Howard L. Parsons 1969
Source: Praxis, No. 1-2, 1969, pp. 164-180.
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, 2025.
The meaning of the transformation of agrarian societies into industrial societies is well known: machines; the harnessing of natural power (water, coal, steam); factories and the making of cheaper and more numerous commodities in factories; modern cities; a system of distribution of manufactured commodities; an increase in population; the rise of a new kind of national state; the mechanizing of national wars; and the centralized control of industrial and social processes.
The meaning of the "postindustrial" revolution is not so well known: the systematic application of scientific theories and methods to industrial and other problems. We may also call this the "scientific"[1] or "technological" revolution, since "technology" means the application of theoretical knowledge to the development of technique (working method) usually in industry or the industrial arts. The technological revolution developed gradually -- in an industrial society of synthetic chemistry, atomic fission, electronics, automation, and cybernation. It has resulted in a postindustrial society growing out of industrial society and gradually changing it: a relative shrinking of the extractive industries (hunting, fishing, agriculture, forestry, mining); an increase in service occupations (trade, finance, real estate, sales, recreation, government, travel, education, health); an increase in professional and scientific groups; an increase in the role of theory in society and in intellectual institutions; an increase in urbanization, population, centralized control, nationalism; and the application of advanced technology to national and international wars.[2]
Since the industrial and technological revolutions have overlapped and since many recently industrialized societies will skip over same stages of 19th century industrialism, we shall refer in this paper to the conditions and problems generated by both kinds of revolution insofar as technology is in issue. According to one prediction, which takes income per capita as the index, in the year 2000 40 percent of the world's population will live in postindustrial societies (in the U. S., the U. S. S. R., France, West Germany, Benelux, Great Britain, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Japan, Canada, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Italy, Israel, Australia, and New Zealand) and in advanced and mature industrial societies (in Spain, Portugal, Austria, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, Ireland, Turkey, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia, 1/4 of Latin America, 1/3 of the Arab world, 1/2 of S. E. Asia).[3]
Technology is not confined to the problems of industry, however. In the general sense it is the application of thought to any technique in an effort to improve that technique. And a technique is a developed way or method of doing something, of attaining an end. Man is par excellence the technician. To live and to create himself, man must be receptive to his environment, think about it, and manipulate and dominate it. To do so, he contrives procedures or techniques. And to attain and assure his ends -- food, water, clothing, association with others, objects of esthetic delight, etc. -- he endeavors to improve, by practice and thought, the effective execution of such procedures. Hence in the course of things he becomes a technician, and, with the application of reflective methods to technique, a technologist. What is known as "science" consists of technique of inference, prediction, and control as well as specialized techniques of self-correction of those techniques. The science of chemistry, for example, which evolved out of primitive cooking, medicine, metallurgy, etc., and then the fantasies of alchemy, transcends its predecessors by virtue of its power to correct and improve its technique. Probably all techniques insofar as they are successful (e. g., playing or composing music) involve some self-correction, i. e., mutual influence of observation and reflection relevant to some end. But scientific technique is the highest development of self-corrective techniques on both formal and empirical levels. Technology which employs the techniques of science has produced and will produce changes in human living which not even its 18th century enthusiasts could foresee.
The term "science" here, as in ordinary language, is used loosely. Whitehead has pointed out that "the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the invention of the method of invention."[4] Invention is not the whole of science; but the methods of careful observation and experiment are an important part of it. Men have been inventive throughout history, but in the 19th century they became consciously and systematically so. Thus the methods of controlled and self-correcting observation more and more entered into the habits of professional groups. That is, technological method spread. Today, a housewife who shops observantly and critically has begun to pass from mere technique in the direction of improving that technique by the application of self-correcting methods that anticipate systematic science.
But it is an error to think that man is only or essentially a technician and technologist. He concerns himself with technique in consequence of a prior tendency -- need and demand for values, for forms of fulfillment. This need finds expression through man's symbols -- his creating of signs to signify valued and intended things that are absent and future. Man is futuristic, valuing, creating activity. He projects, promises, and commits himself to a valued future. Accordingly he becomes concerned with present means to future ends. He signifies means-ends relations (sowing-reaping, machine-finished product) in which the envisaged end functions as a guiding factor controlling present conditions and means. Thus the original and primary function of technique and technology is to serve man in his creative activity. To become preoccupied with particular conditions, ends, means, and techniques is a diversion and perversion of our fulfillment. It is a loss of our full human creativity.
There are techniques of the practical arts (farming, fishing, mining, cooking, weaving, pottery-making), of the fine arts, of the theoretical and applied sciences, of logic, of the social arts and sciences (such as economics and politics), of religion, of warfare, etc. In the U. S. a great deal of money is made by the writing of books or the conducting of schools in the techniques of how to win friends and influence people, how to make a million dollars in the stock market, how to succeed in business, how to get into the college of your choice, how to be a better sexual partner, "how to get thinner once and for all", "how to get and hold a woman" ("Do not try to reason with a woman, just manipulate her in her feelings"). We now have a book " in non-technical, narrative form" which presents the "techniques of joy" -- "pushing, nudging, bumping, wrestling, guided fantasy, 'acting-out', talking, silence, and non-verbal communication." Since some of these techniques "may be emotionally dangerous without professional guidance", we are advised to seek the help of technicians themselves to possess some joys.
It is important to keep this range of techniques in mind. For many identify technology with the improvement of industrial processes and products, and, thanks to the techniques of idea-manipulators, forget that vast and profitable sciences (technologies) have developed in the areas of buying, consumption, political processes, advertizing, etc. There is the view also that techniques and technicians are somehow "value-free" and not responsible for their anti-humanistic accompaniments or consequences, a view that derives from an artificial separation of the sciences and humanities. In this essay the term "technology" will normally be used in this broader sense. With that sense, we can more clearly see the relation of technology to humanism.
The technological revolution in industry has produced an unprecedented set of interconnected problems: a rapid and large increase in world population; a relative decrease of food supply and arable land; the problem of discovering and transforming for human use natural resources and energies; the despoliation of the land, the polluting of air and water, and the upsetting of the chemical and climatic balances in the ecological environment; urbanization, with its crowding, over-stimulation, loss of privacy, interpersonal conflict; impersonal organizations of industry and business; political centralization and bureaucracy; the development of new genocidal weaponry, including thermonuclear, chemical and biological warfare; new forms of imperialism; increasing demands on education; mass culture; leisure time; rapid institutional changes (in family, school, business, industry, science, etc.); revolutions based on a sense of national or radical [racial?] identity.
Men have responded to industrial technology and to the problems created by it in a variety of ways. (1) They have drifted and remained indifferent to the problems, willing to accept the values generated by technological changes and to seek immediate gratifications. Here we can find many of the passive middle class of United States society as well as many of the hungry, diseased, illiterate poor of the world. (2) They have violently and blindly rebelled against the problems, aiming to vent their hostility and resentment against the oppression they feel but lacking a clear direction for change toward new values. Here are the riots and insurrections occurring in the cities of the U. S. (3) They have sought to separate themselves from the possible human values of the technological society by escaping from those values. Such escape may be effected by remaining in the society and dutifully performing certain social and technological functions, but by repressing awareness of the problems and seeking satisfactions in a world of entertainment, fantasy, sports, and other private "diversions". Here are large groups in affluent societies who find forms of escape, provided and encouraged by decision-makers, relatively cheap and accessible. Escape may also be effected through physical removal of oneself from the society -- emigration or movement to the countryside or hinterland to establish a Utopian community. (4) They have sought to control the conditions of their technologies, institutions, communities, or societies in the interest of an established or aspiring elite. Such control is aimed at conserving traditional ways and values and at repressing and resisting change in the direction of more democratic sharing in decision-making, responsibility for such decisions, and the fruits of such decisions. Here we find the owners and controllers of wealth and power in feudal and capitalistic societies, as well as the politicians with vested interests and special privileges in socialist societies. (5) They have sought to control the conditions of their technologies, institutions, communities, or societies in democratic ways in the interest of the great masses of people. Here we find the successful revolutionary movements of modern times which have borne fruit in the socialist nations and are continuing to bear fruit in countries like Vietnam.
These ways of responding to technology and its problems are not of equal value. They compete for the loyalties of men and they do not with equal effectiveness solve the problems. Moreover, as we have observed, technique and technology are always instrumental to values to which men are implicitly or explicitly committed. The question of evaluating responses to technology can be answered only as we answer the question: What human values should technique and technology serve?
Let us begin with some elementary definitions. "Value" in the general sense will here mean anything relevant to the fulfillment of a human preference or interest. Thus a specific value may be something toward which a person actually shows a preference ("preferred value"). It may be sought and cherished ("positive value"), or shunned and destroyed ("negative value"). It may be something which satisfies an interest ("satisfying value"). It may be something which in fact fulfills a real human need ("human value"), independently of whether or not it becomes an explicit and preferred object of interest. And it may be symbolized as a value ("ideal value") or not. An individual person's satisfaction of his interests in a mutually reinforcing way is "personal value". The mutual reinforcing of personal values is "social value". The mutual reinforcing of non-human conditions to support personal and social values is "ecological value". Because man is a preferential activity fulfilling itself, in process of creating or realizing value, the life of value may be studied objectively. But it includes a commitment to a future which transcends value-facts and aims at the creation of new value-facts.
The standard which we propose for directing and judging technology is that of "human value", i. e., values that in fact fulfill real human needs, both personal and social. Man can value (prefer, be satisfied with, symbolize as ideal) and has valued a great variety of things -- luxury, ascesis, homicide, torture, slavery, illusion. But there is evidence that some values conduce to man's life and fulfillment on the whole and in the long run, while others do not. Such evidence is to be found in a certain consensus throughout many cultures in human history and in the sciences that bear upon man's behavior, including those sciences concerned to discover man's real human needs, personal and social, as distinct from illusory needs. (A "need" is an unstable condition and drive to stabilize it; a real human need is such that its deprivation means deprived humanity). Furthermore, the evidence that all men have a primary propensity for life and personal and social fulfillment is indicated in the struggle of men in history to live and live better, as well as in psychological studies in depth of both deprived and fulfilled personalities.[5]
This standard is here called "generic humanism". "Humanism" means, pertaining to values (forms of fulfillment) that occur in human experience, that are known to man's observation and reflection, that can be changed and improved by man's thought and action. "Man" is here taken in the broadest sense to include all men in the long run. "Generic" means, a certain genus of man distinguishing him from what is non-human, as well as a certain corresponding genus of fulfilling activity distinguished from purely preferred of satisfying values. Studies in the biological and psycho-social sciences indicate that man is defined by a certain biological structure with corresponding functions, and that he satisfies the needs associated therewith in certain ways in a social and ecological context of a certain kind.[6] To this extent man has a certain objective genus -- a value realizing nature aiming at generic values -- which in their specific realization are functions of the variables of biological constitution and of social and ecological context. Such generic values indicated by the sciences are also found recurrently expressed in the great symbolized, ideal values -- the philosophies and religions -- of past and present cultures.
Man is psychosomatic being with an underlying genotype that survives and develops in interaction with the things and persons of his social and ecological environment. Whatever his specific need may be (hunger, need for others, etc.), he is required to satisfy it by a receptive, active, and sensible response to the world. He needs continuously (1) to adjust to things and persons by letting them act on him; (2) to act upon things and persons and to control them to some degree; and (3) to perceive them in sensory form and relate the sense data in such ways as to act upon, and be acted upon, by things and persons in the environment. When these three basic needs work together to maintain the person in dynamic balance and growth, they represent the inclusive need of creativity.
The three categories of need-action-value may be called receptivity, dominance, and detachment.[7] They can be oriented toward self or others. They are, respectively, functions of basic components of the somatic organism: endomorphy (the digestive viscera), mesomorphy (bone, muscle, connective tissue), and ectomorphy (nervous tissue, skin).[8] These somatic structures in turn are the expression of a structural genotype continuously at work in the organism.[9] Thus both the similarities and the differences in the values of individual persons may be explained by consideration of the interplay of these somatic variables as they function in relation to the natural and social world.
Technique is a developed, habitual action of dominance: it is control of things or persons exerted toward some end. Technology is the theoretical effort to improve technique. Hence the central humanistic question for technology is: How can technical and technological dominance more effectively serve the realization of human values?
Contrary to Jacques Ellul and others,[10] technique and technology as such are not bad. They are in fact values; men require them to live, they practice them, they find them to be satisfying, they symbolize them as values. The categorial value that men find in technique and technology is dominance: men enjoy controlling things and persons and dominating them; they enjoy perfecting procedures to certain ends. Dominance is not bad in itself; it is not necessarily domination (domineering)[11] -- e. g., a man controls his car (is dominant over it) in order to enjoy the scenery and to go to the seaside to relax. The larger questions are: What ends and other values are being served by technology? Who controls the technology and determines its ends and consequences? Who shares in the goods and services of economic technology? Technology is a "threat" only in so far as the values of dominance restrict, repress, or displace the development of other human values like those of creativity, receptivity, and detachment. From studies of college students' preferences in the U. S., Norway, India, China, and Japan about 1950[12] -- partially repeated in recent years[13] and supplemented by recent data from Poland and Hungary[14] -- there is evidence that most people do not prefer a way of life in which the values of dominance and technology are highest. They in fact prefer ways of life which favor receptivity, or detachment, or an integration of the values of receptivity, dominance, and detachment.
Industrialization as carried out under capitalism concentrates industrial technology and dominance in the hands of a small class, a dominance which spreads from the economic base to the whole society. It was the great merit of Marx to see this: "all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers."[15] He saw also the rising countermovement of the dominated class in the direction of a non-dominating, democratic society. But under socialism also, as we have seen, the struggle of some to dominate others is carried on from the political base and from there through the whole society. It is a struggle that is not entirely explainable in economic or political terms, for it goes on within socialism and among ruling groups. Stalinism as practised does not re-establish the doctrine of original sin or the recent "scientific" view (a secular version of the former) put forth by Lorenz, Ardrey, and Storr that man is an aggressive, domineering animal. But it does lead us to inquire more radically into the causes of dominance and submission in men. In China, for example, we have seen a struggle of those supporting a "cultural revolution" to "recapture" the Party leadership from those "taking the capitalist road." The alleged dominance is not economic or technological. It has to do with "education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure not in correspondence with the socialist economic base...."[16] The revolution claims to be directed against Party bureaucrats and demands the dominance of the masses. Similarly, the situation in the Czechoslovak Communist Party in the post-war period has been described as follows:
The incorrect line of the leadership changed the party from a political party and an ideological alliance into a power organization which became very attractive also to egotists avid for rule, calculating cowards, and unprincipled people.[17]
Protest against the dehumanizing effects of dominance -- industrial, political, or otherwise -- is evident in nearly all societies throughout the world today. The protests take different forms, have different goals, and reach different levels of consciousness.
In the more advanced capitalist industrial societies (U. S., Japan, Canada, Scandinavia, Switzerland, France, the German Federal Republic, Benelux, Great Britain, Italy, Israel, Australia, New Zealand), the protest tends to take the form of intellectual criticism, political opposition, or direct action like demonstrations and strikes. In the industrially advanced socialist societies (Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Czechoslovakia), the protest tends to be intellectual, as it does in less industrialized socialist states such as Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Rumania. At times, of course, the protest has in some of these countries involved both intra-party and extra-party political struggle and direct action.
In the less industrialized capitalist societies (e. g., Spain, Greece, Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile), the forms of protest are similar, though protest may be borne more fully by the industrial working classes and the peasants.
In the poorly industrialized societies, protest is directed against the local landlords and foreign industrialists engaged in exploitation. Such has been the situation in many of the 60-odd nations, chiefly in Asia and Africa, which since World War II have emerged from colonial status. In a number of such cases, as well as in Latin American countries, the protest has taken over revolutionary form. It seems that as nations become more industrialized and integrated, protest tends to take intellectual and political form rather than the form of direct, collective, destructive action. As societies pass from a partially industrialized state to an advanced industrialized state, they develop three kinds of protest against industrial dominance: revolutionary peasant-proletarian, proletarian-political and political-intellectual. These are not mutually exclusive. For example, the revolutionary peasant-proletarian protest includes political and intellectual forces, but the peasants and proletariat represent its base.
Also, protest in an advanced capitalist society is qualitatively different from protest in an advanced socialist society. In the former, most protesters reflect the qualities of the capitalist system: they are liberal, reformist, romantic, anarchistic, etc.; and if they are realistic they know that a basic source of the dehumanization is a dominant economic class in control of technology. In the latter (aside from C. I. A. collaborators) perhaps most protestors know what it means to live in a socialist society as contrasted with a capitalist one; hence the protests tend to be focused on politicians, bureaucrats, managers, and others whose policies have had dehumanizing effects. The proletarian revolution which Marx foresaw in industrialized western Europe did not materialize, and "the self-government of the producers" which he anticipated under socialism has not been perfected. But it should be remembered that at the heart of Marx's teaching was a call for a radical transformation of human living. Marx had in mind a humanistic order which would release men from the constrictions of special groups bent on dominating the society in their own interest. To prevent this domination, he saw that the control over industrial and technological processes and indeed over all social processes must be appropriated once and for all by the people themselves.
The development of dehumanizing technology has prepared the way for a reaction against it, just as the development of 19th century industrial society generated the forces of its own criticism. In incipient post-industrial societies like the U. S., the growth of population, the disappearance of dispersed agrarian communities in favor of crowded urban centers, the expansion of scientific, professional, and service occupations relative to skilled and unskilled workers, the spread of education and cultural pursuits, the increase of leisure, affluence, consumption, and opportunities for sensate pleasures, have all developed a vague consciousness in people concerning the repressed values of receptivity, detachment, and creativity. They have made people increasingly aware of the dominance of their lives by forces they do not control and, correspondingly, of their own frustrated self-determination. Under this advanced capitalism the traditional values of individual dominance, made possible for a number in the "free market" of an earlier day, have given way to the values of an intensified, disguised corporate dominance. Nostalgia and hope for such "freedom" have led to the rise of reactionary groups opposed to the welfare state, the labor movement, the income tax, World War II, communism, the United Nations, etc.[18] An "inner-directed" society has become "other-directed." The dominance of the 19th century European industrial ruling class -- which Marx and Engels described as "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation"[19] -- has taken on an additional characteristic masking the exploitation of subordinate classes at home and abroad. That characteristic is social, political, and ideological manipulation of masses of people through large, impersonal, organizations in industry, business, the service occupations (especially education), the sciences, the professions, and the mass media. The influence of the governmental-military complex is interwoven into these organizations -- e. g., more than one-half of all scientists and engineers are involved in military work. Corporate capitalism in the U. S. has produced affluence for 7 percent of the population, comfort for 50 percent, and deprivation and poverty for 43 percent.[20] Hence the task of masking its exploitation is easier than in the earlier period: the economically exploited people are not so numerous or concentrated, proportionately, as earlier, and the instruments of emotional and mental manipulation are more effective.
Most Americans have not focused on the nature and causes of this corporate dominance, but increasing numbers are aware of it. The Negroes, the unemployed, the poor, the unskilled and semi-skilled workers, the draftable students, have felt it directly. Young people, facing entrance into a society they know to be conformist, impersonal, and repressive, have led the way in rebelling against it, though their rebellion has often been either blind, destructive, passive, retreating, or indulgent. Many have protested against the system by stressing the ideal and actual values of individual receptivity and detachment - the cultivation of sensuous enjoyment and detachment from institutional ties and responsibilities. The new hedonism of the Hippies, of happenings, of be-in's, of inner exhilaration, expresses this rejection of a social order which threatens the diversified and free fulfillment of the individual person. Herbert Marcuse's work is popular among such American youth not so much because of its revolutionary Marxism as because of his emphasis on instinctual pleasure vs. repression and on the values of individual "'immediacy" vs. "organized domination."[21] He articulates the revolt of the youth against dominance in favor of receptivity and detachment. Protest is also expressed in patterns of dominance, as seen in the militant actions of some youth; but some of the militancy is aimed at the balanced values of a democratic order.
Throughout its history class society develops ever more elaborate and subtle forms of social dominance. Thorstein Veblen pointed out how the military and priestly coercion of barbarism evolves into the more complicated economy of business enterprise. The predatory class creates a culture of exploit, aggression, emulation, invidious comparison, prowess, trophies, booty, conspicuous leisure, conspicuous consumption, etc.[22] Social status emerges to reflect economic power. Patterns of value feature self-assertion as primary -- not as direct power over others, but in the forms of wealth and leisure. Thus what was and continues to be unchecked economic dominance over other men is supplemented by a display of dominance. "Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!"[23] In the early stages of capitalism this means the ruthless use and extermination of plants, animals,[24] and men, and the reckless, wasteful manipulation of land, minerals, waterways, and whatever materials the capitalist can lay his hands on. "Wealth is virtue", as one of Balzac's characters puts it in Pere Goriot. Capital in the form of money and surplus-value becomes an essential means for the growth of such dominance. In the later stages the accumulation of material objects -- material "goods" -- becomes an object in itself and is held up for popular admiration. In the early stages the possession of material goods both as material objects and as social values is impossible for the masses. But advanced capitalism makes such objects available to large groups of people, and hence what was previously only admired at a distance is increasingly possessed and enjoyed. In this, capitalism in western European countries and the United States has gradually lifted up large numbers into the realization of its values of material accumulation and material display. It has incorporated the workers into its system of values.[25] By means of its rising productivity and the tendency to level its materialistic ideals (Fords become surrogates for Cadillacs, suburban homes for estates, frozen foods for maids, mass-produced clothes and coiffures for privately produced ones, television for special entertainment and travel, inexpensive boats for yachts, artificial perfumes and shampoos for natural ones, etc.) -- many non-capitalists have been converted to the gospel of capitalism.
Moreover, in this way the revolt against dominance in favor of receptivity is somewhat appeased. For in its more affluent stages capitalism is able to blur the distinction between those who control the economy and those who do not. Politicians serve as the facade of the empire of high finance. And a politician, as Americans demand, must mingle with the people and be one of them. Through its advertizing and its political programs capitalism is able to convince large masses that the happy way of life is the life abundant in material goods. If men in the past objected because their lives were dominated by others and because life was all work and no play -- then today those who do not object do not see the dominators and can proceed to enjoy their beer, their television and their sports. There is no desire, longing, or fulfillment which has not been captured, promoted, and commercialized by the system of corporate capitalism: surf-riding, sky-diving, space exploration, sports cars, clothes, cosmetics, nudism, drugs, painting, music, sculpture, cinema, drama, polymorphous sexuality, pornography, gambling, etc. (When a reform group wishes to " legalize" one of these hitherto underground or undeveloped activities, what it usually means is that it wishes to open up the field for exploitation by money-making groups other than the "criminal" ones now operating it. It wants an Open Door Policy in the exotic land of the heathen). Two experts have predicted that among the technical innovations likely before the year 2000 (presumably in the U. S.) are controlled supereffective relaxation and sleep; improved capability to "change" sex; competitive synthetic foods and beverages; nonharmful methods of overindulging; extensive and permanent changes in features, figures, complexion, skin color, and physique; and programmed dreams.[26] Such innovations will no doubt satisfy some. But those who submit uncritically to such technological "advances" are already candidates for this new colonization, already in need of an opiate and a new "spirit" for a "spiritless situation." Thus new opiates become the new religion of the people.
Why is dominance, as exercised through technological control by a few, anti-human and bad?
1) By virtue of a monopoly of power in the hands of a few, technological dominance deprives the large masses of men of the primary human value of creativity. Dominance in itself is not the primary human value. It is necessary for survival and fulfillment. But in the context of the full human being functioning healthily in society and nature, dominance functions alongside receptivity and detachment as a mode through which man creates and fulfills himself and others. Hence when dominance is singled out by a few men as their dominant life-principle and used to dominate other men, it becomes dehumanizing. It deprives those men of initiative, self-determination, cooperation, and responsibility. A "welfare state", whether capitalist or socialist in outer form, is therefore bad to the extent that decisions and their execution affecting all members of the society are monopolized by a few. However wise the few, they cannot become the creators of the many; undemocratic, they can only become the manipulators and dominators of the many. This is the very contradiction of man himself, who in his real and axial being is a self-creator.
2) Dominance, whether exercised by the few or the many, when it takes precedence over values like receptivity and detachment, becomes shortsighted and destructive. All obsession is ruthlessly exclusive. In allowing themselves to be dominated by the drive to manipulate and control the things and persons in their world, men lose sight of the other needs of their natures. They also become blind to the needs and demands of others, the conditions of the non-human environment, and the consequences of their actions. History and its creative reflection, literature, are filled with the lesson that those whom the goods would destroy, the first make mad with the lust for power. Insofar as the American imperialists, the latest madmen on the scene, attempt in Vietnam to put a humanistic face on their crimes of genocide, they do it in the name of "freedom", "democracy," "justice," etc. But such slogans are only mockeries of the fact that in their greed for dominance they cannot begin to feel and understand the passions and ideals of the Vietnamese people. To dominate others is to treat them as objects -- inanimate, usable, expendable for one's own driving purposes. Correspondingly, natural objects like land, water, plants, and animals are stripped of their humanistic meanings and values, both instrumental and intrinsic, and are wantonly destroyed in pursuit of the all-consuming end of dominance. The same exploitive attitude shows itself in the industrialists who pollute the water and air with waste products and the lumbermen of California bent on destroying magnificent beauty and 2000 years of natural history for the sake of power over nature, men, and the almighty dollar.
The value of dominance, like any other value, becomes a confused and self-defeating value if isolated from other values in the dialectic of a creative life. For if a man dominates a person, a plant, an animal, or another natural object to the exclusion of appreciating and understanding it, its own autonomous being and life, its own qualities and forms and movement, disappear. Total domination ends in destruction. And what can this mean except that the dominator is driven by his own self-destructive tendencies? A creative person, by contrast, is dominant and receptive, active and thoughtful, attached and detached; he preserves the dialectic of creation, being dominant and destructive only for the sake of a fuller life for itself and others in the long run. He maintains the generic human values of receptivity, dominance, and detachment in dynamic and flexible balance, in himself and with other persons and the world.[27] Some values must always be lost, forsaken, and destroyed. But the guiding principle of his life is the optimal creation of all men.
3) Technological dominance, by arrogating to itself the central position in the determination of human culture and its value, produces an unhealthy imbalance. A social system based on the dominance of a class which maintains and extends its dominance through the elaboration of technology cannot purposefully and systematically direct its technology toward humanistic ends and thus keep in balance all the values of human existence. The U. S., for example, spends more money on chemical and biological warfare than on cancer research, more on the space program than on poverty; and while it can devote $ 30 million this year to the Vietnam War, more than 10 million of its people go hungry. The pattern of dominance, competitiveness, acquisitiveness, established in the ways in which people earn their living, pervades the society. It suppresses the values of sensuous responsiveness, release, relaxation, enjoyment, emotional warmth, tenderness, compassion, etc., and the values of perceptual acuity, sensitivity, delicacy of response, it displaces the dynamic, integrating, spontaneous, growing, life-affirming drive of the healthy person with the static, piecemal, mechanical, arrested, death-oriented tendency of the unhealthy person. It distorts personality and culture. Nietzsche, who is often misrepresented as a proponent of a dominant, ruthless will to power and nothing more, described this kind of distortion: "human beings who are nothing but, a big eye or a big mouth or a big belly or anything at all that is big. Inverse cripples I call them."[28]
Various psychological studies show that what characterizes the sick person and society is just this deviation from life.[29] The courage to grow, to venture, to enter into new relations and integrate new meanings and values in a give-and-take exchange with things and persons, is given up. In their insecurity men seek the regular, the orderly, the controllable. This mechanism is deep-seated. It can be traced back to the magic and religion of primitive times and is seen in the mythologies and rituals of ancient slave society and feudalism. In industrial and pre-industrial societies the mechanical and the technological have provided the main outlets for this neurotic need. Science applied on a massive scale to industry and business, capitalistic efficiency, bureaucratic system, political "machines," vast military organizations, total war, the Protestant ethic, the Freudian "repetition compulsion," the anal-obsessive character, and other "mechanisms" of defense, the authoritarian personality -- all express and appease this need. Men become preoccupied with routine techniques, organizational procedures at their place of work and at home, machines and gadgets, for like the lares and penates they give protection against the new, the strange, the unknown, and the unpredictable in man's spirit and in his society and world. In industrial society men derive a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment by driving a car, doing "paper work," putting the shop and desk in order (reward: status, money), making house and yard neat by using the many machines they have been induced to buy (reward: status), shopping, paying bills, etc. Men often lavish more care on their food, clothes, houses, yards, cars, machines, and tools than on persons. They are often more interested in the means, the techniques, the act of controlling, than in the ends. In the U. S. life, liberty, and happiness are vaguely presumed to be the ends; but how many people are lively, free, and happy.
In the complex and uncertain world of capitalist industrial society, men are tempted to turn to and deal with the inorganic and inanimate, the vegetative and the animal, because their technique and technology there can give them that tidy order that they compulsively seek but cannot find among genuine and creative human beings. If they deal with human beings, they endeavor to reduce them to the level of things, where they can be, in good "scientific" and "political" fashion, enumerated, correlated, consensualized, and controlled. Likewise, in this process of dehumanizing others, they themselves become dehumanized. They learn how to subordinate their own purposes to the efficient running of a social machine. They manipulate and shift their techniques to suit its demands. In such a way they become successful workers, leaders, social and natural scientists, market researchers, military men, politicians, bureaucrats, concentration camp managers, organization men, and citizens. Hubert Humphrey "has been called an opportunist by some, for which he has, as always, a fast answer: 'What's wrong with taking advantage of the opportunities? .... Politics of the old days -- when you pitted one group against another -- it's out, it's obsolete,' he said not long ago. 'Hell, I'm an organization man."[30]
Erich Fromm has argued that man's love of the mechanical and the dead is not an inborn instinct but is a secondary reaction to the frustration of his primary love of life.[31] He has also asserted that "the spirit of capitalism, the satisfaction of material greed, is conquering the communist and soc ialist countries."[32] This is misleading. There are persons, institutions, and policies in socialist countries which stress dominance over the environment through technique and technology -- bureaucrats, managers, technocrats who see man only as an economic, technical animal. But the general spirit that pervades socialist societies, as compared with the spirit of capitalist societies such as the U. S., is more cooperative, balanced, peace-keeping, humanistic. In no socialist society on earth is the preoccupation with over-kill, megatonnage, imperialist dominance, guns, violence, and the instrumentalities of death so virulent as it is an the U. S. Does not U. S. society represent the supreme example of how capitalism, generating technology as a means for its own expansion, comes to be dominated by its own empty and destructive techniques of dominance?
Nevertheless, Fromm's warning is a propos. The utopian and revolutionary socialism that arose between 1789 and 1848 was a reaction against the dehumanizing, deadening "order" of the conservative Tories and feudalists, on the one hand, and the equally dehumanizing, fixed order of bourgeois liberalism. The theory of the latter gravitated toward materialism, but it was mechanical materialism, which missed the communal and dynamic character of human life and history. Marx saw how the processes of industry isolate, mechanize, and destroy men; but unlike the Utopians, he also saw the promise of industry for man's humanization, both in the cooperativeness which it engendered and in its promise of the liberation of men from necessary labor. The point of revolution was to release men from the repressive conditions of the feudal and bourgeois order but to do this through industry. Socialist societies have thus always struggled with the problem of maintaining the revolutionary, humanistic vision while developing and subordinating industry and technology to it. In political terms, this is the problem of creating a genuine democracy among people who know their real human needs and who have the knowledge and the technological and other means to fulfill them.
But the achievement of humanism is not easy. Analysts like J. J. Servan-Schreiber have recognized the growing American dominance of the western European economic community through investment and management. U. S. corporations in Europe control 15 percent of the production of radios, television sets, and recording devices; 50 percent of semiconductors; 80 percent of computers; and 95 percent of integrated circuits. The answer proposed to the "dynamism, organization, innovation and boldness that characterize the giant American corporations" is "creativity" -- which for Servan-Schreiber means more effective corporate capitalism in Europe. Servan-Schreiber accepts the fundamental dogma of capitalist technology; the humanistic values and consequences of technology are shoved into the background. Is it not clear by now, however, that neither technology nor capitalism is a god that will guarantee men a good life but that, on the contrary, both pose a serious threat to man? The major theoretical alternative to the anti-humanistic technology of capitalism in western Europe is the humanistic technology of socialism. But whether this can become a practical alternative, a real possibility, depends on the exemplary success of humanism in existing socialist states in eastern Europe and throughout the world. People prefer the goods and services of industrial and post-industrial technology, capitalist or communist, to little or no technology. But as real human beings they also prefer a humanistic technology to a non-humanistic one.
In these terms Lenin's view that "without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement"[33] means that the values and goals of social change must be fully clarified -- not abstractly, but in concrete criticism of current conditions. What is to be said and done will vary from society to society. But change cannot be revolutionary unless it is basic, and therefore criticism must be basic, i. e., must cut to the assumptions, the philosophical roots, the beliefs concerning man, history, the world, values, and methods, which dominate the society. When they "occupy" university buildings and "confront" the authorities, American students imagine that they are making a "revolution". But many repudiate theory and "ideological garbage" (meaning any ideology), and the consequence is far from revolutionary. But the development of a widespread, informed, radical consciousness among Americans -- hitherto preoccupied with the immediate and pragmatic -- would indeed be a step in the direction of radical social change. That consciousness would have to direct itself not only to capitalism but to the whole problem of the dialectics of humanism and technology. In this sense the revolution for Americans must be a double one, just as citizens of socialist countries must now save themselves from the potential distortion and dehumanization of their own technology.
How can technology be made more humanistic -- how can it better serve the whole range of human values?
1) All of the people to the extent of their ability shall have access to knowledge about themselves, their values, proposed decisions on technological policies affecting their values, and the consequences of such policies for themselves and others.
Corollary: All formal education should make questions of value basic and pervasive.
Corollary: Specialists in knowledge about human beings and human values, technology, planning, leading, etc. should communicate and discuss with people affected, the technological policies proposed and affecting them in their institutions.
Corollary: No group, independently of such communication and discussion, should make technological policy.
2) All of the people affected should, in consequence of such discussion, decide upon and determine a course of action with regard to instituting or changing technological policy.
3) All of the people affected, after the instituting of technological policy, should discuss, evaluate, and, if decided, change or eliminate such policy.
4) Institutions (families, schools, unions, government, etc.) should be organized so that the democratic-scientific methods of solving value-problems become established and habitual.
Corollary: Non-democratic, authoritarian, elitist, impulsive, traditional methods of problem-solving shall be eliminated.
Notes
[1] C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961. In Vol. I of Capital, in the next to the last chapter, Marx mentions among the trends of capitalism "the conscious technical application of science." But as Snow points out, such application did not occur on a large-scale until relatively recently.
[2] See Daedalus, Summer, 1967, for a discussion of these tendencies.
[3] Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener, "The Next Thirty-Three Years: A Framework for Speculation", Daedalus, Summer, 1967, pp. 716, 718.
[4] Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World. New York: The New American Library, 1948, p. 91.
[5] See, for example, the work of Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, A. H. Maslow, Ashley Montagu, Carl Rogers, and Ian D. Suttie.
[6] The fact that scientists do not agree on a precise list of needs is overshadowed by a converging consensus on needs. Probably most would accept most of the needs listed by Ashley Montagu: oxygen hunger, hunger, thirst, fatigue, restlessness, somnolence, bladder pressure, colon pressure, fright, pain, internal excitation feeling of nondependency or aloneness, general need or tension. On Being Human. Second edition. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966, pp. 50-51.
[7] Charles Morris, Varieties of Human Value. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956. I have used the term "receptivity" instead of Morris "dependence."
[8] William H. Sheldon, with the collaboration of S. S. Stevens and W. B. Tucker, The Varieties of Human Physique. New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1940.
[9] William H. Sheldon, with the collaboration of C. Wesley Dupertuis and Eugene McDemott, Atlas of Men. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954, p. 19.
[10] Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society. Translated by John Wilkinson. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1964.
[11] Charles Morris, "Technique and Human Value", p. 13. Unpublished paper for the Symposium on the Technological Society, The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara, California, 19-23 December, 1965.
[12] Charles Morris, Varieties of Human Value, Ch. III.
[13] Charles Morris, "Technique and Human Value", p. 21.
[14] The data from Poland and Hungary -- gathered by Mieczyslaw Choynowski, Psychometrical Laboratory, Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, and by Karoly Varga of Budapest -- have not at the present time (August, 1968) become available to this writer.
[15] Capital, Vol. I. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, n. d., p. 645.
[16] Central Committee of Chinese Communist Party, "Sixteen Points", August 8, 1966.
[17] "2000 Words to Workers, Farmers, Civil Servants, Scientists, Artists and Everyone", issued in Czechoslovakia by "a group of leading intellectuals." The New York Times, July 21, 1968.
[18] Seymour Martin Lipset, "The Sources of the 'Radical Right'", in The Radical Right. Edited by Daniel Bell. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1964, pp. 333-334.
[19] Manifesto of the Communist Party.
[20] Conference on Economic Progress, Poverty and Deprivation in the United States. The Plight of Two-Fifths of a Nation. Washington, D. C., 1962.
[21] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955, p. 36.
[22] Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1899.
[23] Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 595.
[24] The increase, misery, and exploitation of the surplus-population is compared by Marx to "the bound less reproduction of animals individually weak and constantly hunted down." Capital, Vol. I, p. 643. Marx also took note of how the farmers in their greed ruin the soil. Ibid., p. 265.
[25] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1964.
[26] Herman Kahn and Anthony J. Wiener, op. cit.
[27] This "way to live," in Charles Morris' studies, was on the average the best liked way. "Technique and Human Value," p. 24.
[28] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: The Viking Press, 1954, p. 250.
[29] See, for example, the references in footnote 5.
[30] Robert Sherrill and Harry W. Ernst, The Drugstore Liberal, New York: Grossman Publishers, 1968.
[31] Erich Fromm, Man For Himself. New York and Toronto: Rinehart and Co., 1947, pp. 210-216.
[32] Erich Fromm, "The Application of Humanist Psychoanalysis to Marx's Theory," in Socialist Humanism. Edited by Erich Fromm. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1965, p. 215.
[33] V. I. Lenin, Selected Works. Vol. I. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950, p. 227.