Volume 14, Number 11 · June 4, 1970
National Self-Abuse
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
The Pursuit of Loneliness
by Phillip E. Slater
Beacon, 196 pp., $7.50
Technology and Empire
by George Grant
Anansi, Toronto, 143 pp., Can. $5.50
What is most novel about the way we have come to view contemporary social crisis is the dynamic and destructive role we ascribe to technology. With rare and prophetic exceptions, like Henry Adams in The Virgin and the Dynamo, most Western writers, even when unsympathetic to the effects of technical progress, have regarded technology itself as morally neutral, though seductive in its possibilities and subject to dangerous abuse. Recently, however, we have come to see that technology may be autonomous, self-perpetuating, and malevolent. Computers and thermonuclear devices do not, as yet, have minds of their own; but by their availability they bring to power men and social institutions less human than themselves. The managers who tend them impose routines more oppressive than any tyrant would devise for purely personal reasons; and this oppression becomes internalized in the expectations and the very perceptions of reality shared throughout technically developed societies, so that rebellion is usually forestalled by repressive de-sublimation or just plain self-betrayal.
Review, 3610 words
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