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  • Looking Back in Order to Move Forward:John McDermott, "Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals"
  • Ruth Schwartz Cowan (bio)

When the organizers of SHOT's fiftieth anniversary celebration asked me to write something for the NSF workshop at George Mason University, I decided to take seriously the motto that they had chosen in honor of the occasion: "looking back; looking beyond." What might I learn, I wondered, about the maturity of our field and its prospects for the future, if I were to re-read an essay that was once part of our communal canon, but is no longer, an essay that had played a crucial role, many years ago, in my own intellectual development, but had, in recent times, fallen into obscurity.

The summer of 1969 was a very difficult time in American national life, but for me it was something of a summer of liberation; I had no teaching obligations and had (finally!) finished my dissertation several months earlier. When the summer began, Richard Nixon had been in office for six months;Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, had decided that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable and had started talking about "a negotiated settlement"—although the United States was still bombing not just North Vietnam but also Cambodia. Streets and campuses were in turmoil. In February, Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, had called out the National Guard to quell protesters on the Berkeley campus; by May the entire city of Berkeley, not just the campus, was under military control. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the police had forcibly removed Harvard students from university offices, and in Hartford, Connecticut, black youngsters had rioted for three days and nights. The Black Panthers had become a national movement and several dissident members of the group had been [End Page 199] murdered. At Cornell, in April, armed black students took over the student union, vowing not to leave until the administration had agreed to set up, of all things, a racially segregated dormitory—and in response, a fair number of faculty members had refused to meet their classes until the administration had removed from the campus every firearm, and every student who had carried a firearm.

In July, Senator Edward Kennedy will drive off a bridge in Chappaquid-dick, drowning Mary Jo Kopechne. A month later Charles Manson and his followers will go on a killing spree in Southern California, hoping to stimulate a race war, and Woodstock will take place. Later, some of the Weathermen, after the failure of the Chicago "Days of Rage," will go into hiding (only to emerge, a few months later, by blowing themselves up in a Manhattan townhouse). And in the midst of all this carnage and mayhem, John Lennon and Yoko Ono will record "Give Peace a Chance."

My intellectual adventure as a historian of technology began during and because of that very distressing summer, the summer of our national discontent. A few months earlier, in response to the chaos on the campus at which I was then teaching, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, some junior members of the faculty had come up with the idea that in order to make our courses more "relevant" to our students, we would each teach a freshman seminar on a subject we knew nothing about. We would, in the language of the time, teach a process rather than a subject; that is, we would learn along with our students, thereby teaching them how to learn. This notion now seems ludicrous to me, after more than forty years at the lectern, but at the time I had only been a university instructor for two years, and I took it very seriously.

In the spring, preoccupied with typing and editing, I had chosen a topic for my seminar, "Technological Determinism," but by the end of June, with my degree now in hand, I was beginning to feel the need to create some sort of syllabus, or, at the very least, some initial reading assignments with which to begin the fall semester. Well, yes, I thought, it was a good thing to learn along with my students, but if I really knew nothing at all about my...

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