline-Based Approaches
Finally, before there can be any question of an autonomous technique, there needs to be a growing reliance on discipline-based approaches to knowing and doing at the expense of culture-based approaches rooted in the symbolization of human experience (Vanderburg, 2011). The growing dependence on discipline-based approaches to knowing and doing can be traced back to the late 19th century when, the technological approaches embedded in experience and culture by means of symbolization, ran into severe limitations in industry (Vanderburg, 2005). The Germans were the first to find the solution. It turned out to be a strategically important component of the phenomena of rationality, and later of technique. Discipline-based approaches were successful because technological products, processes, and systems are built up from interacting domains in which one instance of a single category of phenomena is used in a repetitive manner to produce a single subfunction. In this way, each domain transforms the inputs received from another into the outputs to be received as inputs by the next domain so as to constitute a chain of subfunctions, which has the desired result as its final output. For example, electrical circuits are designed in such a way that all but electrical phenomena are kept at bay, and the same is true for chemical phenomena in the chemical industry. However, examining and manipulating the world one category of phenomena at a time is not well suited to dealing with situations in which several categories of phenomena make nonnegligible contributions. This happens to be the case for almost any entity we encounter in our daily lives, including factories, offices, schools, and hospitals, as well as for the ecosystem in which we live. Any entity involving human life or other life forms is characterized by the mingling of many different categories of phenomena, with the result that no situation ever repeats itself in quite the same way. Therefore, discipline-based approaches are highly problematic.
How then is this discipline-based intellectual and professional division of labor applied to the entities of our world? It can only be done by means of the following triple abstraction. First, the entity must be abstracted from the world by replacing it with the inputs received from it and the desired outputs returned to it. Second, the many categories of phenomena involved in the transformation of these inputs into outputs must be dealt with according to the disciplines of the practitioners involved. For example, the transformation of sick people admitted to a hospital into people on the mend is known very differently by doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, nutritionists, medical lab technicians, information specialists, accountants, security personnel, cleaning staff, human resources, public relations, and so on. The third abstraction resolves the dilemmas faced by all these people as to how to conduct their involvement, since none of them have the experience or the specialized knowledge of the entire entity. Nevertheless, they must adjudicate between alternative courses of action in terms of what is best. They must do so within their own domains of competence and the single category of phenomena associated with each domain, and put this to use to obtain the greatest desired outputs from the requisite inputs, as measured by output-input ratios, such as efficiency, productivity, and profitability. What these ratios cannot measure is how striving for this kind of performance affects the way a single category of phenomena mingles with the others and how they jointly affect the entire system. In other words, this triple abstraction removes all participants from an overall appreciation of what is happening, with the result that they have no choice but to concentrate on performance without any idea of how they are affecting the whole, which was formerly assessed by cultural values. Trapped in the triple abstraction, they are also unaware of the undesired consequences that flow from their decisions, because these fall mostly beyond their domains of expertise. As a result, ways of life organized on the basis of this intellectual and professional division of labor tend to succeed brilliantly at improving performance and fail equally spectacularly in assuring that the results are compatible with, and evolve harmoniously with, everything else. Applying discipline-based approaches to hospitals is paradigmatic for all other institutions, including universities.
Specifically, contemporary knowledge infrastructures built up from disciplines have three additional limitations. First, because these specialists are so disconnected from the intermingling of the many categories of phenomena that make up human life and the world, they can neither prevent nor substantially reduce the undesired consequences of their decisions. These must therefore be dealt with by other practitioners in whose domains of competence they fall. The result is a “system” that first creates problems and then compensates for them by the addition of mitigating technologies and services. In a remarkably short time, this results in a system that is top-heavy with layers and layers of compensation. Second, discipline-based approaches are incapable of going to the roots of the problems they produce in order to prevent or greatly reduce them. The required negative feedback loops are precluded by a discipline-based intellectual and professional division of labor. There is growing evidence to suggest that our economies have been turned into anti-economies, which extract rather than produce wealth. The costs incurred in the production of wealth have caused net wealth to decline. It has transformed traditional societies into mass societies, which have difficulty sustaining individuals and groups. It also continues to undermine the life-sustaining role of the biosphere (Vanderburg, 2005, 2011). Third, this discipline-based intellectual and professional division of labor is virtually incapable of coming up with genuine solutions to many of the problems we face because most of them require a better balance between performance and the context in which this performance is exercised. For example, transportation engineering has substantially improved the efficiency of our transportation networks. However, these gains have been swamped by the growth in the demand for mobility. So-called demand-side solutions are beyond the reach of traffic engineering, or that of any other discipline, for that matter. It would require an integrated approach that would also involve land-use planning and ensuring that the new urban forms are liveable and sustainable. These efforts must contribute to a reduction in the demand for mobility. This cannot be done effectively by the current discipline-based approaches.
These characteristics of our current knowledge infrastructures have a powerful desymbolizing influence on experience and culture. We are a symbolic species that has evolved in a world where everything is related to, and evolves in relation to, everything else. We are now behaving as if our lives and our world are organized in the same way as classical or information machines, which are constituted of distinct domains dominated by a single category of phenomena. Almost all the successes and failures of our civilization can be understood in these terms. We succeed at improving the performance of almost anything but do so at the expense of its compatibility with everything living (Vanderburg, 2011).
Although the above is but a brief summary of arguments developed elsewhere in great detail, the evidence for an autonomy of technique rests on a growing number of developments that we did not foresee or desire and that we tolerate as a consequence of “technique changing people.” What is the use of an economy that extracts rather than produces wealth? What is the point of a mass society that inadequately sustains human life and undermines the quality of human groups and communities? What is to be gained by undermining the biosphere, on which all life depends? Surely, our discipline-based intellectual and professional division of labor, which gave rise to the phenomenon of technique, has effects on human life and society that are ultimately in no one’s interest.
The autonomy of technique is rooted in discipline-based approaches to knowing and doing, which we hold to be totally reliable relative to the approaches based on symbolization. These roots are protected by secular religious attitudes because contemporary cultures treat science and technique as myths in the sense of cultural anthropology. These discipline-based approaches are disembodied by having been separated from experience and culture through processes of desymbolization thus separated from life as a relating of everything to everything else, they are guided by performance measures taking the form of output-input ratios that “evaluate” everything in itself separated from everything else. Our secular contemporary myths specify the relationships between discipline-based approached to knowing and doing and their culture-based symbolic alternatives that are essentially restricted to our personal lives. As a result, the autonomy of technique ultimately depends on a secular religious competence in its omnipotence backed by secular myths.
The Triumph of Everything Digital
The computer and information revolution may be regarded as one of the primary symptoms of how deeply human knowing and doing has been transformed as a result of the shift from a primary reliance on culture to a primary reliance on technique (Vanderburg, 2011). Here we can highlight only some aspects in order to gain a deeper understanding of a parallel triumph: that of the image over the word and the widespread acceptance of the digitization of almost every aspect of human life.
All traditional preindustrial cultures successfully managed the contradiction between the characteristics of human life and the world apprehended through seeing, and those apprehended through experience and culture. The former were managed by making them subservient to the latter. It implied a decision, that making sense of and living in the world by means of symbolization was more reliable than doing so by seeing. The word was more reliable than the image for getting a good grip on our lives and the world.
Industrialization as a total transformation of both technology and society changed all that. It greatly expanded the “world” of machines, industrial processes, and human work, reorganized in the image of machine by the technical division of labor, the role of the economy in society, and so on. This “world” was not dialectically enfolded, as was the symbolic universe of any traditional preindustrial society. Out of necessity, it had to be apprehended through seeing. Consequently, the approaches to knowing and doing best suited to this “world” had to be separated from experience and culture and organized in terms of disciplines and specialties (Vanderburg, 2011). Gradually, the hierarchy between the word and the image became reversed in favor of the latter.
There are five primary differences between the “world” apprehended through seeing and the one apprehended through language and culture (Vanderburg, 2011). First, everything we see exists in its own space separated from everything else we see. Any point in our field of vision can be one thing only, to the exclusion of everything else. Consequently, this “world” implies a principle of noncontradiction. In contrast, the world of language and culture is dialectically ordered, and any living whole is enfolded into many others. For example, each experience is symbolically enfolded into a life by neural and synaptic changes to the organization of a person’s brain-mind, which transforms this experience into a moment of that person’s life. Similarly, that life is enfolded into the lives of many others through a variety of social roles (Vanderburg, 1985).
Second, because we see everything in its own space separated from everything else, the visually apprehended “world” also implies the principle of separability. No enfolding occurs in this world. No such separability occurs in a world apprehended through symbolization, which seeks to relate everything to everything else. As a result, the meanings and values of everything are enfolded into those of everything else.
Third, since everything we visually apprehend can be separated from everything else, it is possible to define it on its own terms. Definitions can be closed. No such definitions are possible in the world apprehended through language and culture, the knowledge of which grows by everything being dialectically differentiated from everything else.
Fourth, because the visually apprehended world implies noncontradiction, separability, and closed definitions, everything within it can be measured and quantified. Doing so opens the door to mathematical representation and applied logic. Such mathematical representations will be logically consistent internally, and also externally consistent with what they represent. None of this is possible in our apprehension of the world through language and culture, where enfolded wholes have meanings and values that overlap with those into which they are enfolded and with those from which they are internally constituted. Consequently, these meanings and values have multiple dimensions, some of which may be ambiguous and even contradictory.
Fifth, because the visually apprehended “world” implies the principles of noncontradiction and separability and the possibility of closed definitions, its complexity can be built up one constituent element at a time. Each additional element will not affect any of the previously added ones. In contrast, the complexity of what we apprehend through language and culture grows by progressive differentiation. It emerges out of undifferentiated stimuli. It is a relational complexity that cannot be assembled one discovery at a time (Vanderburg, 1985). The concept of distinct and separate facts is thus unthinkable.
Elsewhere (Vanderburg, 2005) I have shown that the process of industrialization involved a progressive unfolding of the symbolic universes of the societies engaged in it. It necessitated the separation of knowing and doing from experience and culture, thereby creating a powerful desymbolization of human life and society. What this means is that the characteristics of the world apprehended through language and culture gradually appeared to resemble those of the visually apprehended “world.” The more this desymbolization developed, the more human life and society was prepared for the computer and information revolution and the more these technical developments became utterly necessary. In other words, the unfolding of human life and society through desymbolization amounted to a kind of digitization that soon was unable to advance without an exploding use of computers and their associated technologies. Traditional societies, with their dialectically enfolded cultural universes, had an extremely limited use for computers, while the so-called industrially advanced societies became so highly unfolded through desymbolization that they became deeply dependent on flows of digitized information to sustain their ways of life. The extent to which human life and society is able to make use of, and depends on, information technology is a measure of its level of desymbolization and its corresponding diminished reliance on symbolization and culture. To put it simply: the dialectically enfolded order of a traditional culture cannot be digitally represented because this would involve the possibility of being both zero and one in a dialectical mode. To be digitized and mathematically represented, a cultural order must be separated from experience, desymbolized, and thus unfolded.
Conclusion
This brings us to what could turn out to be the wager of the 21st century. Babies and children continue to learn to make sense of and live in the world through symbolization by means of a language and a culture. As they encounter television, computers, and the discipline-based sciences in high school, they experience an all-pervasive desymbolization of their lives (Vanderburg, 2011). Consequently, technique depends on human cultures, without which human life as we know it cannot be transmitted to future generations, while it desymbolizes these cultures at the same time. How far can this desymbolization of human life and society by technique advance without destroying what has made us human until now? In our personal lives, we continue to be a symbolic species, while in our ways of life, we have all but abandoned our reliance on symbolization. Humanity has already admitted that the biosphere may not be able to sustain our ways of life. This century will ask the question as to whether these desymbolizing ways of life can sustain human relations, groups, and societies. It would appear that most of us find this very difficult, given our reliance on antidepressants, alcohol, and drugs. However, we prefer to treat these as moral issues on which we declare war as opposed to their being symptoms of a gigantic experiment on what it is to be a symbolic species. If this experiment fails, will humanity be able to mutate into something that is viable? The desymbolizing pressure of technique on human life and society may well cause us to be the losers in the wager of the 21st century.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.