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Technology and Culture 45.2 (2004) 479-485



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Technology and Its Discontents


Samuel C. Florman, a civil engineer and author well known for his deep admiration of good engineering and for defending technology against its detractors in works like The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, Blaming Technology, and The Introspective Engineer, has produced what he calls a "survival" tale, but which is, in fact, a utopian novel of the old school. The story line of The Aftermath (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001) is straightforward: a comet has struck Earth, leaving civilization in ruins and plunging a handful of survivors into a new Stone Age. But readers expecting a typical disaster tale will be disappointed; this is a kind of parable, designed to show that if engineers ("the new utopians," in Robert Boguslaw's term) are put in charge technology can help make things right again, especially if those doing the righting remain aware of previous wrong turns—a point Florman heightens by making his narrator a historian of technology. The Aftermath is not so much about people surviving a global catastrophe as it is about how they survive it.

George Orwell, one of several shades that loom in the background of The Aftermath, used fiction to dramatize his concerns because fiction can persuade more effectively than nonfiction. Florman has done the same thing—and I do not mean by that observation to hold him to a literary standard he surely never set out to meet. But this move on his part, writing a novel about the future that does not amount to playing cards with a dead-man's hand, goes against the grain of contemporary utopian fiction, which tends to be pessimistic about the human prospect, especially when that prospect is married to science and technology, the twin horsemen of the modern-day Apocalypse. The Aftermath rejects the governing paradigm of utopian literature, embodied by Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, to reach back to the Ur-paradigm of Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and Edward Bellamy. In Florman's postcataclysm society, as in Utopia and The New Atlantis, knowledge—specifically, technical and scientific [End Page 479] know-how—has the potential to do good, to repair the hurts of the world.

These days such a notion is heretical. When we look into our crystal balls we are supposed to come away stunned and frightened at what lies in store for us. Florman reaches for a different conclusion. In part this is because, as an engineer, he has a practical cast of mind, as is revealed in his very approach to imagining utopia: locate a problem (potential annihilation), develop a solution (technically inclined mentalities and a willingness to work together). Florman's way of thinking is in keeping with the approach More took in Utopia, which in many respects is a chronicle of societal problems and how they might be dealt with at a more ideal remove. This accounts for why Florman stepped around Orwell and Huxley. He is much more at home with More, and with Bacon and Bellamy, all of whom believed in proposing solutions.

Well and good. But what, if anything, is there in this shift back to an older paradigm for the rest of us?

Thomas More invented utopia when he published his brief two-part book of the same name in 1516. Since then legions of writers have offered up their own ideas of what a better society might look like. The vast majority of these efforts have been published in comparatively affluent and technologically well-endowed societies; the utopian writer requires a room with a view. Scholarship on the subject is itself a sizeable cottage industry. Utopia, it turns out, is an endlessly fascinating subject. And why not? We all want to live on the outskirts of Eden.

But over the past five hundred years utopian fiction has changed. The somewhat cerebral, didactic, talky style of More (which Florman emulates), an amalgam of fiction, nonfiction, and philosophy, gave way to novels; today almost all treatments of utopia, if we ignore...

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