Ideological persuasion and technological determinism

Technology In Society 21 (1999) 81–102

Ideological persuasion and technological determinism Y.M. Carlislea,*, D.J. Manningb a

Open University Business School, Milton Keynes, UK b University of Durham, Durham, UK

Received ??/??/??; received in revised form ??/??/??; accepted ??/??/??

Abstract This article suggests answer to the question: How and why has the form of argumentation and the vocabulary of modern ideological discourse changed? It is argued that to describe adequately and account for the semiotic change in its character, we cannot ignore either the symbiotic relationship between the conceptual revolutions that have occurred in its ideologic environment or the effects of technological innovation on its social and political environment. The article concludes that it is time for the case of technological determinism to be reconsidered.  1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Ideology; Technology; Logic; Culture; Change; Progress

1. Introduction In this article the term “argumentation” uses Walton’s [1] sense in which ideological persuasion follows logical steps to achieve its objective. The term “vocabulary” is used in Weldon’s [2] sense in which the ideological use of such words as “liberty”, “equality”, and “fraternity” cannot be divorced from the evaluation of social and political relationships and policies. The term “discourse” is used in the sense established by Connolly and subsequently deployed by Ball [3]. Connolly and Ball use political discourse to communicate and moderate the meaning in use of the concep-

* Corresponding author. Tel: 01327 350679. 0160-791X/99/$ - see front matter  1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 1 6 0 - 7 9 1 X ( 9 8 ) 0 0 0 3 8 - 4

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tual terms of ethical evaluation in current political debate on the authorization of legislative action. In Connolly’s words: By the terms of political discourse, then, I refer first to the vocabulary commonly employed in political thought and action; secondly to the ways in which the meanings conventionally embodied in that vocabulary set the frame for political reflection by establishing criteria to be met before an event or act can be said to fall within the gambit of a given concept; and third, to the judgements or commitments that are conventionally sanctioned when these criteria are met. [4] As for the terms “ideology” and “technology”, for the purpose of this article their use is defined in its text which explores the sense in which the authority of the former is vulnerable to the power of the latter. An ideological doctrine systematically deploys a set of related concepts to ascribe an ethical value to cultural practices, institutional procedures, or organisational objectives in a manner prescribed by its ideologic. Any one such ideologic conveys the force of its conclusion in the form of an imperative to undertake the restoration of a past, the reform of the present, or the foundation of a future way of life. As such, an ideologic is governed by what Ryle understands as a rule of logic: For my purpose, what matters is not how logical rules are established but what they “say”. We are inclined to explain what they say is, in a special sense of “why”, why it is correct or legitimate to draw certain conclusions from certain premises and why it is incorrect or illegitimate to draw others. [5] Given ideal circumstances for the favourable reception of an ideological doctrine, ideological adherence is the consequence of the coherence of its argumentation. Its core values are disclosed in a distinctive manner of reasoning that can be described as ontological (based upon a prior commitment), nomological (rule following), or teleological (goal oriented), respectively [6]. During the 19th century they are to be found in the conflicting European ideologies of conservatism, liberalism, and socialism; but found in the history of any one ideology, which is more likely to be cyclic than linear, they can mark stages in its evolution. A modern ideology such as English liberalism, for example, insofar as it rejected existing political institutions and industrial organisation, began at the turn of the 19th century with Godwin’s [7] and Owen’s [8] projection of new society. It became more concerned with amending current legislation under the influence of the reforming utilitarians. Eventually it became a conservative doctrine in the latter quarter of the 20th century. After attempts by the new liberals, Hobhouse [9] and Keynes [10], to accommodate the impact of industrial change on social and economic circumstances in orthodox liberal thinking, the old classical liberalism of Spencer [11] and Hayek [12] became more attractive to the mind of new conservatives who supported Thatcher and Reagan than to those liberals who supported Grimond and Kennedy. At the same time the ideas of the last to represent the spirit of the now old “new” liberalism, like Beveridge [13] and Galbraith [14], were better received by the new democratic

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socialists led by Attlee and Wilson. In retrospect, we can understand the sense in which the new English conservatives can as readily appreciate the Victorian middleclass values that made Great Britain great in a way comparable to the ontological appreciation of the aristocratic values of a pre-industrial society previously expressed by Bradley [15] and Ludovic [16]. It seems that there is an Aristotelian pattern in the life cycle of every ideological tradition that begins with a teleological youth, proceeds to a nomological maturity, and finally ends in its ontological old age. The question is why?

2. Ideology and technology From a psychological point of view the student of ideology is concerned with the formation of attitudes that lend themselves to the kind of commitment that entails an obligation on the part of an adherent to perform some distinctive form of selfenactment that discloses his ethical identity as a member of a group of persons. This study of ideological conviction contrasts with the study of technological know-how as the acquisition of useful information about how inanimate energy systems can be designed in accordance with the experimental findings of investigative science to effect the desirable results confirmed by the trial and test of production engineering. However, the ethical character of ideological reasoning in favour of a particular social artifice precludes the possibility that the rationale of an ideology consists of nothing more than instrumental reasoning in the sense that a technical recommendation is purely instrumental in the design and production of a material artifact. Whatever the value in use or exchange of a material artifact, it is primarily derived from the contribution it makes to the convenience of human life. In contrast, the value of an ideology lies in the ultimate ethical meaning it can give to that life experience. However, both the technological and the ideological understanding are practical rather than academic in the sense that narrative history and theoretical science are academic subjects. Ideological vocabularies are not deployed to further a historical or scientific investigation into the contingent circumstances or causal conditions of an event for the purpose of giving a more adequate definition or account of its character through a more coherent, precise, and comprehensive explanation of its occurrence. Idealised events called “restorations”, “reforms”, and “revolutions” are abstractions. They do not have the specific characteristics of concrete historical events, such as the Restoration of Charles II, the 1832 Reform Act, or the Russian Revolution. Idealised events do not relate exclusively to surviving documentary evidence of events in the historical past, nor are they exclusive classes of events useful in making the sociological distinctions essential to social science comparisons. They are no help with the occupational classification of such persons it is claimed take part in them, such as “patriots”, “radicals”, or “proletarians”. Idealised persons do not exhibit patterns of behaviour determined by their psychological experience, and they do not hold verifiable qualifications, as do doctors or dentists, that indicate who does and who does not have a professional status in the real world. In short, ideological categories

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serve no useful function in a historical narrative or in a social science system of group classification. In the context of different ideological persuasions, terms like “restoration”, “reform”, and “revolution” can refer to a desirable change to which a state of affairs must be made to conform in order to qualify as an achievement in the mind of an adherent. They are not actual events with definitive terms of reference. They are idealised ethical concepts that can serve to approve a political objective. They can also serve to condemn it. What is understood to be a “revolution” by a conservative is not the same understanding of the term within the alternative bounded rationality of a socialist. In an alternative use of Popper’s term “holistic” [17], a tradition of ideological discourse offers a complete conception of an ideal political economy and a critical evaluation of the contemporary social, economic, and political situations that are relatively immune to academic criticism. Although an individual example of its attempted comprehensive application may fail on grounds of inconsistency within the covers of a book, the tradition of meaning from which its author draws his or her inspiration is not so easily confounded. Chopping the head off one ideologue with a knock-down argument merely provides the opportunity for other heads to appear. The adherence that makes the coherence of ideological argumentation attractive is a firm belief “in” its evaluation of an ongoing experience and not a tentative belief “that” something is factually true about the real world in the past or the present. Ideological reasoning is indicative of an adherent’s approval or disapproval of an existing way of life in terms of an adherent’s present commitment to that lifestyle’s defence or destruction. In political discourse we have ideological arguments rather than argue the case for or against an ideology on other than ideological grounds. Political philosophy, political history, and political science have been the stepping stones from impartial intellectual investigation to political commitment which the ideologue has often relied upon to cross the river of time that divides the banks on which stand those with the urge to understand the world from the banks on which stand those with the will to change it. But like all such stepping stones, in practical life they have been selected and taken from their natural environment for the purpose they are then made to serve. Ideological discourse is notorious for drawing upon historical, scientific, and technological fact, but when it draws upon these resources, it is not only highly selective, it does not use the information in an academic way. The ideological deployment of objective fact is similar to that in support of belief statements found in the expression of religious faith made by Newman in Christianity and Scientific Investigation [18] and Schweitzer in The Quest for the Historical Jesus [19]. But the use of scientific or historical fact cannot give a theology or an ideology the support of the disciplines of science or history to which the academic sense those facts make is germane. At the same time the use of those facts cannot call upon the disciplines of science and history to refute ideological claims in the one sense that is most important. Scientific and historical research may establish that the claims made by Hitler in Mein Kampf [20] as to the superiority of the Aryan race are neither scientific nor historical, but they cannot demonstrate that they have no emotive value

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[21]. Academic disciplines, such as science and history, cannot prove that an ideologic claim has no efficacy. But this is not the case with technology. One kind of ideologic may produce a different doctrinal result everywhere. The teleological argument of Fichte’s [22] German nationalism has the same teleologic as Lenin’s Russian communism [23], but Lenin’s enemy was Western capitalism, not the foreign occupation of the French. His teleological argument supports a different solution to what is a different problem. Fichte’s goal was “national self-government”, and this is quite different from Lenin’s goal which was the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. In contrast, the intended outcome of the application of the logic of a technology, as distinct from the ideological choice of technology regardless of time and place, is always the same. Unlike technology, ideology does not have to conform to the universal laws of nature. The technical evaluation of any component part of a technological achievement—whether in mechanical, electrical, chemical, biological or nuclear engineering—is invariably estimated in terms of the demonstrable efficiency, economy, and utility of its design function as a means of achieving a premeditated objective. Whatever the particular end in view, a technology involves the most efficient and economical use of time and energy in the useful performance of tasks that would otherwise be more time- and labour-consuming. Some of these tasks cannot be accomplished by human resources without anything other than hand tools. Each of the criteria of a technological performance employing inanimate energy of nature presupposes that the information deployed to effect its achievement is proven knowledge of the kind acquired by experimental science and operational research. Scientific knowledge is hypothetical knowledge of the kind: if A then B, where A represents an isolated cause and B its individual effect. Technological knowledge is probable knowledge of the kind: B expects C, where B represents an insulated effect and C its useful application. In a scientific experiment there is always the possibility of a design fault in its apparatus and error in the observation of its result. The same two human factors cannot be absolutely eliminated from the design, production, and use of an industrial artifact, but nature itself does not make mistakes. As Bacon observed, in applying science to the solution of a technical problem the use value of any scientific information is inseparable from its truth-value [24] (p. 304) and that truth-value is universal. It is not necessary that an ideology have any such universal relevance before it can authorise the local reshaping of an existing social artifice. As a set of regulated human activities the shape of a social artifice is itself evidence of the authority of an existing ideological conviction that obliges compliance with its established practice. However, its local dominance is no more unassailable than its dominant technology which is susceptible to the attraction of innovation coming from elsewhere in the world. Indeed, it is the inevitability of change effected by the latter that can make the former more vulnerable to adaptation than it is to the invasion of foreign doctrines. Technological innovation travels faster than a shift in ideological conviction, if only because its mathematical language is universal and can serve any master. The authority of an ideology to legitimate institutional change relies upon human motivation,

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but technological achievement is powered by the energy of nature. It does not require even the adherence of those who have come to believe “in” the liberal values of a free market economy or “in” the socialist values of a command economy, for it to have a comparable effect on society. The belief that the power of technology to change the world is a material fact is a fact that will be empirically confirmed. However, although it is a universal fact in that any technology can serve any master, regardless of his ideological commitment, it may not serve his cause equally well; hence the sense of the ideological case for alternative technologies in an age facing the prospect of an ecological disaster. The power of technology may require a politician to speak for its deployment before it has an impact on society, but it is not the politician who effects its consequences. The power of this effect is causal. Whatever Meszaros means by “the power of ideology” [25] to change the future of the world, it is not the same thing as what Buchanan means by “the power of the machine” [26] to change it.

3. Ideological persuasion How the authority of ideological values legitimates an old or new practice or policy partly depends upon what those values are and the way in which they are deployed in ideological argument. Whether or not an ideological argument attains its objective also depends, in part, upon what its author has assumed about the past experience and existing beliefs of the persons to whom he or she has addressed it. In ascribing value to a particular historical retrospection, an ideological argument assumes that it is one which has an appropriate application by a certain kind of person in a certain kind of situation, namely, a person who can, in his present circumstances, recognise the authority of the values deployed in relating the significance of the illuminated past to the promise of a projected future. In other words, an ideological argument presupposes that the person to whom it is addressed has the attitude of mind that the argument assumes is characteristic of his or her cultural background and outlook. The primary assumption of the substance of the address is born out by the recipient’s self-identification in the vocabulary of the successful ideological communication. The elaboration of the potential adherent’s ethical identity and the undesirable features of the social world in which he or she lives are crucial to the popular success of any classic ideological writing that sets out to explain how that world came to be in such an unsatisfactory state of affairs with a view to something being done about it. For example, in the case of Marx’s political theory, one of the crucial stages of his argument is the affirmation that society has undergone a series of economic transformations commensurate with increasing capital investment in technological innovation, culminating in the kind of industrial mass production capable of dominating a global market. This development, from regional feudalism to international capitalism, is portrayed to have been everywhere at the expense of the quality of life of the working man or woman dependent for his or her employment on the changing requirements of the profitability of a capitalist’s speculative investment in the means

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of production. Consequently, the industrial worker wholly misunderstands the nature of his or her present work situation if he or she still conceives him or herself as a skilled labourer bound by duties to a personal master from whom he or she has derived the security of an established social status, or who aspires to be an upwardly mobile worker with contractual obligations to an employer who has promised that person the opportunity to gain promotion. Whatever may have been appropriate about his or her view of the world in the past, that person does not understand the new world of anonymous private capital investment in mass production where, driven by the most profitable pace of an employer’s machinery, he or she is only a temporary member of an expendable workforce that makes up the permanent majority of the poorest and largest part of the whole population. Like any part of the machine that will eventually take over all their individual functions, every factory worker can readily be replaced by anyone prepared to perform the same repetitive tasks the worker now performs for even less remuneration than they currently receive. Factory workers, in Marx’s picture of the industrial reality of a free market economy, have neither the social security of the tied labourer nor the economic independence of those capable of changing their employment or even of becoming self-employed. Their working experience is more like that of slave labour in the ancient world than any other form of employment in the medieval or modern. Marx’s grim portrait of Victorian factory work and the prospects of its workforce, as drawn in Capital [27], serves to emphasise the common condition and hence common identity of the working class which diminishes the sense in which each of its members is an isolated individual. Those who do not feel that they belong to the working class, and who reject the sense of working-class solidarity essential to their victory in any future class confrontation, will find little or no inspiration in Marx’s teleological projection of their future liberation. In short, they are unlikely to respond to the call for action made in the Manifesto of the Communist Party [28]. The portrait of the man Halevy called a “philosophical radical” [29], drawn by Mill in On Liberty [30], is less heroic than Marx’s “proletarian”. His behaviour at all times follows rules as befits the perfectly rational man. It is a picture of an openminded person committed to advancing the cause of “civilisation” by institutional reform and wealth creation. Everywhere it is his or her personal endeavour to further the conquest of ignorance and poverty by fostering political and moral education, scientific research, and industrial growth that hold out the promise of a better future. In business discussion and political debate, no less than in academic deliberation, it is the most reasonable of possible interpretations of the facts of the case that is the only sound basis for a progressive decision or conclusion. Mill places his confidence in progress in the practice of constitutional government made responsible to its electorate by the proportional representation of all its opinions. The promising career prospects of Mill’s competitive individual in any profession, including that of politics, seem more certain than the benefit to society of his success. In retrospect, Mill’s liberalism may appear less utopian than Marx’s communism, but it is altogether more optimistic than the brutal realism of Fitzjames Steven’s conservatism. The portrait of the man Dr Johnson called a “patriot” [31] in Fitzjames Steven’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity [32] is one of a gentleman of good breeding who

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passionately reveres his own religion and tradition in a world where many suffer situations experienced by those less fortunate than himself. The “patriotic” ruling class, which has no choice but to respond to its “noble” calling, are obliged to be resigned to this fact. Such is the imperfection in human nature and circumstance that only the rigorous enforcement of law and order can contain the worst excesses of human nature, so as to make this the best of all possible worlds in which inevitably exist many necessary evils. Nevertheless, the patriot can take pride in their national institutions and “imperial” achievements and find a rewarding life in performing their public duties. As Maine concluded in Popular Government [33], only some form of morally responsible government, not popular government, holds any hope for the survival of the cultural heritage of the Western world. If the price to be paid for civilisation is the suppression of the political aspirations of the lower social orders, then it is the duty of the ruling class to exact it. Fitzjames Steven does not see that it is possible to question the kind of natural social order defended by Bradley in his essay My Station and its Duties [15]. Our station in life is determined by birth, not by ambition. In an appropriate ideological context, the use of terms like “proletarian”, “intellectual”, and “patriotic” are indicative of a distinctive way of life. They are also indicative of ideological attitudes toward other persons deemed to have no legitimate role in the practice to be approved in any exposition of the right way for a “proletarian”, “radical”, or “patriot” to associate and live. Marx’s proletarian has no place in Mill’s portrait of a democratic assembly, which is more like an academic seminar than a political meeting. Mill’s liberal intellectual appears to be a socially useless bourgeois in Marx’s picture of the revolutionary situation. In Fitzjames Steven’s picture of the empire on which the sun never sets, he appears as a rationalist without any meaningful emotional life. But in their appropriate hermeneutic contexts, each is a portrait of the kind of person having an ethical identity with which at least some of the politically frustrated and disillusioned can be expected to identify. Those who do so in the light of their own experience of social change are able to locate their personal political calling and its duties within the structure of the political party they then feel inclined to join. This political education is anything but academic. It is a feature of any ideological education that, within the bounded rationality of its own ideologic, alternative proposals to those made by its adherents appear as unreasonable. Where the conservative can see the rationale of enforced separate development in a culturally or racially divided country, the liberal can only appreciate the idea of a heterogeneous culture and a multi-racial society and a socialist classless society regardless of any kind of cultural diversity or racial differences. Where the liberal would like to make the world a safe place for democracy, the conservative would like to see democracy made safe for the world, and the socialist to see its power extended, if not removed from the central government of the state, to the workplace and the community.

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4. Technological determinism Francis Bacon, the father of the theory of technological determinism, pronounced in his Novum Organum: It is well to observe the force and virtue and consequence of discoveries, and these are to be seen nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origins, though recent, are obscure and inglorious; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes; insomuch that no empire, no sect, no star seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these three mechanical discoveries. Thereafter Bacon believed that: “…in the course and revolution of many ages [further discoveries will] come to light of themselves, just as others did; only by the method of which we are now treating they can be speedily and suddenly and simultaneously presented and anticipated” [24] (pp. 292–300). It is from the point of view of being instrumental in the accomplishment of tasks that the relationship of cause to effect in industrial design is functional. Its function is to achieve a time- and labour-saving performance. The objective of industrial design is not the insulation of a cause from extraneous intervention, as in the case of a laboratory apparatus; it is the insulation of an effect from any but its desired outcome. In An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith attributed the contemporary increase in the creation of wealth: …first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another; and, lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many. [34] Smith emphasized the part that free market competition played in encouraging industrial growth. To this analysis, in his essay “On The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures”, Charles Babbage made a notable amendment in favour of industrial—rather than market-led—competition. For Babbage, the first if not the last resting place of investment value was in the cost-effective technology of mass production and distribution of manufactured goods. Witness: “The addition they make to human power. The economy they make to human time. The conversion of substances apparently common and worthless into valuable products.” [35] Babbage may be the first to understand the part played by the efficiency of mechanisation in mass reproduction to gaining commanding market share. This conception of industrial efficiency makes more of the importance of the replication of the division of labour by the synchronised movement of the individual parts of the

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machine designed to accomplish exact reproduction than could have been made by Smith half a century before. As the man who clearly distinguished making from manufacturing, Babbage became the leading exponent of the principle of the technological determination of the diminished labour value of men working without machinery. This he did by distinguishing the slow making of articles by coordinated hands from the swift synchronised manufacture of artifacts by blueprint design and template reproduction. He thereby conceptually divorced the process of fabrication in Smith’s pin factory from the mechanisation characteristic of the early Victorian textile industry, and he observed its impact on both the working conditions of paid industrial employees and the real standards of living of the increasing numbers engaged in the industry. The fact that technological change is progressive is a fundamental fact about technology whether it be the technology of production or the technology of its product. Every technological achievement has its natural ceiling imposed by the laws of nature. A propeller-driven aircraft cannot exceed the speed of sound as can a jet-propelled aircraft, and neither can operate as high as the rocket-propelled missile. For the same reasons that the nuclear submarine has a greater range than the diesel/electric submarine or the hovercraft can exceed the speed of a surface vessel, there is always a frontier to be crossed by technological innovation which has been imposed by the inherent limitations on the performance of every machine subject to the same laws of nature that permit its function in the first place. Consequently, the technologist has as inexhaustible a challenge to his ingenuity as he has an inexhaustible source of inspiration in the progressive discoveries of experimental science. Given a devotion to the criteria of “efficiency”, “economy”, and “utility” in conceiving improved design, the technologist can only prove to be an agent of progressive change in what can only be a competitive profession in which the winner must eventually take all of his technologically determined share of the market. As graphically illustrated in the history of international arms sales, once a country falls behind in the race for technological superiority, its share of the market diminishes in proportion to the time lag of its research and development compared with that of the market leaders. Moreover, the further behind a county’s armaments industry lags, the harder it will be to catch up and the sooner that country’s own defence needs will have to be met by rival armaments industries. This fact is common to all competitive industrial development where state-of-the-art technology is a company or state secret. The first European technological revolution of the millennium was a combination of innovations in the design and manual construction of the windmill, water wheel, and the square-rigged sailing ship, the making of armour and firearms, and the casting of cannon. It is not a single invention, but the accumulation of many innovations that makes for any one complete industrial revolution, each of which would seem to be as irreversible as it is inevitable that it be superseded by a bigger and faster one. It seems that in the economic history of the world, because the occasions for technological innovation are endless, the civilisations of the world need never reach

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a plateau of economic development as illustrated by the history of industrial development in the 19th and 20th centuries [36]. The second European technological revolution, associated with the beginning of manufacturing (as distinct from making), involves coal-fired steam power and the machinery of the early 19th century textile industries. The third European technological revolution required vast expenditures of manual labour to bring about a revolution in steam transport and the extraction industries that were essential for steel production and construction of the heavy industry of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It also marks the beginning of the universal use of blueprints and templates in factory-based mass production of assembled machines with interchangeable parts, such as the machine gun and the motor car. The first half of the 20th century witnessed the fourth technological revolution of the electrical and petrochemical industries of both Europe and the United States. The latter half of this century witnessed the revolutionary era of nuclear power and the electronics and synthetic hydrocarbon-based industries associated with the automated production of the uniform products available in the post-war global economy. All these descriptions are very simplified. Even so, on reflection, it is only since the Second World War that the great American, European, and Asian consumer boom, anticipated by the classical economists, really happened. It came after major advances in medical, health, and hygiene technology and the technology of artificial fertilisers and transported food that were not as conspicuous as the growing use of radio, refrigerator, television, telephone, washing machine, work car and holiday airplane. These latter have been accompanied by a growing demand for computers as an instrument of scientific research and as a tool for industrial design appropriate for totally automated mass reproduction of the kind pioneered by the Japanese. Among the products of the microelectronics industry involved in the so-called communications revolution are telecommunications, audio-visual recording, and automated guidance and control systems for both military and domestic use. Where the mechanisation of industry has been superseded by computerised automation— now the hallmark of factory production among the most advanced industrial nations—a marked increase in the pace of industrial change has been experienced. This has been accompanied by whole new fields of technological innovation. Industrial man in America and Russia is now on the threshold of genetic engineering, has gone through the door to the infinite potential of nuclear power, and is now on the first stair to the conquest of outer space. These developments have far removed present life experience from that of those who have been left behind because of their ignorance of modern technology in time-lagged economies. Although the global economy is centred in the advanced industrial nations (and the majority of its leaders are from former imperial powers), the ecological and cultural consequences of the centripetal attraction of its energy resources and the centrifugal distribution of both the useful and the waste products of that energy transformation in production and consumption are now worldwide. To talk about technological revolutions is to talk about saving labour, which is to talk about saving time, and that is to talk about the pace of industrial and business life going faster. This is bound to have an impact on our ideological understanding of the social and

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political significance of change, as the works of Mill, Marx, Maine, and countless other ideologues illustrate.

5. Technology and social change Leading a wandering life, like that of waifs and strays avoiding the jaws of the town work house or the last of Europe’s Romany gypsies escaping the army recruiting officer, has no premeditated objectives. Governed by nature’s seasons it knows only the wildlife regularity of the rising and sinking sun. It offers the romantic open-ended freedom of nomadic self-determination as against the utilitarian equality of opportunity to proceed down the technologically determined road of those employed in offices, mines, and factories. Every route of promotion to temporary job security is hedged in by the boundaries of the expanding property holdings of capital investors who have succeeded in keeping the tramps and travellers out. Opting out of industrial society and the urban lifestyle simply means no food in one’s belly and no roof over one’s head. For those who enjoyed their painstaking craftwork, as claimed by the early 19th century machine breakers, one of the problems presented by technological unemployment brought about by fast factory production was that their only alternative employment opportunities called for abandoning individual performance in favour of the identical tasks of collective machine dependence. This meant accepting the end of time-absorbing job satisfaction, since the only alternative was the seemingly endless out-of-work time spent tramping the open road. When the time cycle that had been the independent worker’s friend instead became a hectic round-the-clock attempt to save time, in order to do more work the second time the hour hand went round, time became the worker’s enemy. In the hurly-burly of job-competitive life, the stable relationship between titled landlord, tenant farmer, and country craftsman was lost. The questions now to be addressed are: 1. Why is the rustic ideology of communal idealists as various as Morris [37] and Tolstoy [38]—which would return industrial workers to as near a state of nature as craft production and barter exchange will admit—a belief in a human relationship to nature that contemporary economic circumstances will not now permit? 2. What, if anything, of value has been lost to the ideologue? The nomads of the 20th century are now few and far between. Insofar as any are to be found in the first European wave of advanced industrial nations, they are the last remnants of the experience of mass migration after the collapse of the Roman Empire. The movement of Celts, Saxons, Vikings, Franks, Normans, Goths, Huns, and Tartars was a different experience from that of the mass migration from agriculture to industry during the course of the industrial revolution of the 19th century. Tribal movements do not lead to the kind of cultural melting pot dramatically illustrated in the history of the United States. The European tribes who eventually settled in territorial domains were able to bring their native language, customs, and conven-

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tions with them because they moved collectively. However, the attraction of individuals to the industrial cities of the 19th century afforded no defence against the cultural levelling effect of urban life. From Cobbett’s Rural Rides [39] to Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops [40], the kind of social and cultural disintegration recorded in Bourne’s Change in the Village [41] resulted in the close-knit rural community giving way to the society of strangers which characterizes modern city life. Numerous factors contributed to the fragmentation of the social hierarchy of the country, which resulted in the class-divided but relative cultural uniformity of industrial society. Among them are: 1. increased geographical and social mobility, 2. a rapid population increase which, for the employed, meant the acquisition of differentiated occupational skills, 3. a marked decline in religious practice, and 4. an increase in uniform basic education. Rather than the social identity of the industrial worker being established by where he came from, it was now established by his current employment which, in terms of financial reward, he was determined to improve. The new commercial and industrial society was likened to a rat race. Presumably the person who first did so was the last person to have time to race rats, as the principal characteristic of the experience of new competitive working life is that there is only just enough time to finish the job at hand in order that there be time left to get on with the next. Given that the pace of change has increased, at least as far as industrial man’s subjective experience is concerned, we must suppose that, relative to times past, a decreasing proportion of the increasing numbers of humankind in command of the latest technology are travelling into the future at an ever-greater speed, and that an increasing proportion have been left behind in progressively remote lifetime cycles determined by the age of their technology, as calculated in the history of the most advanced industrial nations. Ultra-conservatives, like Oakeshott [42] and Eliot [43], who love the past for its own sake, preferring the familiar to the unknown, profess that this is not a good thing. The faster things change in the manmade world of advanced industrial nations, characterised by what Popper [44] calls the “newness” of the latest manufactured things, less and less of its past in the present can remain physically intact. However, it is not just that urban development for the future entails destruction of the buildings of the past, and that there is only so much space left for ancient monuments and only so much room in a museum. Every artifact is entropic as a result of the physical change of state it undergoes by virtue of natural causes that eventually lead to its historical identity being destroyed. In the long run the cause of conservation is lost. But in the short run it is not so hopeless. The call for conservation of abandoned buildings, first made by William Morris, founder of The Society for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments, draws our attention to the fact that the decay of the evidence of our past is now more like a swift historical event than a slow natural process. The major historical event in question is the industrial revolution and

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its effect on the cultural environment of rural life. It is the victim of the same technological time change effected by capital and labour mobility with the coming of modern means of travel and communication. Bradshaw’s railway timetables, first compiled in 1839, marked a turning point in the history of new town and old country life. It is the most important turning point for Withrow, who notes: “At the beginning of the nineteenth century four out of every five people in England and Wales were country folk, but by the mid-century this was true of only about half” [45]. The same magnetic attraction of urban employment has given a new shape to the world’s demography and will continue to do so until the day “the machine stops” [46]. Prior to Nisbit’s classic account of the vanishing sense of community in The Quest for Community [47], social psychologists of various political opinion had commented on its consequences for the quality of human life. According to the liberal Mannheim, what has been sacrificed to the false god of industrial progress is the individuality, intimacy, and privacy essential to rewarding social, communal, and familial relationships. The human relationships between modern management and its workforce are as impersonal as is the uniformity of their products. As presented in Mannheim’s Diagnosis of Our Time, the principal thesis is: The pre-conditions favourable to privacy and contemplation were first threatened by the industrial Revolution with its big factories, mechanical work and the growth of big cities with their crowding, mass amusements, mass excitement and political demonstrations. The existence of intimacy, privacy, contemplation and inwardness is threatened wherever modern mass society develops whether here or in America, Germany or Russia. [48] Of the threat to the durational time of the closed inwardness of private meditation and the unguarded outwardness of close personal relationships, the Catholic theologian Berdyaev wrote in Solitude and Society: Today, in a century of technology and speed, the problem of time has become particularly acute. Time has undergone a frenzied acceleration to which the rhythm of human life must respond. No instant has intrinsic value or plenitude, but must rapidly yield to the succeeding instant. Each instant is but a means to the succeeding instant. Each instant is infinitely divisible and, therefore, has no validity. The era of technology is entirely oriented toward the future—a future wholly determined by the development of time. [49] (p. 145) In Berdyaev’s view the mechanisation of industry has sacrificed the durational time of creativity, contemplation, and appreciation in favour of the successive instant time of the rapid assembly of disposable artifacts of organised production. The modern age of electronic communication had broken down the barriers to the invasion of both private conversation and public debate. It has opened up the closed community to the outside world and turned active participation in communal events into the passive reception of official and commercial information. The result is that: “... the prodigious diffusion of these universal means of communication tends to under-

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mine the intimacy and familiarity so essential to communion: it has the effect of making man extremely solitary” [49] (p. 186). This conservative reaction to the experience of modernity has not, of course, been confined to continental Europe. In England, a similar reaction to that of Berdyaev is expressed by C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man [50] and in America by August Heckcher in The Individual and the Mass [51]. Their common conclusion is that now is the time to do something about this increasingly critical situation. It cannot be left indefinitely to the future, since the same progressive technology that has created it will also exasperate it. In Ellul’s [52] view of this technological society there is already good reason to see its members as becoming more the frightened victims of industrial technology than Babbage’s masters of its power. Every industrial revolution is a cultural revolution, and every cultural revolution has its own ideological thrust, whether it originates from inside or outside of its present cultural boundaries as, for example, the Soviet social revolution under Stalin and China’s Cultural Revolution under Mao Tse-tung. Both had a Western ideological impetus that transformed a traditional social hierarchy with a religious foundation into a materialistic, anti-intellectual one involving radical cultural change. Change of this fundamental kind can be in the direction of technological modernity, as favoured by Stalin in terms of the mass production of armaments and reflected by the military parades on May Day; or it can be in favour of a revolt against the cultural residues of imperialism, represented by a rejection of Western consumer sophistication as instigated by Mao and represented by the austere uniformity of his peasant’s jacket. However, in the cases of both Imperial Russia and Imperial China, the influence of Western technology on manufacturing and transport was a prerequisite for the kind of cultural revolutions that followed. As reflected in human apparel in Western consumer society, cultural revolutions can be either forward-looking (as in the fashion futurism of plastic trainers) or backward-looking (as in the case of denim jeans). The former is associated with an appreciation of the convenience of technological innovation and the latter with a romantic image of manual, outdoor, blue-collar labour associated with the revolt of youth against the indoor, white-collar conformity of American commercial society. However, whether a cultural revolution is backward, or forward looking, technological innovation is invariably progressive. Although the machinery that manufactures old world workers’ trousers in new world America may be more sophisticated than that used in manufacturing Stalin’s army uniforms and Mao’s peasant’s jackets, what all mass-produced clothes have in common, compared to hand-made garments, is the sure sign of their modernity: namely, their universal uniformity made inevitable by the design of the machines that manufactured them. However, whatever be their design, they do not manufacture goods worldwide in equal numbers for everyone. Today, the combined wealth of the world’s 358 billionaires is greater than the combined annual income of countries that contain 45% of the world’s population [53]. According to Shrivastava, writing in Organization Studies [54], at the end of the 1980s, 25% of the world’s population enjoyed unsustainable high levels of consumption, consuming 80% of the world’s resources, and producing 80% of the world’s pollution. Simultaneously, 75% of the world’s population lived in hunger

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and extreme deprivation; of these 3.5 billion people, if only 50% were to rapidly industrialise, it would mean catastrophic environmental damage. After Malthus published “Essay on the Principle of Population” [55], he received, among others, a reply from Godwin in his last work Of Population [56]. Malthus’s argument is that the world’s growing population will eventually be restricted by its limited natural resources. Without moral restraint on reproduction, nature itself would introduce ever-greater numbers to the experience of starvation. Godwin’s argument is that in the foreseeable future, progressive education and technological innovation could indefinitely delay any such dismal conclusion to the post-Enlightenment debate on progress. To date it would seem that, in terms of its common acceptance of the primacy of the economic conditions of civilisation, Godwin’s cheerful optimism has, up to a point, carried the day, but it may well prove to be the case that the message of miserable Malthus will have carried the day tomorrow. The poverty trap into which the majority of the world’s population has already fallen is a technological time trap set by the pace of technological change in the advanced industrial nations compared with that of those left behind by it. As polar icecaps disappear as quickly as fossil fuel resources (which is still not as fast as Nordic pine forests are made into newspapers and tropical rain forests into new furniture), the possibility is that Babbage’s idea of industrial progress is not as friendly to Godwin’s as might be supposed. The gravitation of the world’s valuable raw materials to the advanced industrial nations is not matched by the even distribution of their products to every corner of the globe. Moreover, capital and technological transfer to Far Eastern countries, attracted by the availability of cheap labour, is increasingly concentrated in incredibly small areas of the total land mass. It is true that as the mental working day has contracted in the world’s advanced industrial nations, the manual working day has further expanded in underdeveloped economies where work is done for foreign firms. Where there is no work, the advanced industrial economies leave today’s industrially backward on the edge of the black hole of history into which the ancient cultures of South American Indians, Australian aborigines, African bushmen, Canadian Eskimos, Norwegian Laps, Bedouin tribesmen, and Tibetan monks are fast disappearing. Their worlds will soon be irrevocably lost to more advanced industrial invaders in what has become a game of musical chairs.

6. Technological determinism and ideological shift Understanding technologically-led industrial revolutions as spatio-temporal vortexes that draw capital and labour into centres of progressive technological innovation helps to explain why earlier vortexes of comparatively primitive modes of production were deflated as their markets were saturated by the cheaper and superior products of a new industrial power. Such is the technological power vacuum initially created in under-developed political economies by the market invasion of industrial advanced nations, that massive cultural transformations in whole societies inevitably occur. This was the impact on the previously geographically-protected hand-loom

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cotton industry of Madras when the English cotton industry was mechanized. The result was also the termination of a centuries-old way of life. However, industrial vortexes do have spinoffs, in the form of technological and capital transfers, whenever ideological and cultural barriers do not resist absorption, as was the case in the birth of the Japanese electronics and car industries. The result is counter-cultural industrial vortexes capable of exporting products to the home countries of the inventions that preceded their own native technological innovation. None of these vortextual developments would have occurred without the export of Western ideology, but given the incentive and the resources to compete, not only may new industrial powers emerge, but old ones may make comebacks with changed ideological outlooks and new technological achievements, as in the case of postwar Germany. Nevertheless, contrary to what was expected by 19th century liberals, the global economy today reveals an ever-increasing gap in real income between rich and poor nations and, like the undermined ecology of many wildlife species, there are numerous examples of endangered human cultures that have been eroded by the impact of modern technology on traditional societies. Such is now the difference in the pace of technological change in advanced and retarded industry, in developed and underdeveloped economies, respectively, that their histories now appear to be moving in different time cycles. This “continental drift” may not last forever. It seems that the time gap between the teleological lifestyle of the occidental technocrat and the ontological lifestyle of the Oriental peasant cannot be bridged by communicating the cosmopolitan message of Western liberalism without the ideological values of the former corrupting those of the latter. In some respects technology is a great cultural leveller. In other respects, particularly in terms of the chasm between wealth and poverty, it is exceedingly divisive. In that respect, technology creates new opportunities for the ideological imagination. We have no more reason to believe that we are about to see the end of ideology than we have to believe that we will live to see the end of the world—no matter how many times these events have been predicted. What we can expect to see is a dramatic shift in the ideologic of the dominant ideology as we follow its path around the global economy in the footsteps of technological innovation. Insofar as the recent cultural history of the world is concerned, there is something to be said again for technological determinism as the only historical explanation of the ideological drift that can be associated with the cultural change effected by industrialisation. It is society as a whole that is changed by an industrial revolution, not just the relevance of its dominant ideology which may long survive its social impact. The established ideological attitude toward technological change enters the world from the past into the ongoing present of a tradition of political activity that reflects an earlier experience of change. It enters the ongoing present as a commitment, and accepted as such, it is hard to relinquish; but in the long run, an ideology that cannot accommodate change has to be abandoned. Rather than traditional ideological ideas being consciously rejected by those who suddenly find new ideas more attractive, the adherents of long-established doctrines may find that the emotive power of their received ideas belongs only to their own

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dying generation, as happened in the history of the former Soviet Union. Rather than be refuted, old ideological truths are simply left behind by those of the new generation to whose experience they appear unrelated. In circumstances of radical social and political change, a long-established ideology that fails to evolve, like the ideology of the divine hereditary monarchy, is inevitably doomed to eventual extinction. Its death scream is heard at the end of a long war of words, during which a whole new vocabulary makes its appearance. This is a common feature of the running battle of ideological confrontation which accompanies any radical change in a long existing social order. The unresolvable disputation, growing before, raging during, and fading after the armed conflict of revolution or civil war, finally terminates only with the extinction of the vocabulary used by at least one of the original verbal contestants. The survival of any one of Gallie’s [57] and Gray’s [58] essentially contested concepts in politics depends upon the extinction of another species of political talk in which it has a different meaning. The symbiotic relationship between industrial revolutions, ideological reflection, and political action does not admit simple cause-and-effect explanation. On the one hand, we have to consider the influence of radical shifts in the intellectual climate of opinion of the kind effected by the Enlightenment, which led to the decline of the kind of theological argument deployed in both Filmer’s Patriarcha [59] and the first of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government [60], and the increasing popularity of the scientism of Mill’s essay, “Considerations on Representative Government” [61] and the historicism of Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology [62]. On the other hand, we have to consider the indirect effects of the industrial revolution on the pace and direction of social change in the world of experience as reflected in contemporary legislation. Reflecting on the development of the English legal system in the 19th century, Dicey advanced the thesis, in Law and Public Opinion in England [63], that between 1825 and 1870 the chief objective of legal reform had been to increase individual self-determination. Thereafter, it was less concerned with individual liberty than with implementing a policy designed to satisfy social justice. The transition was from a policy of laissez-faire to one of collectivism. This development was a response to the disparate social and economic circumstances of different classes of persons, which was encouraged by the earlier objective of wealth creation. There was a change of government policy, a gradual but definite change. In the opinion of the English “new” liberals like Montague [64] and Green [65], writing in the latter part of the 19th century, what had been a correct application of liberal principles was now an incorrect application, or at least the application of different principles than those which classical liberals, like Spencer [11], still prescribed. In short, after 1870, Spencer’s position was progressively pushed aside by a positive commitment to a form of social and economic justice that cannot be disassociated from the development of working-class political consciousness and the extension of the franchise that eventually brought the Labour Party to power. As for the fate of the British Liberal Party at the polls, its declining electoral support may have more to do with the passing of a liberal generation than with its conversion to socialism. Like the passing of the generation of early 19th century

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machine breakers, which blackened the future of utopian socialism, the kind of industrial change that occurred in Britain in the first half of the 20th century was not as favourable to the optimistic outlook of the older generation of classical liberalism as it has proved to be in the second half, which has seen the socialist state eclipsed by the rise of the multinational industrial corporation during the age of the global free market economy.

7. Conclusion Had Marx not undermined the strength of the case for technological determinism, advanced by Babbage, as an explanation of the cultural consequences of changes in the mode of production, the case for technological determinism might be a more respected academic thesis than it is. Marx chose to ignore the social impact of the kind of technological achievements for which Babbage’s student Brunel became famous. In Capital, Marx was more concerned with making ideological capital out of Babbage’s description of factory work conditions, presented 52 years earlier, and 15 years before the first regulatory factory acts, than he was with foreseeing the impact on working-class living standards as a result of the exodus of cheap European labour and imports of cheap food in the 50 years to follow. As for White [66], she could have made a better case for technological determinism had she used as an example the impact of the invention of the screw propeller on the European economy and the machine gun on its male population, rather than make the ridiculous claim for the impact of the stirrup on the structure of feudal society. Whatever gave social and military prominence to men on horseback in the ranks of a feudal army, it was something more than the invention of the stirrup. The stirrup was but the tip of the iceberg that represents a whole economy [67] in which the harness of wind and water power was already a significant factor. In any case, it is blatantly obvious that White has not tried to ride a cart-horse at full gallop, with a levelled lance in her right hand, while grasping the saddle pummel with the left, with no assistance from the belly, chest, and tail bands holding fast a highbacked saddle to the body of the horse. It is these bands, not stirrups alone, that enable a rider to deliver the full force of the weight of both horse and rider to the point of impact of the lancehead, rather than put the rider on his bottom. If we are going to talk about the technological aspects of social revolutions, we have at least to get our technology right. It is the smelting of metals and the crafting of suits of armour, weapons, and complex harnessing, and not just iron stirrups that temporarily favoured the cause of the medieval knight on horseback—so long as the medieval code of chivalry prevailed. It was not cavalry that carried the day at Agincourt, where the weaponry of the French noble, regardless of his stirrups, proved to be hopelessly out-ranged by the English yeoman’s yew wood longbow and its steel arrowheads that had no respect for any code of chivalry. That is how all good, old ideologies die—on the battlefield of historical reality— where victory goes to the cause of those armed with the latest technology of death and destruction. The outcome of ideological conflict may decide what we are pre-

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pared to stand and fight for in the political arena, but it is superior command of the necessary technology that is most likely to decide the outcome of conflict when pursued to its final conclusion on the battlefield. As wars of national self-determination became more and more ideological, technological innovation played a more decisive part in their outcome: the Springfield rifle in the American Civil War, the needle gun in the Franco–Prussian War, the machine gun in the First World War, and so on. It seems to be the case with ideological argument, when all is said and done, as Mao Tse-tung remarks in his speech to the Communist Party in 1938: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” [68]. The fundamental fact of the matter is that an ideological image of reality must relate to the contemporary social, economic, and political reality if it is to be the dominant ideology. It has to respond to the impact of the dominant form of industrial technology on that reality—either as a reaction to it, as an encouragement of existing forms of it, or as the instigation of new variations of it. The ethical experience that fires the ideological imagination has an inescapable attraction to inclining its adherents to resist, tolerate, or promote a change in their political, social, and economic circumstances. The only emotional relief for those who tire of any one of its charms is that, although for a time the newly enthralled cannot fail to be entertained by it, like the attraction of a catchy tune, its charms fade with time. As a personal commitment in the political arena of an ever-changing world, the relevance of an ideological conviction to human conduct throughout society is limited to those prepared by their personal experience of life to be influenced by it. Apart from the ideology of technology [69] that has accompanied industrialisation everywhere, the local historical circumstances of the successful propagation of a political ideology are all too readily changed into those in which its vocabulary is inevitably doomed to be withdrawn from active service. The temporality of an ideological tradition of political discourse has within itself the origin of its own mortality. It lies, as Mannheim [70] perceived, in an ideology’s inherent power of persuasion. Whether the original adherents of an ideology succeed in resisting a challenge to the social status of a dominant class, or give another class a leg up on, or even remove, the established ladder of promotion, as they succeed in changing the social structure of the existing world, the substance of their original beliefs becomes the ghost of an ideal. Its lifeblood is soaked up into the soil of a new political and social reality its adherents have helped to create, but to which it is no longer relevant. The ideological choice of technology, above all else, is in one sense decisive, but in another sense the effects of that technology are independently consequential. It may be the case that from the seeds of an ideology, revolution, reform and reaction grow, but whether the seeds of any one ideology fall on fertile or stony ground is likely to be a matter of previous technological determination. In relation to the everdecreasing proportion of the world’s population able to exercise any ideological preference for this or that technology, the ever-increasing proportion is without its benefit, while still being subject to its unintended consequences. Ideologies ride on the merry-go-round of technological change that may well end with “Pop goes the weasel”.

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The great ideologues of the 19th century, like Mill and Marx, were the very agents of social and political changes that made the substance of their ideological message to the world irrelevant to the experience of following generations. At least in a world of rapid technological change, like that of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, it seems that every political ideologue attends the dance of time wrapped in the winding sheet of his burial.

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