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CHAPTER SEVEN ALBERT BORGMANN Feenberg and the Reform of Technology Reform is often thought to be the touchstone of the significance a theory of technology can claim.1 More precisely, the putative test is whether real reforms follow from a particular theory. Larry Hickman’s recent book illustrates the phenomenon. It ends with a chapter titled “The Next Technological Revolution.”2 In it Hickman examines the major, primarily American, critiques and theories of technology to see what kinds of reform they offer or imply—kinds of reform, nota bene, and not of revolution. The Marxist confidence that the dialectic of history will produce a revolution come what otherwise may, that the most determined opposition will merely retard it, and the strongest support will only hasten it a little, that confidence has evaporated. Hence, philosophers of technology have at least this in common when it comes to reform: it will not be easy or obvious. This understanding too is exempli fied in Hickman’s last chapter. He finds all reform proposals wanting because of their optimism, pessimism, thinness, or small scale. In other words, the suggestions, according to Hickman, overestimate or underestimate the feasibility of reform, they are restricted to just one thin layer of the technological culture, or they fail to take on the large structures of power. To this list of failings I would add the restriction to purely procedural reforms. The criteria for real reform, implicit in these criteria, are political realism, cultural depth, structural comprehensiveness, and substantive content. They are more formidable than they look. Still, the first one seems eminently reasonable . Hickman rightly points out that we must start with the conditions we 102 The Politics of Technological Transformation| actually face—hic Rhodus, hic salta, as Hegel put it. But what could possibly be the measure of feasibility or possibility? One obvious answer is that the actual is also the possible. In practice this comes to the implicit expectation that feasible reforms have to look much like the reforms that have actually succeeded. There have been three such reforms in the second half of the twentieth century —civil rights, environmentalism, and feminism. Most philosophers of technology in this country live left of center; these three reforms have their sympathy and have tuned their sense of change. Hence, any proposal that fails to resonate with this tuning simply does not register . The problem with this conception of reform is that for all its benign complexion it often takes technology for granted. To urge a socially more just distribution or an environmentally kinder production of goods and services is likely to leave technology itself unreformed. While the advocates of the first criterion fail to grasp what a genuine theory of technology needs to do, the proponents of the second and third criteria demand too much of a theory of technology, and when presented with one that claims to meet their criteria, they tend to dismiss it as essentialist. A social theory that is both trenchant and sweeping is hard to find. Sweeping generalities are a dime a dozen. Likewise, some particularly arresting and penetrating insight or other can be found in most books on technology. A celebrated example are the low bridges on the Wantagh Parkway in New York State that kept the buses of people without wheels off the parkway. But this example does not generalize well. Social discrimination become stone can be found, but it is rare.3 Usually it is the price of real estate, the expense of a meal at a fine restaurant, or the vigilance of doormen that keeps the poor from the rich. Though breadth and depth are both dimensions of one phenomenon, viz., of the technological culture, plumbing depth is the more difficult requirement. Going for critical depth is much like insisting on cultural excellence, and when it comes to excellence, philosophers and social scientists are typically silent . The chief cause of that reticence is the rise of liberal individualism, shared by deontological and utilitarian ethics alike. Absent a substantive notion of the good life, the move instinctively taken by most social theorists is a retreat to procedural proposals, to calls, for example, for participatory democracy or for decentralization. But just as injustice is compatible with due process , procedural norms can be met by a sullen and shallow society. The predicament of reform is made worse by the interrelation of the criteria of reform. We cannot tell how feasible a reform proposal is until we know its...

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