(Excerpts from D. C. Schindler, The Politics of The Real)
Why should technology be regulated? from a Spenglerian point of view:
1. Technology increasingly saturates the culture, penetrating into the most intimate (social relations) and the most significant (work, both manual and intellectual) dimensions of human existence, so that, even when the excitement and curiosity fades and concern begins to set in, the culture can find no substantial resources for resistance. There is a basic restlessness, a radical “mobility,” because there is no “anchor” in reality that would present a place of contemplative rest.
2. Thus, the capacity to understand and recognize genuine authority, and the capacity to hold and exercise it (these capacities cannot be separated from each other) disappear, and so authority is generally reduced to power. Detached from its roots in the real, language tends to inflate, or to settle into the formulations of (technologically mediated) hip expressions or phrases and words “of the day,” accompanied by a tendency toward hyper-rhetoricization in speech, both public and private; The actuality of human judgment cedes its place increasingly to process, technique, and automation.
3. The “peace” of order is generally imposed, enforced, and repaired through the essentially coercive means of political action, police and military force, and lawyers; Education ceases to be a formation of the person, through his introduction into the tradition, which he is meant to display and pass on in turn, and becomes instead training, the provision of the information and skills needed for individual success. The organization of human affairs, institutions, and collective endeavors tends to take the form of bureaucracy and formalized “management,” whenever it cannot simply be replaced by computer or machine. Philosophy is dethroned by science (and engineering) as the paradigm of human reason.
Why should technology be regulated? from a Spenglerian point of view:
1. Technology increasingly saturates the culture, penetrating into the most intimate (social relations) and the most significant (work, both manual and intellectual) dimensions of human existence, so that, even when the excitement and curiosity fades and concern begins to set in, the culture can find no substantial resources for resistance. There is a basic restlessness, a radical “mobility,” because there is no “anchor” in reality that would present a place of contemplative rest.
2. Thus, the capacity to understand and recognize genuine authority, and the capacity to hold and exercise it (these capacities cannot be separated from each other) disappear, and so authority is generally reduced to power. Detached from its roots in the real, language tends to inflate, or to settle into the formulations of (technologically mediated) hip expressions or phrases and words “of the day,” accompanied by a tendency toward hyper-rhetoricization in speech, both public and private; The actuality of human judgment cedes its place increasingly to process, technique, and automation.
3. The “peace” of order is generally imposed, enforced, and repaired through the essentially coercive means of political action, police and military force, and lawyers; Education ceases to be a formation of the person, through his introduction into the tradition, which he is meant to display and pass on in turn, and becomes instead training, the provision of the information and skills needed for individual success. The organization of human affairs, institutions, and collective endeavors tends to take the form of bureaucracy and formalized “management,” whenever it cannot simply be replaced by computer or machine. Philosophy is dethroned by science (and engineering) as the paradigm of human reason.