Badpuppy Gay Today

Monday, 19 May, 1997

Theodore Roszak ranks among the most gifted writers on the emerging conflict between what he calls "the technocracy" and our need for personal development linked with a sound environmental awareness.

To Roszak, the technocracy represents a vision of social development in which the industrial world stands at the center of organizational integration and efficiency.

It is this kind of world that is foreseen, says Roszak, when men speak of modernizing, updating, rationalizing and planning.

He sees technocrats wedded to specific mandates required for the realizations of their techno-dreams. These include:

1. Efficiency.
2. Security.
3. Large scale co-ordination of human beings and resources.
4. Ever higher levels of affluence.
5. Ever more impressive manifestations of collective human power.

Others, like Roszak, foresee an alarming future. Socially-aware visionaries are positing what Roszak also perceives, namely that there is already in progress a steely attempt by the technocracy to orchestrate everything done by people as within the context of its industrial complexes. "Politics," he writes, "education, leisure, entertainment, culture as a whole, the unconscious drives, and even, as we shall see, protest against the technocracy itself: all these become subjects of purely technical scrutiny and of purely technical manipulation." Roszak believes that we are in the midst of an unrelenting and powerful effort to create a world-wide techno-organism, a social expression whose health depends on its ability to keep "the technological heart" beating regularly.

Complementing this view is one by Jacques Ellul, author of The Technological Society. His vision of this developing scenerio argues that:

"Technique requires predictability and, no less, exactness of prediction. It is necessary then, that technique prevail over the human being. For technique, this is a matter of life and death. Technique must reduce man to a technical animal, the king of the slaves of technique. Human caprice crumbles before this necessity; there can be no human autonomy in the face of technical autonomy. The individual must be fashioned by techniques, either negatively (by the techniques of understanding man) or positively (by the adaptation of man to the technical framework), in order to wipe out the blots his personal determination introduces into the perfect design of the organization."

In such a world, nothing, to the non-technical man, will remain small or simple. In the grand scheme of the technocracy, clumsy human beings can no longer be trusted if left alone to handle their endeavors, whether large or small. Ordinary citizens must take a place among incompetents and the amatuers, leaving all significant matters in the hands of the specially-trained.

To a few feisty onlookers, the technocracy's results have thus far been infuriating. Some, like Russell Baker, whose Observer column appears regularly in The New York Times, turn growing frustration into humorous tirade:

"For me," he writes on May 17, "the golden age was a time when you pulled up to the gas pump, said, 'Fill 'er up, and check the oil and tires,' and somebody did.

"That somebody was not you in your best suit. It was a cheerful, competent-looking man named Pete, Bill, Harry or Frank, and he wore sensible grease-stained work clothes.

"What happened to Bill, Pete, Harry and Frank? The same thing that happened to Mabel, Marie, Gladys and Harriet. They were the people who answered when you picked up the telephone. 'Number please,' they said, and you said, 'Operator, I want to call long distance collect'.

"Now you have to punch 25 numbers, so you can be told by a voice from outer space that those numbers aren't worth dirt on the phone you're using because it is the phone of the Cosmodemonic (pace, Henry Miller) Telecommunications Octopus."

Another voice that has reflected on the technocracy's impact is that of Emanuel G. Mesthene, a Harvard University expert who forecasts changes the technocracy may bring. In describing the anti-technological tradition in which Roszak, Ellul and Baker seem to converge, Mesthene says:

"A contrary view sees technology as an almost unmitigated curse. Technology is said to rob people of their jobs, their privacy, their participation in democratic government, and even, in the end, of their dignity as human beings. It is seen as autonomous and uncontrollable, as fostering materialistic values and as destructive of religion, as bringing about a technocratic society and bureaucratic state in which the individual is increasingly submerged, and as threatening, ultimately, to poison nature and blow up the world."

The first rank English poet, artist, mystic and philosopher, William Blake (1757-1827) addressed the technocracy in its infancy. "And was Jerusalem builded here?" he asked, "Among these dark Satanic mills?"

Author, Mark Satin, longtime editor of New Options, a Washington,D.C-based political newsletter, described in his earliest writings what he called "monolithic technology," a development needing replacement with what a growing but still insignificant movement calls "appropriate technology."

If this mostly-philosophical movement has venerable roots in earlier epochs, it is clear it remains little known to today's public. Satin quotes Tom Bender who says:

"The assumptions upon which present production processes have been built are no longer supportable." Three of such false assumptions follow:

1. Continuously increasing the size of production facilities is the best way to maximize production and minimize costs.
2. We will continue to be able to buy more and more goods and services.
3. The economic effect of how we do things is more important than the political, environmental or psychocultural effects.

The means through which the centralized state grows are constantly--frighteningly-- multiplying. The technocracy, and all that goes with the inevitable centralization and total organizing power of the state, now walk hand in hand.