Abstract
Every second we present ourselves with an extraordinary puzzle. How is it that in a culture that equates progress with technological advances, and where technology screams ahead at a terrific pace, we remain anxious, ill at ease, afraid of solitude? We should be happy because what we wish for is either here now or will be in a few nanomoments: if we’re anticipating a technological epiphany, we won’t be waiting long. Yet the more we put our faith in the interconnected machines of efficiency, bureaucracy, Big Science, and high technology, the more ill at ease we become. If we hope to soothe our ills, we turn, paradoxically, to more machines—get connected, we tell each other, and get the new device to carry with you so that your connections never stop. We demand that machines (including state apparatus) function in reassuring ways for us, accomplish our desires for attachment, and provide meaning for our lives. In the last few years we have hailed increasingly fluid systems like Web 2.0, Facebook, Twitter (each a reduction of its predecessor) as new ways of touching one another. We keep adding each other to networks of networks, but don’t seem to draw any emotional sustenance from that practice. We have embraced the pharmacology of social control (attention deficit or hyperactivity disorder drugs) instead of dealing with the causes such effects suggest, while the drum beats from the gun lobbies grow ever louder: we seek externally imposed control but pair it with a deep paranoia. Each time our minds and, pardon the romantic notion here, hearts, are distressed, we look for a rational solution that emerges from what Jacques Ellul called Technique.
Few thinkers have carried forward Ellul’s work on the puzzle of who and what we are as beings in the world more than Willem Vanderburg, Professor of Engineering at the University of Toronto, Canada. Vanderburg’s recent books (The Labyrinth of Technology [2002], Living in the Labyrinth of Technology [2005]) now have a superb sequel in his 2011 Our War on Ourselves (University of Toronto Press). Those who find themselves, ironically, too pressed for time to read Vanderburg’s other excellent books can leap right into this one with no introduction. The book stands alone, beginning with a concise discussion of our current societal technological joy and personal anomie, and continues by examining how we symbolize the world and our subsequent acceptance of its desymbolization. Vanderburg’s book is designed to be read by specialists and nonspecialists alike: the specialist will bring much from their area of knowledge, but will be introduced to other deep areas (economics, cultural concerns) that may be less familiar. The whole idea here is that we must once more begin talking to one another; more, we must set aside technology to have these discussions and have them in person so that we can see and feel what we mean to each other. The book is not a luddite attack on science but a recipe for the reintegration of human beings into our world so that we are not, in Thoreau’s words, the “tools of our tools.”
Our War on Ourselves both diagnoses and prescribes remedies for the technological and social problems in which we find ourselves mired here in the early 21st century. While the book’s chief focus is not on how one coerces a mass population, Vanderburg caustically identifies the urgent problem of “integration propaganda whose bath of images is as close as we can come to a substitute for a way of life.” While it at times turns directly to focus on the way engineers (of all varieties) are trained, and how that training might be altered, in large part the book addresses a general, thoughtful audience of concerned citizens, and lays out a history not only of our sociological, anthropological moment but also of the many and severe difficulties we face living in a world organized for, by, and around technology. The book charts a direct path to its final chapter where it lays out a number of possible solutions we might undertake in order to handle our current social, cultural, and ecological situation(s).
What is perpetually astonishing about Vanderburg’s work is the breadth and depth of his knowledge. The references comprise a list of key works in sociology, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and science and technology studies that have been published over the last 65 years. Each chapter walks methodically through the appropriate scholarship, whether the discussion is about how to redraft curriculum, rethink our cultural assumptions about what “truth” means, or examine how bad engineering design affects the world. This book is a staggering display of scholarship, backed by years of deep consideration of the topics (economics, politics, high technology, the web, spirituality). It is written by someone from a hard science discipline, someone who, rather than being territorial and defensive, is foraging and eager to learn of new ways things might be done to steer human beings away from the disastrous course we currently pursue. The criticisms and diagnoses of science are all the more powerful because they come from an accomplished professional in the field, someone who insists on holding us to the way things are rather than the way we’d like to imagine them. This is a book written by a specialist for people who need to relearn the power of the generalist, who must understand that true answers will come from seeing things holistically. The author’s grip on a huge variety of texts in their contexts is almost overwhelming: the discussion of economics is followed by cogent and articulate disquisitions on what cultural studies lost when it forgot Raymond Williams and Mircea Eliade, and turned instead to postmodern thinkers who had already surrendered the world to machine culture. There are dozens of similar examples. Only a few scholars in a generation are capable of drawing together the phenomenological net as successfully as can Vanderburg. Here is the whole nightmare of our situation laid out for us in translucent prose. The writing is democratic and inclusive. Jargon is explained and set aside in favor of plain speech: the author’s goal is to communicate, not impress; this book is about message and solution, not ego and problem. The book benefits readers in fields as diverse as media studies, anthropology, and economics, but most of all must be read by the world of the sciences. It most powerfully recalls C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures (1963) that addressed itself to both sides of the cultural divide.
There may be times when the reader initially reacts with a sense that the author has forgotten a social issue, or has misinterpreted texts. His claims that many forms of media create passive viewers doesn’t mean that he is ignorant of audience participation theories following in Stanley Fish’s wake. Rather, Vanderburg sees in postmodern claims a sort of desperation to fit in, to explain why irony, if it cannot save us, can at least amuse us as we fall into the abyss. Vanderburg shuns irony for passion and reminds the reader that good intentions and postmodern self-awareness are simply not enough: they must be completed by action, commitment to change, and significant revision to curricula across the board. One of the points that the author handles with the greatest dexterity is the way children and teens, particularly, use their cell phones or more accurately “mobile devices” for texting rather than calling. The mobile device epitomized by the iPhone or Blackberry is really a handheld computer more than a phone and is used more for text sending than speech. Here we have another problem where McLuhan’s philosophical children have returned to using text, even creating something of an argot, if not a new language of signs, but are perpetually connected to their devices. Are children and teens still engaging in desymbolization? Indeed they are, as where the technology goes, alienation slides in right behind it. Facebook and virtual social networks are only one of the places where the text is rewarding.
What accompanies this issue of networks is the subject of being alone. As Vanderburg has said, “Being alone with a computer is somehow different from being alone.” The computer promises an infinity of network avenues down which the isolate may travel, all the while seeking comfort and company. Vanderburg forces us to evaluate how space-collapsing technologies like social networks and their attendant messaging functions operate; he is as concerned with the estrangement we suffer at the hands of multinational corporations and banks that have so ill-served not only the public but also the communal good. It is community that is Vanderburg’s greatest worry, which is why he concludes with a discussion on the future of education. The book is not a jeremiad but rather a book of possible solutions that are as pragmatic as they are difficult. At the heart of the issue is our willingness to put down, for at least a short while, our toys, and our increasing sense of entitlement for ever more efficient systems. Vanderburg calls on what might be called old-fashioned qualities: patience, learning for learning’s sake, a robust curiosity about the world, and a passion to make our fellow human beings more alive in their daily endeavors. There must be daily meaning to what we do and the way we proceed, or else we’re going ahead only toward the comfort machines can provide. These seem like the same values espoused by the cultural or extreme right. Yet they are shot through, in Vanderburg’s world, with complete, unstinting acceptance of difference of all kinds. Vanderburg takes for granted that we will begin by respecting sexual, religious, age, and race differences: that’s the easy part—it is only then that the hard work of connecting, and staying connected, with each other begins and must continue.
Our War on Ourselves represents an enormous investment of thought and care about passion and love for the world. It is a remarkable achievement of long-term scholarship and takes its place rightly alongside other crucial texts about what it is to live (or try to) in our world. It is an urgent book, a huge advance into the kind of humanistic studies that have unfortunately gone out of style in the last two decades. The book is a deeply serious, beautifully organized inquiry into the way we must regain our lives, if we care about the planet and its inhabitants. It is state of the art, and must be read and reread.