A conversation on technology and man

A conversation on technology and man GAD HOROWITZ AND GEORGE GRANT H orotcitz: What do you mean when you describe our society as a technological society? Grant: I mean that this is a society in which people think of the world around them as mere indifferent stuff which they are absolutely free to control any way they want through technology . I don't think of the technological society as something outside us, you know, like just a bunch of machines. It is a whole way of looking at the world, the basic way western men experience their own existence in the world. Out of it come large organisations, bureaucracy, machines , and the belief that all problems can be solved scientifically, in an immediate quantifiable way. The technological society is one in which men are bent on dominating and controlling human and non-human nature. H oroicitz: And out of this dominating, aggressive relationship with nature grows a situation in which human beings are prevented from existing truly as human beings. Their lives are shaped to conform to the requirements of technological progress. They thus become subordinated to their own technology. How do you mean this? In what ways can we see it? In what ways are we as human beings damaged by the technological relationship with nature? Grant: I think that fundamentally, we don't quite know what has happened to us. vVhat I try to say in my book is that we must try to think what it is to live in modern North America. \Ve who have walked the streets of the great metropolis , and seen the giant wars of this century, and live in highly organized institutions which determine us more than we determine them, must feel the need not only to live but to know, to think our living - otherwise we are at the mercy of it. And it seems to me at the moment that we are at the mercy of the technological machine we have built, and every time anything difficult happens, we add to that machine. \Ve Journal of Canadian Studies have more science to answer the difficulties that science itself has created. Now this predicament is too enormous in the history of the race to permit one to say: I'm against it, or I'm for it. The main thing, you know, in my life, is just to see what it is. Technology is the metaphysics of our age, you know, it is the way being appears to us, and certainly we're rushing into the future with no categories by which we can judge it. Horo1citz: Do you think that the young rebels on the left are as blind as we are? Or do you see foreshadowed in the new movements among the young a more conservative attitude toward technology - perhaps a tendency to return to some notion of the. good, and to get away from the notion of empty freedom as the destiny of man? :\t some points in your writings I get the feeling that you have very deep sympathies with these currents on the left. At other times you seem to identify these currents with the very society they're struggling against. For example, at one point you say that radical protest only hardens the direction the society is already taking. Grant: \Vell, you know, obviously one has to make a lot of distinctions among the new left. This is a very large general term for a lot of people. And I know some of them and read the writings of others and watch some on television. Horo1cit:::.:: \\Tell, let me specify then, if I may. I am referring to the type of revolt that is demonstrated by so called yippies, and the type of new left ideology that expresses itself in the work of someone like "\Iarcuse. \Ve can forget about "\Iaoists and people like that. Grant: One person who has moved me very much is the yippie Abbie Hoffman. I think Hoffman is an example of a human being who is trying to reach beyond the categories of the western world and to partake of true being. I meet a lot of students who are...