The Enchantments of Technology (review)

In this intriguing synthesis, Lee Worth Bailey proposes that the apparent "disenchantment" of the world that accompanied the scientific and industrial revolutions would better be described as a transfer of "enchantments" from the natural to the technological order. With a nod to Bruno Latour, Bailey asserts that despite the technological underpinnings of modern society, "We have never been modern." The modern world is laden with hidden "enchantments," including the unstated desires, fantasies, and myths that guide technological development, research, and commerce.

Bailey insists that a variety of invisible enchantments guard the gateways to the rational-technological order. His argument is strongest when he examines the philosophical underpinnings of scientific detachment and objectivity. He notes that the technological project's aim, from Francis Bacon on, has been to "subject" nature—to cleanse it of spirit and posit it as nothing but brute matter. The scientific worldview required a new "disenchanted" metaphysic and Descartes eventually offered one, when he insisted on the sharp distinction between "subject" and "object" that became enshrined as a ruling cognitive assumption of modernity. Enlightenment epistemology reframed "Being" as neutral matter, meaningless beyond its use value. As an adjunct to this conquest of nature and its mysteries, Enlightenment epistemology likewise conquered the "self," isolating a reasoning subjective consciousness from earlier modes of "being-in-the-world." This modernist worldview, which encouraged what Bailey calls the "brain in a vat" model of selfhood, inevitably heightened alienation and encouraged, in compensation, a nihilistic will to power often channeled through technology.

Bailey strengthens this argument with his discussion of the rise of the camera obscura and magic lanterns as modernizing technologies. The camera obscura provided an analogue for a disembodied sensibility, one that gained sense impressions from a distinct material realm. The phantasms of the magic lantern, ironically, strengthened this epistemology: "The magic lantern exhibits the philosophical notion that a purely internal psyche pro-jects subjective feeling outward onto a soulless world of objects" (p. 78). In this way, new technological developments strengthened the construction of a cleansed world in which isolated "subjects" confronted "objects."

Throughout this work, Bailey, a professor of religious studies and philosophy, is admonitory, insisting that our worldview with its hidden enchantments and enshrinement of reason is pathological. He develops his argument with chapters that look at key enchantments that have guided technological development: speed, the Titanic, flight, and "Robogod." These chapters graft social critique to the history of technology. For example, the lust for speed, or the "rush," has guided transportation technology, as isolated consumers seek a "sublime" state behind the steering wheel. The chapter on the Titanic uses this tragedy as an example of the hidden hubris of technologists. In his chapter on flight, Bailey insists that the history of aviation and aeronautics has a barely hidden spiritual subtext. A chapter on robotics, or "the Pinocchio Project," points to the millennialism dreams rampant in the artificial intelligence and robotics community.

Throughout, Bailey is prescriptive. He bases his position on phenomenologists such as Husserl and Heidegger who rejected the simple subject– object dualism and proposed a return to the notion of Being. He also cites Gregory Bateson, Morris Berman, and other thinkers influenced by environmentalism. Bailey's effort to define "deep technology" overlaps with countercultural and environmentalist critiques of materialism. He strains to avoid pop jargon—rarely, for example, resorting to the word "holistic"— yet urges much the same program. Although he makes vague mention of international organizations and self-imposed ethical codes growing from within the technological communities, his prescription falls into the realm of the therapeutic as he argues that it is up to individuals to see and experience the world in its greater complexity, without the blinders of guiding enchantments.

The Enchantments of Technology is a useful synthesis of philosophy, religious studies, and history. Undergraduate engineering and science students, who might indeed have their eyes opened to...