The ideology of technology and the birth of the global economy

Technology

Pergamon

In Society, Vol. 18, No. I. pp. 61-77. 1996 Copyright 0 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0160-791x/96 $15.00+0.00

0160-791X(95)00026-7

The Ideology

of Technology and the Birth of the Global Economy D.J Manning and YM. Carlisle

ABSTRACT Tbe fundamental presuppositions of both the market-led and the command-driven economies have common characteristics with the conceptual understanding of experimental science and applied science, respectively. In spite of the controversy between individualists and collectivists on the proper role of government (legislation or dictation) in fostering economic development, there has been a largely unrecognized but fundamental agreement on the “causes” of wealth creation. The polarized dispute about the market vs the command economy obscured a common belief in the moral justification of continual technological innovation. Both views entailed a belief in the moral value of technology in the service of civilization, primarily at the expense of the moral authority of theology. This belief bad far-reaching implications for the uneven development of the global economy under imperial and multinational corporate control. It has created the sense of time of modernity and has radically transformed the culture of societies, the organization of industry, the objectives of commercial organizations, and their economic circumstances. Copyright 0 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd

1. Introduction

In the era in which Britain, Germany, America and the Soviet Union became the world’s leading industrial powers, experimental science was understood to involve the isolation of a natural cause under controlled laboratory conditions, while engineering and applied science were thought to involve the insulation of an effect by the design of an inanimate energy system. The l?r D. J. Manning is a graduate of the London School of Economics, and is the author of numerous works on ideology, technology and change. He has been a visiting professor, from the University of Durham, at the universities of Texas, California and Tubingen. Dr Y M. Carlisle graduated from Durbam, Stratbclyde and Newcastle universities, has co-authored various articles and is a lecturer in strategic management at Royal Holloway College working with Dr D. Manning on ideology, technology and change and Professor Charles Baden-Fuller of City University, London, on strategic change management. In January 1996, she is taking up an appointment at City University Business School, London, U.K. 61

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former concept is akin to the ideology of a free market economy, which presupposes that the legal system can isolate the causes of wealth creation from governmental and criminal interference. The latter concept is akin to that of a command economy, where the insulated effects of administrative direction, free from political and religious opposition, are intended to have a premeditated result. In the understanding of the science-based paradigm of market political economy devised by the classical liberals, the engineering-based logic of socialist economics made no sense, and vice versa. But at the same time, in the context of scientific research and industrial development, both concepts have something very important in common: the acknowledgement of the fact that experimental science is as dependent on the technological sophistication of its apparatus as is technological innovation in industry dependent upon the accuracy of the findings of experimental science. This common recognition of the importance of systematic research and “blue print” design encouraged a fundamental belief in the power of a science-related technology to create the transport and the products for a global economy. This article explores the origins of the European inspiration of this belief and what were, in times of war and peace, its international implications. 2. Legislation,

Science and Technology

Of those who belonged to the Birmingham Luna society in the late eighteenth century, a spiritual forerunner of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, meeting in the first half of the nineteenth century, some were experimental scientists, like Priestley’ and others technologists like Watt and Wedgewood.’ Many were eccentric but few were lunatics. They were, at one and the same time, a scientific, technological and business minded company.’ What distinguished its founder members, principally Priestley and Watt, from the luminaries of the Royal Society, was the belief that the technologically-oriented scientist is capable of what Bacon had called the “conquest of nature.“4 This conquest consisted in the industrial employment of inanimate energy, authorized by the ideological value ascribed to the satisfaction of human want. Interested as they were in technological innovation, both in laboratory apparatus and in industry, the leading members of the Luna Society did not conceive scientific discovery, as distinct from the theoretical deductions of natural philosophy, as being anything other than the result of invention guided by testing its contrivances. This was not a purely theoretical understanding of existing physical reality of the kind advanced by Newton. Experimental science was, in the Luna view, itself a form of technology. In this view the difference between operating a laboratory apparatus and an industrial process was simply the difference between technologically isolating a cause, with a view to investigating its effect, and technologically insulating that effect from the influence of external causes that would otherwise prevent its desired occurrence.

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In this technological frame of mind, when focused on the problem of economic development, discovering the conditions for wealth creation and engineering their existence by political design are related activities. From a Luna point of view, they are distinguished only by their different procedures and objectives. However, in the changing circumstances of the nineteenth century European population explosion, the economic objectives of pursuing private profit and those of satisfying overall public want proved to be radically incompatible. The experiment of liberating market forces from legal restraints and engineering wealth distribution was the subject of partisan political controversy. The fundamental basis of this political confrontation, primarily between liberals and socialists, was the difference between a desire to create the legally regulated market in which competitive private investment in the production of a variety of saleable goals and services is prontable, and a desire to monopolistically control industrial production by centrally directed public investment with a view to politically dictating the uniform design and distribution of its products. Perhaps it is not surprising that an ideologue like Jeremy Bentham, schooled in the methodology of experimental science,’ should follow Adam Smith’s physiocratic account of the energy of economic activity being liberated wherever the conditions of a market society were maintained by the design of an appropriate legal system. ’ The legitimate behavior of a free market economy should exhibit the same kind of regularity, determined by the procedures of experimental science. What the law does not prohibit it permits, and, in the case of industrial growth this is the natural effect of technological competition isolated from the intervention of the causes of its stagnation. In Bentham’s book, the study of the utility of legislation is the study of how best to achieve the liberation of the natural inclination of wealth creation from the fear of violent dispossession and premature death. As a defence against political intimidation, crime and pauperism, in place of the inconsistency of the historic and the vagary of natural laws, he offered the psychological facts of inventive human motivation as the best guide to rational legislation.’ Following in Bentham’s footsteps, in defence of the legal regulation of a free market economy, Hayek, who had previously restated the argument of Spencer’s 1884 Benthamite essay, “The Coming Slavery,“8 in his 1944 “The Road to Serfdom,“9 subsequently expressed the conviction in his 1960 “The Constitution of Liberty,” that the task of the law giver is not to set up a particular order but merely to create conditions in which an orderly arrangement can establish and ever renew itself. As in nature, to induce the establishment of such an order does not require that we are able to predict the behavior of the individual atom-that will depend on the unknown particular circumstances in which it finds itself. All that is required is a limited regularity in its behavior; and the purpose of the human laws we enforce is to secure such limited regularity as will make the formation of an order possible.“’

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The rule of law in this model of a political economy is analogous to the discipline of a laboratory apparatus designed to allow a certain natural cause to have an individual effect which is constant because it is not subject to interference by the effects of contingent environmental change. Over time this can only be achieved by the adjustment of the laboratory apparatus to compensate for any such variation. By emphasizing the inevitable ongoing character of the analogous kind of ongoing engineering in the social field, Popper, in his 1957 work, “The Poverty of Historicism,“” advanced a notable amendment to Bentham’s holistic legislative plan for a permanently reformed political economy. Popper wrote in an age of more rapid technological innovation in production than that which had occurred in Bentham’s age of labor intensive industry. Nevertheless, Popper does not challenge Bentham’s fundamental assumption that a rational legal system is shaped by the utilitarian objectives of its legislators the task of the piecemeal social engineer is to design social institutions and to reconstruct and run those already in existence . . . as a technologist or engineer he will look upon them from a “functional” or “instrumental” point of view.‘* It is from the point of view of their being instrumental in the performance of tasks that the relationship of cause to effect in industrial design is functional. Its function is to achieve a humanly useful objective. Here the objective of industrial design is not the insulation of a cause from extraneous intervention, it is the insulation of an effect from any but the desired performance. In this connection, Smith himself, in discussing technological innovation in his 1776, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”13 made an essential point about the opportunist character of industrial engineering characteristic of private enterprise. In the lirst fire engines, a boy was constantly employed to open and shut alternately the communication between the boiler and the cylinder, according as the piston either ascended or descended. One of these boys, who loved to play with his companions, observed that by tying a string from the handle of the valve which opened this communication to another part of the machine, the valve would open and shut without his assistance, and leave him at liberty to divert himself with his play fellows.14 Apart from associating technological innovation with the desire to increase leisure time and save labor, and the common sense of dividing its specialized employment, Smith pointed to the most fundamental of all the objectives of mechanical engineering. It is the achievement of the efficient, economic and useful insulation of inanimate energy from any diversion from the performance of the function of its synchronized movement in designed transmission. This concept of utilizing the forces of nature-the fundamental concept of technology-was not originally as attractive to those obliged to market their labor to satisfy an immediate physical want as it was to those prepared to invest in productive machinery with a view to eventually marketing a profitable product.15 It was not until the political leadership of organized labor embraced the

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image of man as master of nature, by his use of the productive machine for the conquest of want, rather than the maximization of profit, that industrialism became as inseparable from socialism as it was from liberalism. In contrast to the concept of the rule of law as a set of negative restraints on conduct detrimental to the accumulation of industrial wealth, the concept of a legal system designed to create what the Webbs, in 1937, described as “a world of plenty” 15 placed a new emphasis on the potential wealth creation of the centralized direction of the technology of mass production. In the mind of Lenin, the most notorious advocate of this form of “economic engineering” as opposed to the “scientific economics” of the classical economists, the burning question was how to establish the centralized direction of an economy. The answer was by revolution and civil war. In his 1917, “The State and Revolution”‘” Lenin takes it as a matter of common sense that he who controls the capital and the choice of technology of industrial production can control product distribution in the interests of the producers. We have but to overthrow the capitalists, to crush the resistance of these exploiters with the iron hand of the armed workers, to smash the bureaucratic machine of the modern state-and we shall have a splendidly equipped mechanism, free from the “parasite,” a. mechanism which can very well be set going by the united workers themselves, who will have technicians, foremen and book keepers, and pay them all, as, indeed all “state” officials in general, a workman’s wage.” For Lenin, there was no “hidden hand.” There was only the question of whose hands were visibly on the levers of political and industrial power. However, the conceptual framework of the relationship between experimental science and technology, in which technical know-how is the key factor in effecting what is taken to be progress, remains unchanged. The exact nature of the ideological appeal of this relationship was established by Charles Babbage in the first half of the nineteenth century.

3. The Ideology of Technology and the Modern Industrial

State

Babbage, in 1832, the author of, “On The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, “IS may be said to be the originator of the understanding of the efficiency of automation in mass reproduction. This conception of industrial efficiency is distinct from the long established principle of the division of skilled labor that automation replicates in mechanized reproduction. As the man who clearly distinguished making from manufacturing, Babbage became the leading exponent of the principle of the technological determination of the diminished labor value of men working without machines. This he did by distinguishing the slow making of articles by coordinated hands from the swift synchronized manufacture of artifacts by the “blue print” design and template reproduction system. He thereby conceptually divorced the process of fabrication in Smith’s pin factory from the automation characteristic of early Victorian mechanized industry. The debt that Mill and Marx

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variously owe to Babbage’s understanding of the management of synchronized reproduction is recognized in both Mill s 1848 defence of the ideology of technology in his “Principles of Political Economy”19 and in Marx’s attack on it in his Capita12’ The understanding of the place of technological innovation in wealth creation, as propagated by Mill, Cobden and Bright, brought to liberal discourse a profound faith in the utilization of inanimate energy to advance the cause of civilization. It is this belief in the ethical value of utilizing the power of nature, that is the essence of the ideology of technology, which motivated those industrialists then intent upon the creation of world wide markets for their manufactured products. It consists of two distinct aspects: first, in an ethic of industrial life that ascribes an intrinsic value to technological achievement, and second, in a belief in the political ability of those representative of the industrially invested to create the legal conditions for their own wealth creation. Together, described by Marx as capitalism, they powerfully supported the commercial and political ambitions of European imperialism. The first aspect may be represented by the following quotation in the spirit of the ideology of technology that was to be the inspiration of the manufacturing economies of imperial England, France and Germany. It is taken from an address made by Babbage’s close acquaintance, the notable pillar of Victorian society and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society S. R. Blackwell. His subject is the iron making resources of Great Britain as reflected in the best exhibits of the great exhibition of 1851 if to the Anglo-Saxon race has been given so large a proportion of the mineral riches of the world, it must not be forgotten, that, equal to the power thus committed to their care, is the responsibility thereto attached; they must, of necessity, be the guides and promoters of the advancing civilization of the present day, seeing that the very basis of that civilization is to be found in the increased and increasing purchasing power to adopt to the requirements of society the great physical resources of the world, and that the science and the skill of the present day would be comparatively powerless but for the stores of iron and coal by which that science and skill can be rendered available. The steam engine, the railroad, and the electric telegraph, the characteristic features of the present day, are indeed preparing a quiet revolution for the world; breaking down class interests and substituting universal interests in their place, they are fast uniting in one bond of unity the entire human race, and are leading rapidly, to use the words of his Royal Highness Prince Albert, “to the accomplishment of that end to which, indeed, all history points, to the realization of the unity of mankind.21

In Blackwell’s view the prospect of that unity depends upon the creation of a global industrial economy integrated primarily by the products of heavy industry proudly marked “made in England.” Taking the iron and steel industry, for no other reason than that it was the backbone of Victorian Britain, as the workshop of the world, the message of the ideology of technology, that was rapidly becoming the dominant ideology of Western European overseas business activity, can be further illustrated from pre-first world war texts. The quotation below cites the words of Sir James Kitson, M.P., as

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taken from Macfarlane’s 1908 “Principles and Practice of Iron and Steel Manufacture.“22 It alludes to the ascription of value to productive and product technology as the source of all the conveniences upon which an international industrial civilization depends. In what variety and most useful forms do we daily, hourly meet with it. In stately steamships, whose records of capacity and of swiftness constitute one of the marvels of our time; in the powerful locomotive careering along the way; in machinery, ponderous and powerful, or numbly delicate and deft, in hammer and anvil, in cannon and shot: the pen, the sword, the ploughshare and a thousand things more, from the proverbial “needle to anchor“ are fashioned for us from this most useful of metals.”

Macfarlane’s account of the technology of iron and steel manufacture is an exposition of the interrelationship between technological innovation in the form of the Siemens iron furnace, and the consequent increased production capacity of the rolled steel factory that formed the foundation of Britain’s advanced industrial revolution and the market economy essential to the extension of her trading empire. The account is reverential in that it ascribes an ideological value to both the commercial and military success made possible by the technological innovation of a modern industrial power. The second aspect of the ideology of technology emphasizes the relationship between industrial production and a market led or command driven economy. The ideology of technology is common to both. For example, in one respect, Spencer’s strident 1884 defence of the free market economy, in his “The Man Versus The State,“2” is in accordance with the inspiration of Bentham and Mill. In another respect it is not in conflict with the equally committed defence of a state fostered program of industrial development favored by the disciples of the German economists List and Wagner.” That is the respect in which they all subscribe to the common conviction that makes possible the imperial expansion essential to the economy of a world power. In the nineteenth century iron ship steam power and the screw propeller increased Britain’s Atlantic trade and the Suez canal made it possible for British companies to trade more profitably in the East. This was the age of heavy engineering financed by share holders and supported by the military and commercial policies of governments with imperialist objectives in view. Writing from that point of view, Berhardi, in his “Germany and the Next War,” published in 1914,2G attributed the imperial expansion of great Britain to her technological and commercial achievements. England introduced the universal employment of coal and iron and of machinery into industries, thus founding immense industrial establishments: by steamer and railways she brought machinery into commerce, at the same time effecting an industrial revolution by physical science and chemistry, and won the control of the markets of the world by cotton. There came, besides the enormous extension of the command of credit in the widest sense, the exploitation of India, the extension of colonization over Polynesia. England at the same time girdled the earth with her cables and fleets. She thus attained to a sort of world-sovereignty. She has tried to

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found a new universal empire; not, indeed, by spiritual or secular weapons, like Pope and Emperor in bygone days, but by the power of money, by making all

material interest dependent on herself.*’ Berhardi’s point is that commercial success depends upon industrial growth, and industrial growth depends upon technological leadership. His proposal was that Germany be admitted to the rank of empire builder by virtue of her investment in successful productive technology and its commercial and military potential. Consistent with the ideals of the militant von Treitschke’s “Politics” published in 1878, ‘a von Bernhardi advanced the view that the imperial market share of a world power ought to be commensurate with the gross product of its industrial economy. This aggressive form of economic nationalism is comparable with that earlier form of political nationalism associated with the name of Fichte. Fichte’s doctrine of national self-determination deemed that the extent of the jurisdiction of a nation state ought to be commensurate with the cultural geography of all those claimed to be its native inhabitants regardless of existing state boundaries. In a comparable expansive fashion, Bernhardi’s economic nationalism implied that industrial might made imperialism a right. This right was not restricted to a claim on virgin territory. In a prospective mode of thought, Lenin had already recorded in “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,” published in 1917,” the role of rival investment in heavy industry in the expanding world economy of competitive imperial powers. Reflecting upon the future of the organized labor involved, he concluded that, if it were to capture, rather than destroy the assets of this private enterprise, then an integrated world economy under the direction of international socialism would become a reality. Then the forecast of that genius Saint-Simon will be fulfilled: the present anarchy of production, which corresponds to the fact that the economic relations are developing without uniform regulation, must make way for the organization of production. Production will no longer be directed by isolated manufactures . that will be done by public institutions.30

Saint-Simon’s ideal of the efficient,

economic

and useful centralization

of

the direction of industrial development involved the promotion of the class of professional technocrats favored by both Babbage and Lenin. In his “On Social Organization,” published in 1825, Saint-Simon presented an alternative form of the Benthamite ideal of political-economic modernism subsequently called “public administration.” The men who brought about the revolution, who directed it, and the men who, since 1789 and up to the present day, have guided the nation, have committed a great political mistake. They have all sought to improve the governmental machine, whereas they should have subordinated it and put administration in the first place . . . leaders of industrial enterprise are the men who should be entrusted with administrative power; that is to say, with the responsibility for managing the national interest; and that the function of government should be limited to maintaining public order.3 ’

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Saint-Simon’s point is that the industrial state requires the technocratic expertise of the professional business manager. In graduating from being the theory of the prosperous firm to the theory of the prosperous industrial state, through the work of Smith, Babbage, Mill, Spencer, List, Wagner, SaintSimon, Lenin and the Webbs, the ideology of technology became, in effect, the motivation of both those who claimed to be individualists or collectivists. This seemingly effortless infidelity of the ideology of technology cannot be divorced from the apolitical character of technology itself in the service of the economic rivalry of the major industrial powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The appeal of this ideology has been, where Europeans have made their presence felt, global. From the publication of “The Wealth of Nations” to the composition of “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism,” the terms in which that appeal has been made have been almost universally accepted by liberals and socialists sufficiently literate to be informed by its publications. The key concept of their modernism is technologically driven material progress, and by this material progress it was understood that the achievements of an industrial political economy, in satisfying want, is the foundation of what both Smith and Mill, on the one hand, and Saint-Simon and Lenin, on the other, understood to be the basis of modern civilization. In t& classic texts of the ideology of technology, the progress of industrial technology is celebrated as the measure of human achievement. By the same token, it is only the kind of planned legal system that is conducive to industrial growth and full employment that is to be seen as a legitimate constitution. In the twentieth century, the post-depression recovery of the American economy, and the postwar recovery of Western Europe and Japan, are now seen as commemorable historical events inseparable from the recognition of the legislative achievements of the new governments involved. The respect for their political legitimacy is comparable with the prestige accorded to the technological triumphs of their subject’s industrial power. Regardless of the first twentieth century attempts to create a new economic order, first in the Soviet Union and then under the Third Reich, there has never been so perfect an example of a completely planned political economy as those successfully established by the victorious allies after the Second World War in West Germany and Japan. The twentieth century conflict between the scientism of modern liberalism and the historicism of socialism was not simply an ideological struggle that has been accentuated by an East-West power struggle for ethnic territorial domination. It was also an ideological struggle for the recognition of political authority based upon a belief in the value of industrial power to impress upon the world the superiority, and hence the legitimacy, of a political-economic system. In terms of the promise of industrial growth, what Sir James Kitson perceived from under his top hat, from the point of view of organized capital, Lenin perceived from under his peeked railwayman’s cap, from the point of view of organized labor. It is the power of technology to increase the returns on capital invested in mechanized reproduction for

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mass domestic consumption or its military destruction. This power has been taken as the measure of human progress against the history of the poor returns on human labor unassisted by the inanimate energy of nature. This evaluation of progress is characteristic of both the American dream of Ford’s very individualist: “My Life and Work,” published in 1922,32 and of the collectivist vision of the Webbs in their “Soviet Communism: A New Civilization,” first published in 1937.33 4. The Industrial Ideological Revolution of the Twentieth Century Ideological revolutions are, in prospect, a long time coming. In retrospect their effects are a long time going away. In terms of the total transformation of the criteria of evaluating human experience their impact is not immediate. It is protracted, but in being protracted it is also incremental. There came a point in time at which technological Darwinism had stood Marxism on its head, put liberalism into its imperial marching boots and given nationalism its iron fists. This point in time is the closing years of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Obviously National Socialist projected genetic engineering took technological Darwinism to its anti-Christian extreme, but, still in the mainstream of European secular thought, Speer’s constant, if not Hitler’s intermittent adherence to the ideology of technology, was the most powerful driving force behind the headquarters of Germany’s race for economic and military supremacy. As previously affirmed on behalf of British imperialism, by Benjamin Kidd in his “Principles of Western Civilization, ” published in 1902,“* and Sir Halford Mackinder in his “Democratic ideals and Reality” published in 1919,35 the inspiration of the ideology of technology was to become the principal motivation behind the “triumph of the will” on the European industrial front. In following that lead, Japanese perfectionism, in the form of the perfection of industrial reproduction, is a power that has shaken the Western world. It has given the ideological lead to the industrial ethic of the governments of Taiwan and South Korea. Few would have predicted the industrial and hence economic power of the Far East 40 years ago, but, with hindsight, its origins appear far from new. Westernization has for periods been resisted by China, as originally it was by Japan, but eventually, via the influence of self-reliance movements, the ideology of technology became married to the traditional perfectionism of the Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist faiths. It found a new application for the ancient ideal of personal self-perfection in perfect imitation, not of what was theologically peculiar to the East and very old, but in perfecting the most useful of modern technology regardless of its origins. As in each and every case of the triumph of the spirit of technology over the spiritualism of theology, the story of the ethic and ethos of the Japanese belief in the value of “quality circles” has involved the externalization of the harmony of the soul within in a manufactured work of art in the world without. The spiritual harmony within then becomes the material harmony

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without, expressed in terms of the perfect reproduction of useful things. The same ideal of self-realization, projected as a future material condition, rather than conceived as a state of received spirituality, has similarly enabled the aspirations of Parse Tarta industrial nationalism to triumph over Ghandi’s conservation of a Hindu rural way of life. It makes the triumph of the message of Samuel Smiles “Self-Help,” published in 1857,-‘” and “Industrial Biography,” published in 1863,37 over the tradition of manual craftsmanship, celebrated by Ruskin, Tolstoy and Morris, seem all the more complete. It totally rejects the slow pace of the seasonal production of the village commune in favor of the fast pace of the factory working day of urban industrial life. To the minds of the conservative critics of modernism, such as Mathew Arnold,-SHT.E. Hulme,3” E.M. Foster,*’ F.R.Leavis,” Lewis Mumford,4z T.S. Eliot4” and C .S . Lewis,** the Promethean aspirations of the industrial man blind him to the value of the aristocratic cultural brake on the pace of change necessary to preserve the heritage of political and religious traditions. As portrayed by the conservative Ortega y Gasset,-’ Nicolas Berdaev46 and Michael Oakeshott,“’ in their inter-war reflections on the managerial ethos and work ethics of mass society, the ideology they identify appears more like a theory of industrial enterprise, applied to public life, than a social and political theory in which industrial experience has its place. The ideology of technology has, according to its more recent critics, writing in the Marxist spirit of Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 “One Dimensional Man’14” found its most perfect expression in the uniform indoctrination, instigated by totalitarian regimes, and reenacted in the synchronized performance of mechanically marching men at Nuremberg rallies, May Day parades and Maoist birthday celebrations. According to these critics of Western and Eastern mass production materialism, writing in the aftermath of Spengler’s 1918 “The Decline of the West,“4” the implication of the appeal of the ideology of technology is a call to organize both men and women to achieve the most efficient and economical allocation of their present time in pursuit of their material want. In terms of their recall of the spiritual world they had lost, few orthodox conservatives believed that, in the aftermath of the long withdrawing roar of Arnold’s classical and Christian culture, there is any alternative to what Neibuhr’” and 0akeshott5’ described as the fate of the tower of Babel. The extent to which the material values of the “external” working world of efficiency, economy and utility have become values of paramount importance to Western civilization is the extent to which they have replaced the “internal” spiritual values of monastic and academic life-truth, beauty and virtue. The ideology of technology has undoubtedly helped to spread the conviction that a minimum standard of material well-being is the essence of modern civilization everywhere. The traditional presentation of imperfection in the world, in terms of the problem of evil, has been usurped by its presentation in terms of the problem of want. What this has involved is a shift from an appreciation of the value of moral restraint to an appreciation of the value of the industrial initiative. What has been considered the essence

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of original sin-a lust for the power of technical knowledge-became the essential impetus of human achievement, or failing its acquisition, the measure of defeat. It is the most prominent feature of the ideology of technology, that the progress of civilization is to be understood to depend upon industrial research and development. On the pace of its progress depends the speed and spread of its productive benefits. As described by Sir Henry Clay in his 1947 essay “The Organization of Industry,“52 the history of mechanized production is unintelligible separated from the history of rapidly expanding world markets. However, where they expand depends on the geographical location of the required purchasing power. In this respect capital investment in selected undeveloped countries has made at least a partial global economy the inevitable result of the moral support given to the Western commercial self-interest by the ideology of technology. Hayek has restated the case for the moral impetus of this ideology in his 1960 publication “The Constitution of Liberty.” At some future date when, after a long period of world-wide advance in material standards, the pipeline through which it spreads are so filled that, even when the vanguard slows down, those at the rear will for some time continue to move at an undiminished speed, we may again have it in our power to choose whether or not we wish to go ahead at such a rate. But at this moment, when the greater part of mankind has only just awakened to the possibility of abolishing starvation, filth and disease; when it has just been touched by the expanding wave of modern technology after centuries or millennia of relative stability; and as a first reaction has begun to increase in number at a frightening rate, even a small decline in our rate of advance might be fatal.53

Apart from the danger to the export industries of the advanced economies of the Western world, leaving the undeveloped economies of the overpopulated countries so far behind as to eliminate them from any major market other than that of cheap labor, there is the sting in the tail of the ideology of technology reserved for those who first exported its evaluation of human achievement to what are now their industrial rivals. The industrial performance of both market and command economies depends upon its appropriate legal regulation or direction. That legislative control must take into account the effects of ever more rapid productive technological innovation on the material fortunes of its progressively age-gapped subjects. Failing that, to the extent that increasingly automated production entails the disappointed expectation of those of all ages engaged in older modes of decreasing employment, to that extent voluntary compliance with the rules of the instrumental laws of any kind of wealth creation is subject to the increasing strain of divergence in social satisfaction. In Karl Jasper’s view this is the inevitable result of technological innovation which is inseparable from volatile international cultural integration and the disintegration of previously autonomous forms of stable human relationships.54

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5. Conclusion Both the scientific and the technological understandings of physical processes are dependent on the premeditated control of nature’s energy. In the case of scientific research it is desirable to alter the otherwise predetermined order of future events, prior to an experiment, in order to isolate the sufficient cause of a particular occurrence. This isolation cannot be achieved without the technology of an apparatus. The second application of technology serves an industrial interest invested in the sufficient effect of human energy in control of the insulated power necessary to energize product reproduction. Reading the minds of liberal theorists like Hayek and Popper, and socialist theorists like Saint-Simon and Lenin, it would appear that the analogies between isolating the natural causes of wealth creation and experimental science, and the endeavor to insulate the effects of a planned economic objective from disruption, as in technology, have obscured the common role of premeditated design in giving effect to the economic ambitions of the two kinds of political agency. Where the former is depicted as permitting the legitimate free movement of market forces, within the confines of the rule of law, the latter is portrayed as subjecting production and distribution to the central direction of the programmatic policy of a public authority.55 However, whether engineered, as a condition of the rational behavior of “horn0 economicus,” or of the strategy of “homo politicus,” a political economy is, by definition, an artificial construct. Poorly designed or mishandled, it can fail to function. In that event its fate is indeed that of the Tower of Babel-witness the American “great crash” and the collapse of the U.S.S.R. From the point of view of its Catholic conservative enemies, the success of the ideology of technology represents the triumph of the acquired knowledge of the external world over the received wisdom of the soul. It has involved an ideological revolution in man’s understanding of his relationship, not only to god, but also to nature. Part of that revolution, which began with the idea that the mind of man is formed by sense impressions of the external world, led to the idea that, in conjunction with his creative intelligence, he was progressively informed by this knowledge in his struggle for survival. It is this revolutionary idea, that man alone is the prime mover of progressive material change in the world, since his technological innovation is rarely retrogressive, that has given rise to the belief that time is for ever passing more quickly. The shift from the passive to the active stage of the development of empirical materialism consists in a new sense of time in which speed is of the essence of productive achievement. The sense of urgency generated by the idea that the solution to all basic human problems is a progressive improvement in his material condition belongs to a totally different order of time to that presupposed by classical and catholic moral philosophy. It is the order of linear, as distinct from cyclic time, which technology shares with science. It is the order of the sequential before and after of both isolated

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coincidence and insulated synchronization in the fleeting moment. It is not the durational order of the ongoing present of reflective human consciousness. In the ever ongoing present of cyclic time it seems that we are always now but never now for any length of time. In this eternal time, wherein theological wisdom is immortal, we have endless time for contemplating our past life’s moral and religious significance. In the sequential time of industrial, commercial and military man working with machines, the experience of the passage of time is relative to the urgency of the completion of appointed tasks. In his race against time, this Taylorite time saver never has the time to reflect on anything past until his working life is finished. Similarly, the vision of the technologically oriented management of productive enterprise and their command of service organizations is blinkered on the future. Behind De Gaulle’s vision of “une Europe de la technologie” and Harold Wilson’s projection of a new Britain rising phoenix-like out of the “white heat of the technological revolution” came a revival of Marinetti’s futurist infatuation with speed, symbolized by the construction of the Concorde. During the latter half of the nineteenth century the combination of increasing accuracy of the scientific instruments of observation and measurement and increasing precision of machine tools speeded up the pace of experimental discovery and its industrial application. This development in assisting both theorizing and technological innovation was partly the result of advancing mathematics and the foundation of science departments in new universities and the growth of polytechnic education. In little more than a lifetime the age of steam gave way to that of electricity. petroleum and nuclear power. In terms of Western and Eastern international economic integration, the computerization of technical information and its selected electronic communication between multinational business organizations and their general public was no less a revolution than jet transport and the impact of chemical, genetic and biological engineering on agriculture and the medical profession. Today it has to be admitted that the business schooled management of multinational corporations does much for their home country’s international relations, despite the frustration of their strategic planning by the intervention of government regulation, both at home and abroad, problems of middle management co-ordination over large areas with disparate cultures and the overhead costs of under utilized research and development due to areas of unofficial and official foreign market protection. That multinational corporations do not hesitate to take advantage of the existence of cheap labor in underdeveloped economies does not alter the fact that they inadvertently disseminate industrial and administrative skills. This is more than can be said for recent ethnic politics and wars. Insofar as this is a victory for the propagators of the ideology of technology, it is equally a failure on the part of its adherents (increasingly drawn to the technologies of such projects of the military-industrial complex as satellite surveillance and star wars) to bridge the gap between the world’s rich and the world’s poor. The result of their ideological commitment has

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been the diminution of power of the Western world to fund international economic development and the bankruptcy of Central and Eastern Europe. In terms of the conquest of want, after a century of its ideological dominance in Western countries, where local manual industry no longer prevails and others in the Far East have recently reached the top, or in the South, are climbing the ladder of foreign financed industrialization, in some cities, states and all continents, the world economy is still comprised of islands of affluence surrounded by seas of poverty.5” It is not, however, within the power of multinational corporations to control the world’s population explosion in the increasing numbers of countries which have fallen by the wayside in the international race for technological supremacy. That is the responsibility of their host country governments and those good Samaritan international agencies obliged to respond to their requests for help along the road built by those who still believe in the possibility of its being paved with gold as a monument to the survival of the currently diminishing elect of the technologically fittest. In the light of this fact, the term “the global economy” implying, as the term would to the founding fathers of the free market economy to which it now refers, universal participation on comparable competitive terms, as yet means very little today, if not nothing at all compared with say the descriptive power of the world’s economy in terms of the “discriminating international investment, production and trade.“57 Perhaps this is just as well, since if there were to be a truly global industrial economy there would doubtless be a truly global ecological disaster.

Notes I. R. E. Scofield, A Scientific Autobiography of Joseph Priestly (12?.?-1804) (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966). 2. L. U. Cooper, James Watt the Engineer (London: Black, 1‘963). 3. A. Finer and G. Savage, The Selected Letters of Josiah Wedgewood (London: Cory, Adams and Mackay, 1965), p. 265. 4. F. Bacon, The New Organon, in Philosophical Works. J. M. Robertson(ed.) (London: Routledge and Son, 1905), pp. 256-302. 5. C. W. Everett, Jeremy Bentbum (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1966), pp. 16-19. 6. J. Bentham, A Fragment on Government and An Introduction to the princzpies of Morals und Legislation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), pp. I 15- 13 1; Leading Principles of a Constitutional Code for any State (London: Valpy, 1825). pp. 1- I 1. 7. I). J. Manning, The Mind of Jeremy Bentham (London: Longmans, 1%8), pp. 86-97. 8. H. Spencer, The Coming Slavey, in Man versus The State (London: Watts, 1940), p. 122. 9. F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1944), pp. 54-75. 10. The Constitution of Liberiy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1960>, pp. 148-220. 11. K. Popper, The Poverty of Historicfsm (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), pp. 64-70. 12. Popper, Ibid., pp. 64-65. 13. A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh, 1776). 14. A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Aberdeen: George Clark and Son, 1871). p. 17. IS. B. Webb and S. Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization (London: Gollancz, 1937). pp. IO18- 1020. 16. V. Lenin, 7&e State and Revolution (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), p. 80. 17. Lenin, Ibid., p. 80. 18. C. Babbage, On the Economy ofMachinery and Manufactures (London: Knight, 1832), Chap. 1-5.

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19. J. S. Mill, The Principles of Political Economy (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 184% Chap. viii-ix. 20. K. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961) Chap. xiv. 21. S. R. Blackwell, Report on the Greut Exhibition of 1851 (London, 1852) pp. 182-183. 22. W. Macfarlane, The Principles and Prachce of Iron and Steel Manufacture (London: Longmans, 1908). 23. Macfarlane, Ibid., p. 37. See also G.D. Knox, Engineering (London: T.C. and EC. Jack, 1915) pp. l-10. 24. H. Spencer, Ibid., p. 122. 25. W. J. Ashley, Political Economy and the Tariff Problem, Compatriot Lectures (London: Macmillan, 1905), Chap. vi. 26. F. Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War (London: Arnold, 1914). 27. F. Bernhardi, Ibid, p. 68. 28. Von H. Treftschke, Politics, see H.W.C. Davis, The Political Tbougbt of Heinricb uon Tretscbke (London: Constable, 1914) Chap. vii-ix. 29. V. Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Moscow Foreign Languages Publishing house). 30. V. Lenin, Ibfd, p. 221. 3 1. F. M. H. Markham, Henrf Comte De Saint-Simon 1760- 1825: Selected Writings (Oxford: BlackweLL, 1952), pp. 78-79. 32. H. Ford, My Life and Work (London: Heineman, 1922). 33. Webb, Ibid. 34. B. Kidd, Principles Of Western Civilization (London: Macmillan, 1902). 35. H. Mackinder, Democratic Ideaki and Reality: a Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (New York: Holt, 1942). S. Smiles, Serf-Help (London: Murray, 1858). Industrial l?iograpby (London: Murray, 1863). M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). T. E. Hulme, Speculations (London, 1924). E. M. Foster, The Machine Stops (edited by A.O. Lewis), in Of Men and Machines (New York: Dutton, 1963) pp. 83-97. 41. F. R. Leavis and D. Thompson, Cultire and Environment (London: Chatto and Wiidus, 1950). 42. L. Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1934). 43. T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber and Faber, 1939). 44. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (London: Bles, 1943). 45. J. Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (London: Allen and Unwin, 1961). 46. N. Berdayev, The Meaning of Histoty (London: Bles, 1936). 47. M. J. Oakeshott, Introduction to the Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939) pp. xi-xxiii. 48. H. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). 49.0. Spengler, The Decline of the West (New York: Knopf, 1934). 50. R. Niebuhr, “The Tower of Babel,” in Beyond Tragedy (London: Nisbit, 1938) pp. 27-46. 51. M. J. Oakeshott, “The Tower of Babel,” in On History (Oxford: BlackweE, 1983) pp. 165-194. 52. Sir Henry Clay, ‘The Organization of Industry,” in E. Barker (ed.), The Character of England (Oxford, 1947). 53. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 53. 54. K. Jaspers, The Origins and Goals of History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953) pp. 96-125. 55. R. Gilpin, Prance in tbe Age of the Scientific State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) Chap. 4-5. 56. G. Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (London: Buchan and Enright, 1982) Chap. 5-6 57. G. Jones, “The Making of Global Enterprise”, in Business History, Vol. 36, No. 1 (London, Cass, 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

1994).

N.B.-The authors of this article are aware of the significant contribution to the study of what they call the ideology of technology made by Winner and Habermas. They have therefore chosen to neglect its political role in the American and Russian experience of elitist technocracy. Winner’s account of the advocacy and

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condemnation of technocratic politics in America from its friend Veblen to its enemy Galbraith, and Habermas’ work on legitimization, as it can be applied to advocacy and condemnation of technocracy in the Soviet Union, from the reflections of the enthusiastic Webbs to those of the contemptuous Djilas, have obliged them to graze what is essentially an English pasture. [See L. Winner, Auionomous Technology (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1977) and J. Habermas, Legitfmization Crisis, trans. T. McCarthy, (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1975).]