Technopoly (16 page)

And yet, because of its “universality,” the computer compels respect, even devotion, and argues for a comprehensive role in all fields of human activity. Those who insist that it is foolish to deny the computer vast sovereignty are singularly devoid of what Paul Goodman once called “technological modesty”—that is, having a sense of the whole and not claiming or obtruding more than a particular function warrants. Norbert Wiener warned about lack of modesty when he remarked that, if digital computers had been in common use before the atomic bomb was invented, people would have said that the bomb could not
have been invented without computers. But it was. And it is important to remind ourselves of how many things are quite possible to do without the use of computers.

Seymour Papert, for example, wishes students to be epistemologists, to think critically, and to learn how to create knowledge. In his book
Mindstorms
, he gives the impression that his computer program known as LOGO now makes this possible. But good teachers have been doing this for centuries without the benefit of LOGO. I do not say that LOGO, when used properly by a skilled teacher, will not help, but I doubt that it can do better than pencil and paper, or speech itself, when used properly by a skilled teacher.

When the Dallas Cowboys were consistently winning football championships, their success was attributed to the fact that computers were used to evaluate and select team members. During the past several years, when Dallas has been hard put to win more than a few games, not much has been said about the computers, perhaps because people have realized that computers have nothing to do with winning football games, and never did. One might say the same about writing lucid, economical, stylish prose, which has nothing to do with word-processors. Although my students don’t believe it, it is actually possible to write well without a processor and, I should say, to write poorly with one.

Technological immodesty is always an acute danger in Technopoly, which encourages it. Technopoly also encourages in-sensitivity to what skills may be lost in the acquisition of new ones. It is important to remember what can be done without computers, and it is also important to remind ourselves of what may be lost when we do use them.

I have before me an essay by Sir Bernard Lovell, founder of Britain’s Jodrell Bank Observatory, in which he claims that computers have stifled scientific creativity.
¹⁴
After writing of his awe at the ease with which computerized operations provide
amazing details of distant galaxies, Sir Bernard expresses concern that “literal-minded, narrowly focused computerized research is proving antithetical to the free exercise of that happy faculty known as serendipity—that is, the knack of achieving favorable results more or less by chance.” He proceeds to give several examples of monumental but serendipitous discoveries, contends that there has been a dramatic cessation of such discoveries, and worries that computers are too narrow as filters of information and therefore may be antiserendipitous. He is, of course, not “against” computers, but is merely raising questions about their costs.

Dr. Clay Forishee, the chief FAA scientist for human performance issues, did the same when he wondered whether the automated operation of commercial aircraft has not disabled pilots from creatively responding when something goes wrong. Robert Buley, flight-standards manager of Northwest Airlines, goes further. He is quoted as saying, “If we have human operators subordinated to technology then we’re going to lose creativity [in emergencies].” He is not “against” computers. He is worried about what we lose by using them.
¹⁵

M. Ethan Katsch, in his book
The Electronic Media and the Transformation of Law
, worries as well. He writes, “The replacement of print by computerized systems is promoted to the legal profession simply as a means to increase efficiency.”
¹⁶
But he goes on to say that, in fact, the almost unlimited capacity of computers to store and retrieve information threatens the authority of precedent, and he adds that the threat is completely unrecognized. As he notes, “a system of precedent is unnecessary when there are very few accessible cases, and unworkable when there are too many.” If this is true, or even partly true, what exactly does it mean? Will lawyers become incapable of choosing relevant precedents? Will judges be in constant confusion from “precedent overload”?

We know that doctors who rely entirely on machinery have
lost skill in making diagnoses based on observation. We may well wonder what other human skills and traditions are being lost by our immersion in a computer culture. Technopolists do not worry about such things. Those who do are called technological pessimists, Jeremiahs, and worse. I rather think they are imbued with technological modesty, like King Thamus.

If we define ideology as a set of assumptions of which we are barely conscious but which nonetheless directs our efforts to give shape and coherence to the world, then our most powerful ideological instrument is the technology of language itself. Language is pure ideology. It instructs us not only in the names of things but, more important, in what things can be named. It divides the world into subjects and objects. It denotes what events shall be regarded as processes, and what events, things. It instructs us about time, space, and number, and forms our ideas of how we stand in relation to nature and to each other. In English grammar, for example, there are always subjects who act, and verbs which are their actions, and objects which are acted upon. It is a rather aggressive grammar, which makes it difficult for those of us who must use it to think of the world as benign. We are obliged to know the world as made up of things pushing against, and often attacking, one another.

Of course, most of us, most of the time, are unaware of how language does its work. We live deep within the boundaries of
our linguistic assumptions and have little sense of how the world looks to those who speak a vastly different tongue. We tend to assume that everyone sees the world in the same way, irrespective of differences in language. Only occasionally is this illusion challenged, as when the differences between linguistic ideologies become noticeable by one who has command over two languages that differ greatly in their structure and history. For example, several years ago, Susumu Tonegawa, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Medicine, was quoted in the newspaper
Yomiuri
as saying that the Japanese language does not foster clarity or effective understanding in scientific research. Addressing his countrymen from his post as a professor at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he said, “We should consider changing our thinking process in the field of science by trying to reason in English.” It should be noted that he was not saying that English is better than Japanese; only that English is better than Japanese for the purposes of scientific research, which is a way of saying that English (and other Western languages) have a particular ideological bias that Japanese does not. We call that ideological bias “the scientific outlook.” If the scientific outlook seems natural to you, as it does to me, it is because our language makes it appear so. What we think of as reasoning is determined by the character of our language. To reason in Japanese is apparently not the same thing as to reason in English or Italian or German.

To put it simply, like any important piece of machinery—television or the computer, for example—language has an ideological agenda that is apt to be hidden from view. In the case of language, that agenda is so deeply integrated into our personalities and world-view that a special effort and, often, special training are required to detect its presence. Unlike television or the computer, language appears to be not an extension of our powers but simply a natural expression of who and what we are. This is the great secret of language: Because it comes from
inside us, we believe it to be a direct, unedited, unbiased, apolitical expression of how the world really is. A machine, on the other hand, is outside of us, clearly created by us, modifiable by us, even discardable by us; it is easier to see how a machine re-creates the world in its own image. But in many respects, a sentence functions very much like a machine, and this is nowhere more obvious than in the sentences we call questions.

As an example of what I mean, let us take a “fill-in” question, which I shall require you to answer exactly if you wish full credit:

Which of these two questions is easier to answer? I assume you will agree with me that the second question is easier unless you happen to know precisely the year of Jefferson’s death, in which case neither question is difficult. However, for most of us who know only roughly when Jefferson lived, Question Two has arranged matters so that our chances of “knowing” the answer are greatly increased. Students will always be “smarter” when answering a multiple-choice test than when answering a “fill-in” test, even when the subject matter is the same. A question, even of the simplest kind, is not and can never be unbiased. I am not, in this context, referring to the common accusation that a particular test is “culturally biased.” Of course questions can be culturally biased. (Why, for example, should anyone be asked about Thomas Jefferson at all, let alone when he died?) My purpose is to say that the structure of any question is as devoid of neutrality as is its content. The form of a question may ease our way or pose obstacles. Or, when even slightly altered, it may generate antithetical answers, as in the case of the two priests who, being unsure if it was permissible to smoke and
pray at the same time, wrote to the Pope for a definitive answer. One priest phrased the question “Is it permissible to smoke while praying?” and was told it is not, since prayer should be the focus of one’s whole attention; the other priest asked if it is permissible to pray while smoking and was told that it is, since it is always appropriate to pray. The form of a question may even block us from seeing solutions to problems that become visible through a different question. Consider the following story, whose authenticity is questionable but not, I think, its point:

Once upon a time, in a village in what is now Lithuania, there arose an unusual problem. A curious disease afflicted many of the townspeople. It was mostly fatal (though not always), and its onset was signaled by the victim’s lapsing into a deathlike coma. Medical science not being quite so advanced as it is now, there was no definite way of knowing if the victim was actually dead when burial appeared seemly. As a result, the townspeople feared that several of their relatives had already been buried alive and that a similar fate might await them. How to overcome this uncertainty was their dilemma.

One group of people suggested that the coffins be well stocked with water and food and that a small air vent be drilled into them, just in case one of the “dead” happened to be alive. This was expensive to do but seemed more than worth the trouble. A second group, however, came up with a less expensive and more efficient idea. Each coffin would have a twelve-inch stake affixed to the inside of the coffin lid, exactly at the level of the heart. Then, when the coffin was closed, all uncertainty would cease.

The story does not indicate which solution was chosen, but for my purposes the choice is irrelevant. What is important to note is that different solutions were generated by different questions. The first solution was an answer to the question, How can we make sure that we do not bury people who are still
alive? The second was an answer to the question, How can we make sure that everyone we bury is dead?

Questions, then, are like computers or television or stethoscopes or lie detectors, in that they are mechanisms that give direction to our thoughts, generate new ideas, venerate old ones, expose facts, or hide them. In this chapter, I wish to consider mechanisms that act like machines but are not normally thought of as part of Technopoly’s repertoire. I must call attention to them precisely because they are so often overlooked. For all practical purposes, they may be considered technologies—technologies in disguise, perhaps, but technologies all the same.

Aside from language itself, I don’t suppose there is a clearer example of a technology that doesn’t look like one than the mathematical sign known as zero. A brief word about it may help to illuminate later examples.

The zero made its way from India to Europe in the tenth century. By the thirteenth century, it had taken hold of Western consciousness. (It was unknown to the Romans and the classical Greeks, although analogous concepts were known to Babylonian mathematicians of the Hellenistic period.) Without the zero, you will find it difficult to perform any of the calculations that are quite simple to do with it. If you should try multiplying MMMMMM by MMDCXXVI, you will have this point confirmed. I have been told, by the way, that such a calculation
can
be done, but the process is so laborious that the task is unlikely to be completed, a truth that did not escape the notice of medieval mathematicians. There is, in fact, no evidence that Roman numerals were ever used, or intended to be used, for calculation. For that purpose, mathematicians used an abacus, and between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, a struggle of sorts took place between abacists, who wrote Roman numerals but calculated with the abacus, and algorists, who used Hindu numerals employing the zero sign. The objection raised by the abacists was that the zero registered the
absence
of a power of
ten, which no Roman numeral did, and which struck them as philosophically and perhaps aesthetically offensive. After all, the zero is a sign that affects values of numerals wherever it occurs but has no value in itself. It is a sign about signs, whose very etymology, via “cipher” from the Hindu word for “void,” suggests the idea of “nothingness.” To the abacists, it was a bizarre idea to have a sign marking “nothing,” and I fear that I would have sided with the abacists.