I want to use this
blog post to explore the following issue: what meaning can we make of western
culture’s current skepticism about science and technology. Certainly from
1870-1940, science and engineering were held in high repute. In the progressive period in
the United States, roughly 1880-1920, the concept of engineering took on the
character of a worldview. Progressive activists and intellectuals saw
engineering as the method for achieving efficiency in all dimensions of social
life, whether applied to industry, natural resource conservation, municipal
government or city planning. Thorstein Veblen, the skeptical economist who gave
us the term “conspicuous consumption,” argued in his classic, The
Engineers and the Price system,
“That engineers must
be free to do their work without interference from political and business
people. In point of material welfare all the civilized people have been drawn
together by the state of the industrial arts into a single going concern. And
for the due working of this inclusive going concern, it is essential that the
corps of technological specialists who by training, insight and interests make
up the general staff of industry, must have a free hand in the disposal of
available resources, in materials, equipment, and manpower, regardless of any
national pretensions or any vested interests” (p 54).
We have to see
Fredrick Winslow Taylor, the first industrial engineer, and much maligned
today for his efficiency studies of the factory floor, in this light. He saw
the science of efficiency as a method for reducing the conflict between workers
and foremen. By describing the work to be done with objectivity and precision,
workers and owners could agree on what the work required and what pay-rate was
fair. Taylor embodied Veblen’s hope for a rational world where "national
pretensions" and "vested interests" no longer impaired
judgment.
This exaltation of
engineering was also the basis for the many great Worlds’ Fairs, in London
(1851), Philadelphia (1876), Chicago (1893), Paris (1900), New York City,
(1939) and elsewhere. Worlds’ Fairs offered a roadmap to the future and
expressed utopian strivings for the culture as a whole. Moreover, the 1893
exposition in Chicago was not simply a venue for showing tradeable goods and
technical achievements but, as a man-made landscape, it was also emblematic of
what could be accomplished by large scale urban engineering and planning. As
Daniel Burnham, the architect who coordinated the works of the exposition wrote,
“The World’s Fair came, and disclosed what all were unconsciously waiting to
receive, a lesson in landscape architecture. What the matter was with our
public improvements, the Columbian Exposition made forever plain. Here, studied
on the spot by millions, and by millions more through the activities of the
Bureau of Publicity and Promotion, a great truth, set forth by great artists,
was taught to all our people. This truth is the supreme one of the need of
design and plan for whole cities.
Similarly, the “Futurist
movement,” a group of European artists at the turn of the twentieth century,
envisioned their art as tied to the exaltation of machines and the modern. They
wrote in their founding manifesto,
“We will sing of
great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the
multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will
sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with
violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed
serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges
that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter
of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested
locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel
horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers
chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.”
Yet consider the following:
· On May 29, 2011, the government of Angela Merkel, the prime minister of Germany, announced that it would close all of its nuclear power plants by 2022. On March of 2012, fifty-thousand German demonstrators, responding to the first anniversary of the Fukshima nuclear disaster in Japan took part in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Once envisioned as the source of cheap and limitless power, western countries are foreswearing its use. Italians voted overwhelmingly to keep their country non-nuclear. Switzerland and Spain have banned the construction of new reactors. As of 2013, countries such as Australia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal, Israel, Malaysia, New Zealand and Norway remain opposed to nuclear power.
· People are also increasingly skeptical of large-scale urban engineering. On October 11, 2008, four-thousand citizens of Stuttgart Germany protested the demolition of an old railroad station, one step in an ambitious project for creating a high speed rail network between Paris and Bratislava. On September 30, 2010, hundreds of demonstrators were injured when the police used water cannon, pepper spray and batons. On the following day, more than 50,000 people took part in the largest demonstration against the project to date. On October 1, 2010, 100,000 people took part in a demonstration against the project and the proposed demolition. Demonstrators argued that the construction would cut off access to the city's cherished park areas for ten years, and that the integrity of the exceptional railroad-station building should be maintained. ·
· In 1974 Robert Caro published his classic, The Power Broker, the story of the extraordinary achievements as well as the destructive impact of Robert Moses, the great builder of parks, highways and tunnels in New York City and its region from the 1930s to the 1950s. Over the course of his career, ensconced in the independent Port Authority of New York, he built 13 bridges, two tunnels, 637 miles of highways, 658 playgrounds, ten giant public swimming pools, 17 state parks, and dozens of new or renovated city parks.” In one reading of his achievements he was a populist, bulldozing through private gulf clubs and country estates to provide working and middle class families access to great beaches and preserves. Yet starting with Caro’s book, historians saw Moses as a destroyer who ousted “more than half a million people from their homes in the Bronx, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in Sunset Park in Brooklyn and on Long Island farms for the sake of new highways.” Some characterized these projects as “slum clearance,” arguing that Moses could have limited the number of evictions by using alternate routes.
Moreover, the
resulting dislocation often created new slums. Marshall Berman, the Marxist
humanist and philosopher, wrote a passionate and poignant essay on how Robert
Moses destroyed the Bronx, a borough in New York City, by ramming the
Cross-Bronx-Expressway through its heart. Describing the expressway in dark
terms he
notes, that it is, “Jammed with heavy traffic day and night, deadly at the
graded entrance and exit ramps, cars weaving wildly in and out among the
trucks.” It is bordered by large walls that protect the driver from seeing
“hundreds of boarded up buildings,” and “dozens of blocks covered with nothing
at all but shattered bricks and waste. Children of the Bronx who drive along
this expressway, “Are not merely spectators, but active participants in the
process of destruction that tears out at hearts.” Watching a lovely building
being destroyed by a wrecking ball, Berman reflects that, “So often the price
of ongoing and expanding modernity is the destruction not merely of traditional
and pre-modern institutions and environments but- and here is the real tragedy-of
everything most beautiful and vital in the modern world itself.” This moral
vision of an expressway is dystopian to its core. To Berman, Robert Moses, was
in fact “the Moloch.”
My question is what
accounts for this reversal of perspective? Why would progressive activists such
as Jane Addams, Florence Kelly, Daniel Burnham, President Theodore Roosevelt, a
great believer in conservation, and yes Robert Moses himself, appear to be on
the side of the devil today. One simple answer of course is that technologies,
the engineering of everything, and indeed the entire technological apparatus
are simply more hazardous, for example, with their impact on the earth’s
climate. A second and equally self-evident answer is that in a
post-modern or post-industrial society we are that much more sensitized to the
injuries, deaths and dislocations imposed by the very same implements and
infrastructure that sustain our living standards. Just as Marshall Berman
argued that modernity destroys itself, our technology, once the vehicle for
increasing our standard of living, actually reduces it.
For example, in 1975
U.S. residents tolerated some 50,000-highway deaths per year. Ralph Nader, the
consumer activist, published his indictment of car manufacturers Unsafe at
Any Speed, in 1965. It “prompted
the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966,
seat-belt laws in 49 states (all but New Hampshire) and a number of other
road-safety initiatives.” By 2009, the number highway deaths fell to
31,000, a 40% reduction, (though still ½ the number of U.S. military personnel
who were killed in action throughout the entire Vietnam war!). We are less
willing to “pay the piper” in terms of blood and lives, for the goods
delivered.
Indeed, the
sociologist Ulrich Beck writes, that we live in what he calls “the
risk society” in which social conflicts are focused less on the
distribution of income and wealth and more on how different groups are exposed
to the risks and burdens imposed by technology and its development, whether in
the form of rising ocean levels, pollution, radiation poisoning, storms and
hazardous waste. As one author notes, “Beck's theory
describes contemporary societies as so profoundly affected by
technologically-induced risk, that risk is their defining feature.
Paradoxically, the importance of risk in Beck's sociological description of
contemporary societies corresponds to the inability of experts to adequately
determine or assess dangers posed by technological change as a defining feature
of modernity. The 'risk society' is modernity in a state of excess. It is
modernity at risk, ultimately, to itself. And it is not just risk, but rather indeterminate
risk that Beck identifies as its central problem.” In other words
technologies, and the engineers who create, build and operate them, are the
ultimate sources of hazard.
One argument in
favor of the idea that we live in a culture increasingly sensitized to risk is
that our political culture appears to be developing an alternative conception
of development, one that links the idea of progress and change to the idea of
care, to transformation without destruction. Jane Jacobs, the famous
naturalistic observer of city neighborhoods and an urban activist, set the
stage for this way of thinking in her classic, The
Death and Life of Great American Cities, that though published in 1961
remains compelling even today. As an activist, she led the opposition to Robert
Moses’ plan “ to drive
an expressway across Lower Manhattan through Tribeca (it wasn't
called that then), Chinatown, Little Italy, SoHo, and the Lower East Side and
another major road through Washington Square, the symbolic heart of Greenwich
Village”. Characterizing the spontaneous order of the city she wrote,
“Under the seeming
disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a
marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of
the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use,
bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement
and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art
form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision
dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing
off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and
ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other
and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never
repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete
with new improvisations.”
Her description of
the city’s miraculous order, what she felicitously called the “ballet” of
neighborhoods, poses the question of whether or not we could transform our
urban settings as our needs change, without being destructive at the
same time. For example, in my own city of Philadelphia, urban development often
takes place through a process called “in-fill,” through which developers build
single homes on vacant plots while renovating rather than destroying old
factory and commercial buildings. This stands in contrast to the landscape
altering plans implemented 50 years ago. For example, in 1959, Philadelphia was
physically transformed when the city destroyed many homes, stores and commercial
buildings to build an expressway on its north side to speed cars east and west
through the city. By the mid sixties, protestors stopped the building of a
similar expressway on the city’s south side. Had it been built, center-city
residents would have been cut off from the working class and minority
populations on both sides.
We can call this new
model of development, “bricolage” in the sense that developers, home owners and
commercial enterprises create a new landscape from the means and materials at
hand, for example by renovating vacant buildings and or creating building
designs to fit the idiosyncratic lot lines associated with the earlier built
environment. The term “bricolage” has the merit of resonating with descriptions
of a post-modern artistic and cultural sensibility, for example Andy Warhol’s
collage of images of himself, his iconic pastiche of Marilyn Monroe’s face, or
quite recently, using pastiche to create radio podcasts. The pleasing result of
bricolage at the neighborhood scale is based on the visual surprise produced by
the jumble of styles and building types that “in-fill” creates. Broadly,
bricolage suggests that order is both created and maintained spontaneously
through changes that take place at a small scale but with cumulative impact.
There is transformation without, or with much less destruction. This is
why, despite his remarkable achievements Robert Moses, the master builder of
New York City, appears now more like the devil than the magician.
If we stay with this
line of thinking, we can ask what impacts does this new model of development
have on the economy? Does bricolage have any costs? Because it values
experience at a small scale, one unhappy thought, if indeed this makes us
unhappy, is that it it may result in a technological slowdown if not
stagnation. For example, one irony is that we have stopped building nuclear
power plants when in fact we now have proven designs for building small or
modular ones that function without control rods, don’t use weapons grade
materials, minimize nuclear waste and of course don’t produce carbon dioxide as
an after-product. Indeed, the most surefire way of improving any technology is
by using it a lot. This is known as Wright’s Law, or is termed “the
experience curve,” in which the unit cost of producing anything falls, or its
quality rises, as the scale of production increases. This is why, for example,
hospitals that specialize in heart surgery have fewer surgical errors. There
are actually only 437 operating civilian power plants in the world. In the
United States, from 1990 to 2013, nuclear power plants increased megawatt
production by 37% or about 2.5% per year. Compare this to the experience curve
effects of Henry Ford’s famous Model T, where volume increased 100 times from 1909 to 1916, reducing unit
costs from roughly $8,000 per car to under $1,000. It is no wonder that nuclear
power is costly and not as safe as it could be. One hypothesis is that in the
risk society we paradoxically stop learning how to reduce risks.
Indeed, several
economists, particularly Robert Gordon in a widely cited paper, "The
Demise of U.S. Economic Growth," and Tyler Cowen in his book
The Great Stagnation, argue that we are entering a period of
relatively slow growth in productivity, one measure of technological
stagnation. Gordon suggests that living standards increased significantly in
the early part of the 20th century as households got access to the
social and urban “grid,” such as indoor plumbing, electricity, the telephone, the
radio, trolleys and automobiles. As he notes
in an interview, “Something can’t be more than 100 percent of itself. You could
only have the transition from a rural to an urban society once. You could only
have the transition from 20 per cent infant mortality to near zero once. All of
that was happening in those 50 years. And then in the early part of the post
war years we completed the subsidiary inventions from the late 19th century,
with commercial air transport, air conditioning and the inter- state highway
system.”
Gordon presents
estimates of what economists call “total factor productivity,” the portion of
productivity growth that is not due to increases in scale, for example more
hours worked, or more machinery, but to improvements in the quality of these
resources, such as a more educated worker or a better machine. As he shows,
total factor productivity has been in decline since 2005, before the financial
crisis hit. In addition, Cowen argues that,
“The United States produced more patents in 1966 (54,600) than in 1993 (53,200)
while, ‘patents per researcher” have been falling for most of the twentieth
century.”
Of course, the
Internet has change the lived experience for millions of people, but it is
unclear how it has changed the material conditions of life. As Tyler Cowen writes,
“The revenue component of the internet is comparatively small. A lot of the
internet is a free space for intellectual and emotional invention, a kind of
open-ended canvas for enriching our interior lives.” We are building culture --
the expressive elements of our lives -- without building civilization, or its
material elements. As Gordon notes, if we follow the rules of economics,
when the marginal cost of adding one more opinion to a website is zero, then
its marginal benefit, in material terms should be zero as well. PayPal founder
Peter Theil, reflecting on the failure of our accomplishments to match our
earlier fantasies of the future, famously said,“We
expected jet packs, but we got 140 characters” (on twitter).
One other
discomfiting development fits with this vision of stagnation. People in the
United States are withdrawing from the world of work. In 1960 close to 95% of
men between the ages of 25-54 were working, by 2012, the percent stood at about
83%. This decline took place over periods of enormous economic growth and
several cycles of employment booms. This decline in workforce participation
also accounts in part for the slow growth in median family income over the last
thirty years. As Cowen writes,
“In 1947, median family income was $21,771. By 1973, a mere twenty-six years
later, it was more than twice higher, at $44,381. Now move from 1973 to 2004,
thirty-one years later. Calculating in terms of 2004 dollars, median family
income had gone up to $54,061, which is less than a 22 percent increase.”
One hypothesis is
that this decline in participation accounts in part for what George Packer,
calls the “unwinding”
of the “inner life” of the working class, and what Charles Murray characterizes
as a “coming apart” of the white working class, as reflected in marriage and
divorce rates, educational attainment, single parenthood and joblessness.
Sandor Ferenczi, the famous Hungarian psychoanalyst, once noted that his
patients suffered from “Sunday neurosis,” that is, on their day-off they became
emotionally distressed. Work in this sense is a psychological container and in
its absence we become prey to internal demons.
Murray in his, Coming
Apart: the State of white America, 1960-2010, ascribes
this trend to a decline in ‘industriousness.” Some white men are simply
unwilling to take available jobs, such as carpenter helper, building cleaner,
truck delivery man, that while low-paying nonetheless provide a living standard
above the poverty line for two adults. This development he suggests is linked
to the decline in the sense of community – what Robert Putnam felicitously
called the syndrome of “bowling alone.” People feel marginalized.
But perhaps our
framework provides an additional hypothesis. Absent a cultural narrative of
development that links people psychologically to creating economic value, work
as a venue for securing a sense of purpose is less salient. It has less
meaning. This may also be why so many men with mathematical abilities who once
saw engineering as a noble undertaking are now attracted to careers in finance.
It represents a kind of social regression from creating value to redistributing
it.
Consider a
counterexample. Factory work was once at the heart of the technological
apparatus of an industrializing and urbanizing America. This is also why
industrial unions were once powerful. Men with limited education, but with the
capacity to master the requisite cognitive and manual skills, demonstrated tremendous
discipline in subordinating their minds and bodies to often difficult and
exhausting physical work. They demonstrated physical and mental courage in
forming and defending unions and for the most part sustaining their democratic
character. This experience of worthiness undergirded the strong community life
and stable marriages they were able to sustain.
Of course, we could
argue that automation itself makes people redundant without regard to whether
work is worthy or not. From 1977 to 2012 manufacturing output rose two
and half times, while manufacturing employment fell by about
40%.
But I wonder if this
trend is dispositive. Consider for example, the problem of global warming. As
the Scientific American magazine reports,
“While we may not yet have reached the “point of no return”—when no amount of
cutbacks on greenhouse gas emissions will save us from potentially catastrophic
global warming—climate scientists warn we may be getting awfully close. Since
the dawn of the Industrial Revolution a century ago, the average global
temperature has risen some 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Most climatologists agree
that, while the warming to date is already causing environmental problems,
another 0.4 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature.. could set in motion
unprecedented changes in global climate and a significant increase in the
severity of natural disasters—and as such could represent the dreaded point of
no return.”
If we take this
scenario seriously, and we should, there is little doubt that large-scale
engineering and technology development must play a vital role in helping
communities adapt to the impact of climate change. For
example, soil shrinkage due to drought affects oil and gas pipelines,
drought can affect cooling systems for power stations, sea level rises can
affect electricity substations in coastal regions, stormy conditions can lead
to windmill shut down, power failures will cripple information and
communication systems controls, change in rain density can weaken cell phone
signals, high winds can knock down telephone polls, and rare earth metals will
become harder to mine. It seems almost certain that we will need the appetite,
talent, and the resources for large-scale engineering projects, perhaps on a vaster scale than we have ever seen, if we are to respond
adaptively to climate change. The question, is will our culture help us
prepare?
Stirrings on the
right and on the left suggest that it might not. The right wing often opposes
large-scale public infrastructure projects, for example, the modernization of
the intercity rail network, because it presumes that government spending crowds
out private investment. This argument is not entirely reasonable at a time when
corporate savings are high—and are used primarily to buy back shares-- and
interests rates are low. But perhaps the wider cultural process I have
been describing shapes the right’s skepticism. There is no shared vision of how
public resources might be used and why. In contrast to the progressive era,
when engineering and urbanization created a public narrative of how modern
society should unfold, no narrative exerts a similar force today. One result is
that sectional interests, biases and ideologies can hold sway. Indeed,
theorists of post-modernism maintain that one of the most salient features of a
post-modern society is that it lacks a narrative about its own development.
This may be one reason that some people reject the findings of climate science
on global warming. It imposes an unwanted narrative on societal development.
The left wing, which
often represents the claim that technology is destructive is not always
reasonable either. In the risk society, people apply the “precautionary
principle,”-- a principle similar to the warning that doctors should “first do
no harm,”-- when planning to implement a new and untested technology. This may
be reasonable, but it must rest ultimately on a rational assessment of the harm
itself. It is striking in this regard that no one has died from genetically
modified food over the last 15 years, and indeed, a genetically modified
organism (GMO) saved the papaya industry in Hawaii. As many scientists point
out, genetic modification takes place in nature through mutation and farmers
have been genetically modifying plants through breeding for centuries.
Yet as a piece of
investigative reporting in Slate, the online magazine, notes,
“In the past five years, companies have submitted more than 27,000 products to
the Non-GMO Project which certifies goods that are free of genetically modified
organisms. Last year, sales of such products nearly tripled. Whole Foods will
soon require labels on all GMOs in its stores. Abbott, the company that makes
Similac baby formula, has created a non-GMO version to give parents, “peace of
mind.” Trader Joe’s has sworn off GMOs. So has Chipotle.” Yet as the reporter
notes, “The World Health Organization the American Medical Association, the
National Academy, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
have all declared that there’s no good evidence that GMOs are unsafe. Hundreds
of studies back up that conclusion.”
The Slate reporter
continues quite mercilessly. He goes on, “The central argument of the anti-GMO
movement—that prudence and caution are reasons to avoid genetically engineered,
or GE, food—is a sham. Activists who tell you to play it safe around GMOs take
no such care in evaluating the alternatives. They denounce proteins in GE crops
as toxic, even as they defend drugs, pesticides, and non-GMO crops that are
loaded with the same proteins. They portray genetic engineering as chaotic and
unpredictable, even when studies indicate that other crop improvement methods,
including those favored by the same activists, are more disruptive to plant
genomes. The deeper you dig, the more fraud you find in the case against
GMOs.”’
The journalist is describing a paranoid
stance, not different from people who once believed that fluoridated water was
poisonous, or parents today who believe that childhood vaccines cause autism.
Freud argued that paranoia resulted from the projection of internal feelings of
hostility. Since the hostility is projected, it cannot be addressed through
appeals to objective facts. Moreover, any failure to identify the actual
threatening person or institution only proves that the conspirators have been
clever to erase their footsteps.
The question of
course is what is the source of this hostility? I am inclined to think that it
represents a tremendous disappointment and anger at the authorities that have
failed to bequeath us a safe and beneficent world. Global warming, the war or
terror, the breakup of our mediating institutions such as the family, the
circulation of nuclear weapons, these pose what some may experience as
existential risks. It is the apocalypse coming. In earlier times a younger
generation might have seen this as a challenge to be surmounted, as setting the
stage for the project of their lives, to be addressed by marshaling all of our
scientific resources as well as our engineering and political capabilities. But
this will-to-action may be missing.
This may also be why
people are increasingly sensitized to personal risk. Howard Schwartz, in his
extensive body of work on “political correctness” has identified a cultural
character type, which he calls the “pristine self.”
This is the self that takes offense easily and readily without any apparent or
objective manifestation of threat. As he show, its curious impact as a
cultural meme can be seen when assessing school bullying. Certainly, if one
peruses the press and the Internet one might believe that school bullying is an
increasing problem. But the statistics show otherwise.
“For all students in grades 6-12, hate related graffiti in classrooms,
bathrooms hallways, etc. dropped from 36% in 1999 to about 28% in 2011. The
rate of students who reported fearing an attack or harm at school at all has
dropped dramatically, from nearly 12% in 1995 to less than 4% in 2011. For
black and Hispanic students it is an even more encouraging shift from more than
20% of both groups worried about being attacked in schools to less than 5% in
2011. The decline in actual physical violence is even more dramatic. It was
down 74% between 1992 and 2010, according to the latest Department of Justice
data, which was cited by David Finkelhor director of The Crimes Against
Children Center at the University of new Hampshire, in a paper he published in
last January.”
Why this
discrepancy? One hypothesis is that in a society where we fear risks that are
ineffable and indeterminate, at least as they appear to us, we turn on others,
in this case the imagined bullies walking school corridors, as stand-ins for
the threat. We turn ghosts of the future into present people of flesh and
blood. Like the television-show, “The Walking Dead,” we become zombies
to each other. In addition, to protect ourselves we seek out victims whom we
morally elevate, so that we can project our own sense of vulnerability into
them. We don’t consider them in their actual privation, or in their potential, both of which would be to their
benefit, but as symbols of ours privation which paradoxically victimizes them more. By
attacking the powers that we believe exploit these victims, we try in our fantasy
to protect ourselves. Of course this does not make us feel safe, which only
intensifies our need for protection.
Perhaps we are
paralyzed by the seemingly impossible dilemmas of re-engineering while
exhibiting care, risking without harming, or transforming without destroying.
This just may be the challenge worth confronting.
