The Technological Imperative in Canada: An Intellectual History (review)

This useful if not scintillating book traces over a century of thinking about technology through the ideas of leading Anglo-Canadian intellectuals. After an overstretched first chapter, which strains to summarize the worldwide evolution of ideas about technology from Karl Marx to Norbert Wiener, the book's structure is chronological and clear. Each chapter examines one or more prominent Canadians with important thoughts about technology, from 19th-century railroad promoters like Thomas Keefer and Sandford Fleming, through the seminal communication theorists Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, to the late 20th-century philosopher George Grant and the poet Dennis Lee. Brief biographical sketches put each individual in context. Then Francis reports his protagonists' theories on technology and generally stays out of their way.

There is a deeper thesis threaded quietly through the book. Francis names and describes a "technological imperative," a mindset or philosophy in dialogue and competition with the "moral imperative" in Canadian thought identified by Brian McKillop and others. Francis's thinkers and theorists are almost all moralists, and their views on technology flow directly from its perceived relation to morality. His 19th-century subjects embrace technology, by and large, as an engine for the advancement of Western civilization; his 20th-century subjects accuse it of corroding moral and spiritual values. Ironically, Francis argues, Canadian intellectuals helped to create the very imperative they came to fear. Over time, these thinkers inflated the meaning of the once-obscure word "technology": from a description of discrete objects (railway locomotives or telephone receivers) to a field of study (technical science and education) to an irresistible, all-pervasive force (in George Grant's words, "the metaphysics of our age"). Leo Marx calls technology "a hazardous concept." The very vagueness of the term, he says, makes it peculiarly susceptible to reification. We endow technology with unlimited powers of historical agency, embracing our seeming impotence and ignoring our own obligation to make decisions. The Technological Imperative in Canada finds many Canadians complicit in this process.

But this organizing argument is only lightly sketched and modestly advanced. It probably had to be this way, in order to accommodate the book's varied cast of characters and long chronological sweep. Had Francis insisted too strenuously on his argument, the threads connecting poet to prime minister, educator to engineer, might well have snapped.

Because the connecting threads are slender, the individual case studies of this book are often more interesting than the whole. My favourite chapters concerned the interwar period, a hinge between the uncomplicated boosterism of the Victorian era and the techno-pessimism of more recent years. Francis illuminates the impressive intellectual biography of William Lyon Mackenzie King, taught by William Ashley and James Mavor in Toronto, Jane Addams and Thorstein Veblen in Chicago, and William Cunningham at Harvard. He makes a case for King's 1918 book, Industry and Humanity, as a turning point in Canada's intellectual engagement with technology. And he reintroduces readers to other interwar intellectuals — Stephen Leacock, Archibald Lampman, George Sidney Brett, and Frederick Philip Grove — who also wrestled with the technological imperative in this in-between era, when it was not at all clear whether to celebrate or lament the advances of industry and mechanization.

Is there, or has there been, a particularly Canadian way of thinking about technology? Francis does not make a strenuous case for the "Canadian-ness" of this discourse. As his chapter on King suggests, in almost every case Francis's subjects were engaged in transnational conversations with American, British, or German theorists of technology, or at least responding to international ideas. It is not clear that there is anything distinctive or essentially Canadian about the ideas collected here, other than the frequency with which ideas about technology get conscripted in the defence of national identity. One quick and dirty way of summarizing the intellectual evolution that Francis traces with such care is that Canadians saw technology as good when it came from Britain, bad when it came from the United States, and almost never saw it...