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The legacy of the frontier, on the Turner model, would be an ongoing faith in the individual's right to opportunity and the nation's right to material abundance.
No. 2Turner Thesis. Turner is known as an environmental determinist, famous for his assertion that nature changed Europeans into Americans. In fact, his presentation of nature was abstract, providing little sense of particular places with particular qualities. The wilderness may have mastered the colonist and then been mastered in turn, but this transaction took place in a realm closer to poetry than to prosaic historical reality. Mastered or mastering, Turner's wilderness took water for granted, and a large share of the continent -- Nevada, Arizona, much of New Mexico, California, Utah, and eastern Oregon and Washington -- vanished from frontier history.
No. 3The conventions of the Turner thesis did their part to obscure the significance of deserts. Another trend in historiography had a similar effect. Exposing the exaggerated myth of the "Great American Desert," historians inadvertently drew attention away from the actual deserts. Professional historians, personal experience shows, will still hear the declared intention to study the desert as an intention to explore "the Myth of the Desert." It is odd, but not altogether surprising, that environments of such powerful reality became associated in the intellectual's mind with myth and symbol.
Certainly deserts have accumulated a great deal in the way of symbolic meaning; (any other conclusion would provide a very odd ending for this particular book.) But that meaning rests on a very solid basis of physical actuality -- aridity set against human needs for water. The history of American deserts offers a chance to revitalize questions long discredited by a simplistic environmental determinism. How do environments affect human behavior? How do people newly introduced to a particular place figure out what to make of it, both conceptually and literally? One could hardly prepare a better experiment by conscious design: Remove a crucial variable and see what changes. Reduce water, and watch how people adapt or find an alternative to adaptation.
No. 4In 1848, when Mexico surrendered its northern territory, the United States came into possession of major tracts of desert. What made this seem a worthwhile acquisition? Why would a nation with a dominant interest in agricultural expansion want so much unwatered land? California and a few river valleys in the interior were territories of recognized value. The intervening arid space had the primary function of connective tissue; something, after all, had to connect Texas to California. The deserts in the middle had value primarily as a land passage, a route for overland travel and eventually for railroads.
The American desert found its initial significance as a place to cross, to get from one livable place to another. The overland trail in general was an adventure for many participants, an experience of novelty, challenge, and opportunity. While a degree of hardship was intrinsic to the challenge, the desert went too far. In desert travel, hardship went past adventure and into ordeal. Dust and heat were burdens enough: jornadas, the utterly waterless stretches of as many as fifty miles, put the endurance of both humans and animals through a brutal test. This was, after all, a form of transportation in which the loss of the oxen, mules, or horses put the travelers in a fearful and precarious situation. The desert passage was an experience of vulnerability, discouragement, exhaustion, and, at the end, triumph and relief.
Deserts as a result put a particular strain on the optimistic expectations of pioneers. In 1849, the emigrant Peter Decker noticed this warning sign near the Humboldt Sink: "Expect to find the worst desert you ever saw and then find it was worse than you expected." Warned or not, emigrants still found the desert a shock -- the fullest proof that the overland route to profit and improvement was not an easy one. The hardships of the desert, set against expectations of a continent that made at least minimal provisions for the needs of travelers, led to the widespread perception that the desert was the most "real" of environments, the place where, as Twain put it, reality drove romance into full retreat. In the face of such intractable reality, emigrants became innocents betrayed; routes that looked clear and direct on maps turned out to be ordeals; so-called rivers were small, bitter, and given to sudden disappearances. The desert passage was an interlude of shaken confidence; the visual distortion of mirages was only one of the ways in which nature, in the desert, seemed to cheat.
For those who took time for further reflection, the significance of the desert could only become more troubling. Faced with aridity, the project of mastering the continent seemed to have reached a non-negotiable limit. By all the conventional standards for value and habitability, the desert was an irrational environment, a betrayal of the promise of abundance fulfilled elsewhere in North America. Certainly the American agrarian ideal had never been put to a worse test.
With the discovery of minerals, beginning in the late 1850s, the significance of the desert shifted. Nature had prepared the scene for a treasure hunt, placing gold and silver in the most trying locations. Would the Americans and their acquisitive impulses be up to the challenge, ready to follow the traces of mineral wealth despite the most discouraging travel and living conditions? The answer was a solid yes. If William Lewis Manly could be persuaded to return to Death Valley, then the prospector's urge carried as much force in deserts as in mountains. Mining gave deserts a new value, but it was the transitory value appropriate to extraction. From a place to get across, the desert had become a place to get things out of, a meaning that hardly encouraged feelings of responsibility or attachment in the new arrivals. The high hopes of prospectors also led them to see the deserts as a harsh and extreme version of reality. The man who hoped for riches and found nothing, or even the man who found minerals too difficult to extract without major investment, was a man meeting -- and resenting -- reality.
For both overland travelers and prospectors, deserts offered hardship and scarcity without much compensation in the form of aesthetic charm. Beauty in the desert could only be discovered with a margin of safety. As Mark Twain noted, "nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs," and nothing improved desert scenery like a reliable water supply, a refuge from heat and direct sunlight, a safe form of transportation requiring little individual exertion, and an element of choice -- to visit the desert voluntarily, and to leave at will.
One further prerequisite to desert appreciation deserves mention. Most nineteenth-century Americans, those in a position to have an opinion at all, had felt that progress lay in the advance of civilization and the retreat of the desert. Along with leisure, choice, and safety, desert appreciators, from the turn of the century on, frequently had one other qualification: discontent with American society. To the degree that one found civilization unattractive, one could admire the most intractable of environments for its purity. The convention of the desert as "the most real" of landscapes carried through, although with a reversed and now positive meaning. Deserts that had not submitted to development were, to the appreciators, the most authentic of places, where existence was stripped to its essentials, without pretense and without artifice.
No. 5What, after all, are the deserts worth? The legacy of the overland trail was a judgment of arid vacancy. That legacy lasted into the twentieth century and up to the present. Describing the distinctive landscape of the Far West, the historian of the twentieth-century West Gerald Nash demonstrated the power of the overland legacy: "The only vestiges of life," he said, "could be found in towns and cities that served as oases -- centers of human activity in the midst of the seemingly endless sea of nothingness." From that perspective Krutch's and Abbey's energetic attempts to popularize desert appreciation -- to replace an image of vacancy with life and activity -- were writings in the sand.
No. 6The idea that nature has had something to do with the shaping of cultures and history is an idea that is both obviously true and persistently neglected. Maybe that is because there have been so many absurd versions of it, so many laughable claims: for instance, hot weather has been supposed to make peoples passionate and volatile like the Italians -- or is it metaphysical and speculative like Plato and the Hindus? The fatal temptation in this line of thinking has always been to fasten on a single factor of nature, like climate, and proceed to discover its influence everywhere. A more credible strategy would be to regard nature as participating in an unending dialectic with human history, seeing the two, that is, as intertwined in an ongoing spiral of challenge-response-challenge, where neither nature nor humanity ever achieves absolute sovereign authority, but both continue to make and remake each other.
That is the more complex perspective suggested by modern ecology, which describes a nature that is an exquisite interacting of diverse species, a circle of interdependence and mutuality. Bring humans into the picture, and the circle of life broadens to include diverse cultures as well as biological species, all of them working to reshape one another. Nothing is ever finished in that dialectic between history and natural history. Nothing can be abstracted altogether from its context or be said to have made itself in splendid isolation.
No. 7Up to this point, Marx's historical dialectic closely resembles the modern ecological perspective on culture and history. But as nature increasingly bears the impress of human energy and technique, Marx claimed, as it becomes a "second nature" of artifice, the effective terms of the dialectic change. The original conversation between a powerful, independent world of nature and a smaller, struggling world of human communities eventually gives way to one between technology and society. Hence history appears almost always in Marx -- certainly European history does -- as a struggle between one class of people and another, as a matter of laborers extracting a surplus from a passive physical world of "resources" lying before them like an open mine, then watching that surplus get taken away from them by those who own the tools. Nature as a real, intrinsically significant, autonomous entity gets obliterated, by workers and owners alike, in Marx's onward march of social progress.
The progress of history then involved leaving nature behind as a key formative element, supplanting it with the productive apparatus and class structure contrived by humans. Marx well understood that there were psychic costs paid in that liberation, including the alienation it entailed from the rest of the natural world. Capitalism, he wrote in Grundrisse, has freed humans from the age-old, localized dependence on the earth and the "nature idolatry" with which it was associated.
For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself, and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production.
No. 8Wittfogel learned much from this historical materialism of Marx, but, once again, he sidled off onto his own path, rescuing the ecological factor from Marx's neglect and placing it at the very center of his own scientific history. The natural environment and the technology used to produce wealth from it -- together constituting the "means of production" -- became for him more primary throughout history than Marx's social relations and forms of property ownership. In 1928 Wittfogel published his essay "Geopolitik, Geographischer, Materialismus und Marxismus," wherein he wrote: "Man and his work on one side, nature and its material on the other -- this is the fundamental relation, the eternal natural condition of human life upon which every form of this life, and above all its social form, is dependent." As societies try to remake nature, they remake themselves, without ever really escaping natural influences. In this spiral of history the people are by no means like helpless passengers of a boat that is being tossed this way and that in a storm; there are options open to them at every point. But always they must respond to nature, then fit themselves to their response.
No. 9In the preindustrial world, agriculture dominated human life, and that agriculture was a mosaic of little patches. Here a bit of wheat grew, there a grove of date trees, over there rows and rows of peas. Around those patches of crops developed a parallel mosaic of villages, often standing in sight of one another but each one largely self-contained, like an archipelago at sea. The early Chinese philosopher-poet Lao-tse speaks of hearing the cock crow every morning in the next village but never visiting the place; it was a foreign country to him.
No. 10The most fundamental characteristic of the latest irrigation mode is its behavior toward nature and the underlying attitudes on which it is based. Water in the capitalist state has no intrinsic value, no integrity that must be respected. Water is no longer valued as a divinely appointed means for survival, for producing and reproducing human life, as it was in local subsistence communities. Nor is water an awe-inspiring, animistic ally in a quest for political empire, as it was in the agrarian states. It has now become a commodity that is bought and sold and used to make other commodities that can be bought and sold and carried to the marketplace. It is, in other words, purely and abstractly a commercial instrument. All mystery disappears from its depths, all gods depart, all contemplation of its flow ceases. It becomes so many "acre-feet" banked in an account, so many "kilowatt-hours" of generating capacity to be spent, so many bales of cotton or carloads of oranges to be traded around the globe. And in that new language of market calculation lies an assertion of ultimate power over nature -- of a domination that is absolute, total, and free from all restraint
The behavior that follows making water into a commodity is aggressively manipulative beyond any previous historical experience. Science and technology are given a place of honor in the capitalist state and put to work devising ways to extract from every river whatever cash it can produce. Where nature seemingly puts limits on human wealth, engineering presumes to bring unlimited plenty. Even in the desert, where men and women confront scarcity in its oldest form -- not the deprivation of a particular industrial resource, which is always a cultural contrivance, but the lack of a basic biological necessity -- every form of growth is considered possible. Undaunted by any deficiency, unwilling to concede any landscape as unprofitable, planners and schemers assure that there is water in the driest rocks, requiring only a few spoken commands to make it gush forth without end. That collective drive to make the bleakest, most sterile desert produce more and more of everything comes from aggregating individual drives to maximize personal acquisitiveness without stint or hindrance. It is an ideology shared wholeheartedly by agriculturists and water bureaucrats, providing the bond that unites their potentially rival centers of power into a formidable alliance.
In capitalist society the prevailing way of perceiving and dealing with the natural environment is through instrumental reason. It is our equivalent for the Taoism of China, the worship of Osiris in ancient Egypt, and the animistic religion of the Papago -- at once our source of faith, value, ethics, purpose, and analysis. But that comparison can mislead, for the peculiarity of instrumental thought is that it destroys traditional religion and value, denigrates all genuine philosophy, recognizes no transcending purpose, and consequently leaves a deep void in our relationship with nature. "Reason," writes Horkheimer,for a long period meant the activity of understanding assimilating the eternal ideas which were to function goals for men. Today, on the contrary, it is not only business but the essential work of reason to find means for the goals one adopts at any given time.7
Instrumental reason is thinking carefully and systematically about means while ignoring the problem of ends. Business employs it regularly, for the end of business is assumed to be the obvious one of making money and only the methods for accomplishing that goal are worth bothering about. In technology too, instrumentalism tells the inventor what is needed to make a machine function more effectively, leaving the ends of innovation unexamined. There is nothing new in that way of thinking, nothing except that it has moved from the edges of human awareness, where it dwelt in premodern times, to the very center of consciousness, crowding aside all other activities, giving us increasingly a life of "rationalized irrationality."8
The highest form of reason, according to Horkheimer, involves more than understanding the phenomenal world and how it works and being able to manipulate it to one's advantage. Reason should deal with ultimate matters; it should define the greatest good, search out the values that inhere in things, contemplate human destiny, and sort out moral truths. By that standard, reason inevitably is the pursuit of what ought to be. But in recent centuries "ought" has been rigidly distanced from "is" and, finally, consigned to a back room. Under the influence of capitalism, science, and technology, facts alone have come to have real meaning. Values appear to be subjective preferences, which is to say they get relegated to a pile marked "private and extraneous." Like taste, they cannot be disputed, it is said, nor can they be established. An empty space therefore is left in public discussion, and instrumentalism rushes in to fill it with charts, numbers, measurements of efficiency, productivity talk, profit-making, whatever will divert attention from the awkward silence. "We must conquer the desert." Why? "So there will be homes and farms for more people." Why? "So there will be more wealth to go around." What is the wealth for? "Whatever people like, or come to decide --I t's not a question we can address." Reason thus surrenders its high calling and settles for a career of calculation. "Having given up autonomy, reason has become an instrument."9 In an age ruled by instrumentalism, nature ceases to have any value in itself. It is no longer seen as the handiwork of God to be admired more than used, nor is it an organic being we are bound to woo and respect. A tree, a mountain, a river, and its edges are meaningless except where they can be turned to some human use by a farmer, a scientist, or a manufacturer. Nature is "degraded to mere material, mere stuff to be dominated, without any other purpose than that of this very domination." Because it is uncontrolled by any aims set by reason, technological domination is an unlimited ambition. "Man's boundless imperialism is never satisfied."10 Here at bottom is the ideological force driving the capitalist state on and on, leading eventually to a "totalitarian attack of the human race on anything that it excludes from itself," whether it be landscapes, ecosystems, or people (Indians, Jews, and women have all at times been among the excluded) who are put outside the pale of humanity and assumed to be part of nature, not of ourselves.
The domination of nature implied in instrumentalism must not be confused with every use of specific resources, or with any and every impact humans have had on the nonhuman sphere. When a man clears a field of trees and plows it up for crops, he has not embarked on a career of technological domination, though he may have given the land a new appearance. Domination, as Horkheimer and Adorno used the term, is a repressive act that is total in intention. It springs from a hostility and an alienation that cannot tolerate the otherness of nature, that can see no worth there or respect any right to exist separate from humans, like the guard in a concentration camp who seeks to crush his prisoner's very identity. Every being on the earth influences other beings, and some exert far more influence than others. But that is not yet domination -- not until the superior being tries to change others beyond all recognition and denies them any meaning outside of reference to himself. Then it becomes clear that domination is an epidemic of blindness. In his raging, uncontrolled drive for self-preservation and self-extension, the dominator loses sight of the very ends of life.11
Karl Marx had described capitalism as an aggressive exploiter of the earth, and the Frankfurt philosophers agreed. In the capitalist culture and its mode of production, they maintained, the domination of nature appears in its most virulent, popular form: there we find the chief expression of the destructive sickness that affects modern societies in their ecological behavior. But Horkheimer and the rest could not agree with Marx that the domination of nature is merely a side-issue to the conflict between the classes, a reflection of the bourgeois exploitation of workers. On the contrary, our relationship with nature is the central problem, the archmalady, the Urgebrechen, of our time. And it has roots going back before the hegemony of capitalism, and manifestations beyond its reach. For an early source, Horkheimer pointed to the Judeo-Christian tradition, particularly that often-quoted instruction by God in Genesis 1:28 to "multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it." (Horkheimer might have added to his indictment those other desert religions of the Near and Far East and their water-control programs.) But always, until the modern period, nature still carried some intrinsic meaning. The more immediate and decisive source of domination was the Enlightenment of eighteenth-century Europe and its "disenchantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of knowledge for fancy."12 The Enlightenment, though on one side devoted to the same critical reason the Frankfurt School believed in, had a darker aspect, a more influential side, which stripped value from the world, made it ephemeral and subjective, and opened wide the door to positivistic, utilitarian mindlessness. Capitalism was a key part of that ominous side--it constituted the "bourgeois Enlightenment"--but by no means was it the only part. There was also science and its imperial project to reduce nature to facts and master it, and there was industrialism, the large-scale, centralized production of goods, and its indefatigable machines, furnishing the very metaphors by which science came to understand the world. Marx, therefore, was only halfway right in focusing exclusively on capitalism and class conflict. Worse, he was, despite a romantic youth, at last too close in his own thinking to that darker Enlightenment, too close to instrumental reason, to be a wholly reliable guide.
No. 11Accepting the authority of engineers, scientists, economists, and bureaucrats along with the power of capital, the common people become a herd. They live as "docile masses governed by clocks." More and more of their needs are attended to by others, even their leisure time is organized for them. Someone decides what they should want, what will keep them amused and uncomplaining, and what they must accept as reality. Instead of maturing into autonomous, rational individuals capable of deciding ultimate issues, as one side of the Enlightenment promised they would all do in the modern age, they instead become lifelong wards of the corporation and the state. Sensing their own impotence in the midst of so much general power, they may feel anger welling up inside them; but they do not know whom or what to blame, so thoroughly have they absorbed and internalized the ruling ideas, so completely have they lost the capacity for critical thought. Genuine freedom is for the average citizen an unknown ideal. His spontaneity atrophies. The memory of alternatives dries up. The private interior is invaded by hucksters and planners. Material life alone flourishes, and for the manipulated mass man that seems to be enough: an iron cage with all the amenities will do nicely in the absence of other possibilities. "Even though the individual disappears before the apparatus which he serves, that apparatus provides for him as never before."
No. 12Such use of the snowmobile by people with markedly different cultures may seem to illustrate an argument very widely advanced in discussions of problems associated with technology. This is the argument which states that technology is culturally, morally and politically neutral -- that it provides tools independent of local value-systems which can be used impartially to support quite different kinds of lifestyle.
Thus in the world at large, it is argued that technology is 'essentially amoral, a thing apart from values, an instrument which can be used for good or ill'. So if people in distant countries starve; if infant mortality within the inner cities is persistently high; if we feel threatened by nuclear destruction or more insidiously by the effects of chemical pollution, then all that, it is said, should not be blamed on technology, but on its misuse by politicians, the military, big business and others.
The snowmobile seems the perfect illustration of this argument. Whether used for reindeer herding or for recreation, for ecologically destructive sport, or to earn a basic living, it is the same machine. The engineering principles involved in its operation are universally valid, whether its users are Lapps or Eskimos, Dene (Indian) hunters, Wisconsin sportsmen, Quebecois vacationists, or prospectors from multinational oil companies. And whereas the snowmobile has certainly had a social impact, altering the organization of work in Lapp communities, for example, it has not necessarily influenced basic cultural values. The technology of the snowmobile may thus appear to be something quite independent of the lifestyles of Lapps or Eskimos or Americans.
One look at a modern snowmobile with its fake streamlining and flashy colours suggests another point of view. So does the advertising which portrays virile young men riding the machines with sexy companions, usually blonde and usually riding pillion. The Eskimo who takes a snowmobile on a long expedition in the Arctic quickly discovers more significant discrepancies. With his traditional means of transport, the dog-team and sledge, he could refuel as he went along by hunting for his dogs' food. With the snowmobile he must take an ample supply of fuel and spare parts; he must be skilled at doing his own repairs and even then he may take a few dogs with him for emergency use if the machine breaks down. A vehicle designed for leisure trips between well-equipped tourist centres presents a completely different set of servicing problems when used for heavier work in more remote areas. One Eskimo kept his machine in his tent so it could be warmed up before starting in the morning, and even then was plagued by mechanical failures'.' There are stories of other Eskimos, whose mechanical aptitude is well known, modifying their machines to adapt them better to local use.
So is technology culturally neutral? If we look at the construction of a basic machine and its working principles, the answer seems to be yes. But if we look at the web of human activities surrounding the machine, which include its practical uses, its role as a status symbol, the supply of fuel and spare parts, the organized tourist trails, and the skills of its owners, the answer is clearly no. Looked at in this second way, technology is seen as a part of life, not something that can be kept in a separate compartment. If it is to be of any use, the snowmobile must fit into a pattern of activity which belongs to a particular lifestyle and set of values.
No. 13In defining the concept of technology-practice more precisely, it is necessary to think with some care about its human and social aspect. Those who write about the social relations and social control of technology tend to focus particularly on organization. In particular, their emphasis is on planning and administration, the management of research, systems for regulation of pollution and other abuses, and professional organization among scientists and technologists. These are important topics, but there is a wide range of other human content in technology-practice which such studies often neglect, including personal values and individual experience of technical work.
To bring all these things into a study of technology-practice may seem likely to make it bewilderingly comprehensive. However, by remembering the way in which medical practice has a technical and ethical as well as an organizational element, we can obtain a more orderly view of what technology-practice entails. To many politically-minded people, the organizational aspect may seem most crucial. It represents many facets of administration, and public policy; it relates to the activities of designers, engineers, technicians, and production workers, and also concerns the users and consumers of whatever is produced. Many other people, however, identify technology with its technical aspect, because that has to do with machines, techniques, knowledge and the essential activity of making things work.
Beyond that, though, there are values which influence the creativity of designers and inventors. These, together with the various beliefs and habits of thinking which are characteristic of technical and scientific activity, can be indicated by talking about an ideological or cultural aspect of technology-practice. There is some risk of ambiguity here, because strictly speaking, ideology, organization, technique and tools are all aspects of the culture of a society. But in common speech, culture refers to values, ideas and creative activity, and it is convenient to use the term with this meaning. It is in this sense that the title of this book refers to the cultural aspect of technology-practice.
All these ideas are summarized by Figure 1, in which the whole triangle stands for the concept of technology-practice and the comers represent its organizational, technical and cultural aspects. This diagram is also intended to illustrate how the word technology is sometimes used by people in a restricted sense, and sometimes with a more general meaning. When technology is discussed in the more restricted way, cultural values and organizational factors are regarded as external to it. Technology is then identified entirely with its technical aspects, and the words 'technics' or simply 'technique' might often be more appropriately used. The more general meaning of the word, however, can be equated with technology-practice, which clearly is not value-free and politically neutral, as some people say it should be.
No. 14One problem arising from habitual use of the word technology in its more restricted sense is that some of the wider aspects of technology-practice have come to be entirely forgotten. Thus behind the public debates about resources and the environment, or about world food supplies, there is a tangle of unexamined beliefs and values, and a basic confusion about what technology is for. Even on a practical level, some projects fail to get more than half way to solving the problems they address, and end up as unsatisfactory technical fixes, because important organizational factors have been ignored. Very often the users of equipment (figure 2) and their patterns of organization are largely forgotten.
Part of the aim of this book is to strip away some of the attitudes that restrict our view of technology in order to expose these neglected cultural aspects. With the snowmobile, a first step was to look at different ways in which the use and maintenance of the machine is organized in different communities. This made it clear that a machine designed in response to the values of one culture needed a good deal of effort to make it suit the purposes of another.
A further example concerns the apparently simple hand-pumps used at village wells in India. During a period of drought in the 1960s, large power-driven drilling rigs were brought in to reach water at considerable depths in the ground by means of bore-holes. It was at these new wells that most of the hand-pumps were installed. By 1975 there were some 150,000 of them, but surveys showed that at any one time as many as two-thirds had broken down. New pumps sometimes failed within three or four weeks of installation. Engineers identified several faults, both in the design of the pumps and in standards of manufacture. But although these defects were corrected, pumps con-tinued to go wrong. Eventually it was realized that the breakdowns were not solely an engineering problem. They were also partly an administrative or management issue, in that arrangements for servicing the pumps were not very effective. There was another difficulty, too, because in many villages, nobody felt any personal responsibility for looking after the pumps. It was only when these things were tackled together that pump performance began to improve.
This episode and the way it was handled illustrates very well the importance of an integrated appreciation of technology-practice. A breakthrough only came when all aspects of the administration, maintenance and technical design of the pump were thought out in relation to one another. What at first held up solution of the problem was a view of technology which began and ended with the machine -- a view which, in another similar context, has been referred to as tunnel vision in engineering.
Any professional in such a situation is likely to experience his own form of tunnel vision. If a management consultant had been asked about the hand-pumps, he would have seen the administrative failing of the maintenance system very quickly, but might not have recognize that mechanical improvements to the pumps were required. Specialist training inevitably restricts people's approach to problems. But tunnel vision in attitudes to technology extends far beyond those who have had specialized training; it also affects policy-making, and influences popular expectations. People in many walks of life tend to focus on the tangible, technical aspect of any practical problem, and then to think that the extraordinary capabilities of modern technology ought to lead to an appropriate 'fix'. This attitude seems to apply to almost everything from inner city decay to military security, and from pollution to a cure for cancer. But all these issues have a social component. To hope for a technical fix for any of them that does not also involve social and cultural measures is to pursue an illusion.
So it was with the hand-pumps. The technical aspect of the problem was exemplified by poor design and manufacture. There was the organizational difficulty about maintenance. Also important, though, was the cultural aspect of technology as it was practised by the engineers involved. This refers, firstly, to the engineers' way of thinking and the tunnel vision it led to; secondly, it indicates conflicts of value between highly trained engineers and the relatively uneducated people of the Indian countryside whom the pumps were meant to benefit. The local people probably had exaggerated expectations of the pumps as the products of an all-powerful, alien technology, and did not see them as vulnerable bits of equipment needing care in use and protection from damage; in addition, the local people would have their own views about hygiene and water use.
Many professionals in technology are well aware that the problems they deal with have social implications, but feel uncertainty about how these should be handled. To deal only with the technical detail and leave other aspects on one side is the easier option, and after all, is what they are trained for. With the hand-pump problem, an important step forward came when one of the staff of a local water development unit started looking at the case-histories of individual pump breakdowns. It was then relatively easy for him to pass from a technical review of components which were worn or broken to looking at the social context of each pump. He was struck by the way some pumps had deteriorated but others had not. One well-cared-for pump was locked up during certain hours; another was used by the family of a local official; others in good condition were in places where villagers had mechanical skills and were persistent with improvised repairs. It was these specific details that enabled suggestions to be made about the reorganization of pump maintenance.
A first thought prompted by this is that a training in science and technology tends to focus on general principles, and does not prepare one to look for specifics in quite this way. But the human aspect of technology -- its organization and culture -- is not easily reduced to general principles, and the investigator with an eye for significant detail may sometimes learn more than the professional with a highly systematic approach.
A second point concerns the way in which the cultural aspect of technology-practice tends to be hidden beneath more obvious and more practical issues. Behind the tangible aspect of the broken hand-pumps lies an administrative problem concerned with maintenance. Behind that lies a problem of political will -- the official whose family depended on one of the pumps was somehow well served. Behind that again were a variety of questions concerning cultural values regarding hygiene, attitudes to technology, and the outlook of the professionals involved.
This need to strip away the more obvious features of technology-practice to expose the background values is just as evident with new technology in western countries. Very often concern will be expressed about the health risk of a new device when people are worried about more intangible issues, because health risk is partly a technical question that is easy to discuss openly. A relatively minor technical problem affecting health may thus become a proxy for deeper worries about the way technology is practised which are more difficult to discuss.
An instance of this is the alleged health risks associated with visual display units (VDUs) in computer installations. Careful research has failed to find any real hazard except that operators may suffer eyestrain and fatigue. Yet complaints about more serious problems continue, apparently because they can be discussed seriously with employers while misgivings about the overall systems are more difficult to raise. Thus a negative reaction to new equipment may be expressed in terms of a fear of 'blindness, sterility, etc.', because in our society, this is regarded as a legitimate reason for rejecting it. But to take such fears at face value will often be to ignore deeper, unspoken anxieties about 'deskilling, inability to handle new procedures, loss of control over work'.
Here, then, is another instance where, beneath the overt technical difficulty there are questions about the organizational aspect of technology -- especially the organization of specific tasks. These have political connotations, in that an issue about control over work raises questions about where power lies in the work-place, and perhaps ultimately, where it lies within industrial society. But beyond arguments of that sort, there are even more basic values about creativity in work and the relationship of technology and human need.
No. 15Indians Shmindians. It's got a catchy paradoxical ring to it. It's memorable, it's sensational, and it does seem to summarize our cultural attitude.
No. 17Combined with the popular imagery from television and films, the book helped remand Indian issues to the past.
Even liberal-minded people, concerned about issues of justice, who acknowledge the atrocities committed on this land, tend to speak of Indian issues as tragedies of the distant past. So ingrained is this position that when, occasionally, non-Indians do come forward on behalf of present-day Indian causes -- Marlon Brando, William Kunstler, Robert Redford, Kevin Costner, Jane Fonda -- they are all put into that "romantic" category. People are a bit embarrassed for them, as if they'd stepped over some boundary of propriety. When environmentalists such as David Brewer occasionally speak publicly about how we should heed the philosophies of the Inuit (Eskimos), they are thought impractical, uncool, not team players. (And when a specific issue pits native traditions against some current environmental concern, such as fur trapping, or subsistence sealing, or whaling, the native viewpoint is not given a fair hearing; literary luminaries like Peter Matthiessen have also been chastised for books on contemporary Indian issues (In the Spirit of Crazy Horse and Indian Country), with the implication that they should return to novels and Zen explorations.
I have had my own experiences with this. In Four Arguments I reported several encounters with Indians as a way of revealing bias in the media. I was surprised at the number of critics who cited those lines as foolish. Gene Youngblood, for example, a respected radical writer on media issues, said, "Mander is so naive.... My God, that old sixties chestnut, the Indians."
I thought that even Nelson Mandela got that treatment when he spoke about Indians at his 1990 Oakland rally. The news reports seemed to suggest that he didn't quite understand "our Indians."
No. 18There are still over one and a half million Indians in the United States today. Significant numbers of them continue to live in wilderness and desert regions and in the far north of Alaska, often engaging in traditional subsistence practices on the same lands where their ancestors lived for millennia. Contrary to popular assumptions, most of these Indians are not eager to become Americans, despite the economic, cultural, and legal pressures to do so.
Elsewhere in the world, millions of native peoples also live in a traditional manner, while suffering varying degrees of impact from the expansion of Western technological society. In places such as Indonesia, Borneo, New Guinea, the Amazon forests, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, parts of central Africa, the north of Canada, and even Scandinavia, the Soviet Union, China, and Tibet, tribal peoples are struggling to defend their ancestral lands. In other places, such as India, Iraq, Turkey, Mexico, Chile, the Pacific islands, New Zealand, and Australia, millions more native peoples live a kind of in-between existence, while they are under cultural, economic, or military siege.
No. 19More to the point, it is directed against a mentality, and an approach to the planet and to the human place on Earth, that native people find fatally flawed. For all the centuries they've been in contact with us, they've been saying that our outlook is missing something. But we have ignored what they say. To have heeded them would have meant stopping what we were doing and seeking another path. It is this very difference in world views that has made the assault on Indian people inevitable.
No. 20All of these acts were and are made possible by one fundamental rationalization: that our society represents the ultimate expression of evolution, its final flowering. It is this attitude, and its corresponding belief that native societies represent an earlier, lower form on the evolutionary ladder, upon which we occupy the highest rung, that seem to unify all modern political perspectives: Right, Left, Capitalist, and Marxist.
Save for such nascent movements as bioregionalism and Green politics, which have at least questioned the assumptions underlying this attitude, most people in Western society are in agreement about our common superiority. So it becomes okay to humiliate -- to find insignificant and thus subject to sacrifice -- any way of life or way of thinking that stands in the way of a kind of "progress" we have invented, which is scarcely a century old. In fact, having assumed such superiority, it becomes more than acceptable for us to bulldoze nature and native societies. To do so actually becomes desirable, inevitable, and possibly "divine."