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Links
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LINK: AUTOMOBILES
THE AUTOMOBILE IS A MATERIAL AGENT OF ALIENATION—PASSENGERS ARE
PACKAGED INTO A RUBRIC OF TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT AND SECURITY THAT
REDUCES THEM TO PASSIVE ZOMBIES.
BECKMAN, ’08 (Karen, “Doing Death Over: Industrial Safety Films, Accidental Motion
Studies, and the Involuntary Crash Test Dummy”, Discourse, Volume 30, Number 3, Fall 2008,
pg. 317-342, accessed through Project MUSE)
Prior to this conflation of the crash, the speeding automobile, and telescopic vision, however, Virilio offers
another version of the collision in which the crash emerges as a brief (because potentially fatal) movement
from passivity to activity, a laying bare of the ideological operations of the apparatus of security, an
apparatus [End Page 319] designed less to keep traveling bodies safe than to hide from the passengers' senses
the violence of speed: So long as the dromoscopic simulation continues, the comfort of the passengers is
assured; on the other hand, when the illusion comes to its brutally violent cessation in a collision, it is as if the
voyeurs-voyagers are projected like Alice through the looking-glass windshield, a death jump but above all a
jump into the truth of their trajectory where the gap between theater hall and the stage collapses, the
spectators become actors: it is this fleeting insurrection that the seat belt is designed to prevent.12 The local
security that begins with the "corporeal 'packaging' [l'emballage] of the passenger," the mummifying effects
of car safety design, result, for Virilio, in a loss of the sense of touch and localization, a hiding of "solid
reality" under the padding of surfaces.13 And, as the ideology of speed permeates every aspect of life, the
discourse of security that begins with transportation replaces all concrete "enemies," so that "pacification
replaces nationalism, the final citizen becoming less active than passive," leaving the new citizen as "a kind of
'zombie' inhabiting the limbs of a devalued public life."14 Undoubtedly Virilio captures the contemporary sense
of a collective "crash" and disorientation that persisted in the wake of the euphoric liberation movements and
antiwar protests of the 1960s and 1970s. Furthermore, he astutely pinpoints the politically paralyzing effect of
the contemporary ideology of security, usefully tracing it back to a safety measure as seemingly harmless, or
even harm preventing, as the seatbelt, identifying the collision as one potential, if neither permanent nor
guaranteed, rupture in the state's security blanket. The relationship he highlights here between car safety and the
cultivation of certain modes of citizenship, and his interest in the potential of the crash for emerging theories of
subjectivity, citizenship, and visual technology at a time of great hybridity and rapid, potentially destructive, change,
make Virilio's work an important and suggestive starting point for my own inquiries. Yet, his line of thought can
productively be explored and developed only if we begin by highlighting four fundamental limitations of his critical
paradigm.
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LINK: AUTO-SAFETY
AUTO-SAFETY DISCOURSE IS A VIOLENT FORM OF NIHILISM—INDIVIDUALS ARE
DIVORCED OF RESPONSIBILITY VIA EXCLUSIVE FOCUS ON TECHNOLOGY AND/OR
ROAD CONDITIONS.
SIEGEL, ’08 (Greg, assistant professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, “The Accident is Uncontainable/The Accident Must Be
Contained: High-Speed Cinematography and the Development of Scientific Crash Testing”,
Discourse. Volume 30, Number 3, Fall, 2008, accessed through Project MUSE)
The villain of prewar auto-safety discourse, the reckless driver, is conspicuously absent from this grim
account of automobile catastrophe. Absent, as well, is the moral scheme that endowed his actions and
volitions with meaning and consequence, the ethico-juridical [End Page 366] logic that assigned him
responsibility and insisted on his accountability. Just as the question of culpability goes unasked here, so the
prospect of behavioral reformation—and of accident prevention—goes unimagined. For the collision
experimenter, such considerations are plainly beside the point; the ethics of automobility necessarily take a
backseat to the physics of accidentality. Surrounded by "collapsing structures," overpowered by "injurious
forces" of monstrous proportion, the motorists in Severy's disaster scenario are denied the opportunity to
determine their own fates, deprived of the ability to make a difference. They cannot possibly anticipate or
assess, much less respond to, the onrushing developments in so short a time. They can do nothing to deliver
themselves from their perilous predicament, to alter the inexorable course of events in which they are
"embroiled." Neither are their perceptions acute enough, nor their reactions quick enough, nor their bones,
sinews, and muscles strong enough. The accident condemns them to impotence and incapacity: it all happens
too soon; it is already too late. Trapped inside a rapidly decelerating, violently imploding machine, the bodies
of driver and passenger are reduced to the status of inanimate objects, no more active or effective than the
test dummies that simulate them.
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AUTO-SAFETY DISCOURSE IS A FUTILE ATTEMPT TO RENDER DEATH RATIONAL—THIS
IS THE ULTIMATE FORM OF TECHNOCRATIC CONTROL.
SIEGEL, ’08 (Greg, assistant professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, “The Accident is Uncontainable/The Accident Must Be
Contained: High-Speed Cinematography and the Development of Scientific Crash Testing”,
Discourse. Volume 30, Number 3, Fall, 2008, accessed through Project MUSE)
The complicated physical and physiological events involved in automobile collisions were little examined and
little understood prior to World War II. The car crash's "natural" phenomena—its energies, its materialities, its
spatialities and temporalities—were not generally considered worthy of serious scientific inquiry. Ideologically and
institutionally, the focus in the early decades of automobility in the United States was on preventing (and
thereby eliminating) accidents, not on discovering what took place during their occurrence. What mattered to
safety experts and advocates of the day was the moral and behavioral reformation of the "reckless driver," not the
systematic investigation of vehicular collision dynamics.6 By the early 1950s, however, the basic terms and
tendency of auto-safety discourse had changed dramatically. The emphasis was no longer on the prevention
(and progressive elimination) of accidents but, rather, on the reduction of crash injuries and fatalities. This
conceptual and discursive shift—from a regime of crash avoidance to one of crash amelioration—was tied to the
emergence of a new technoscientific ritual: the automobile-collision experiment. Full-scale "accidents," complete
with humanoid dummies as human surrogates, were painstakingly re-created at several industrial and institutional
sites across America during the postwar period. Intricate systems of instrumentation, electronic and photographic,
were used to facilitate the observation, registration, and analysis of the collisional process in all of its aspects: every
motion, every mechanical [End Page 350] deformation, every anatomical contortion. High-speed cinematography, in
particular, held the promise of new ob servational and analytical knowledge. With its ability to visually apprehend
and temporally extend instantaneous activities—to seize them, slice them up, and slow them down—the
overcranked camera enabled unprecedented perceptual access to the crash's most eventful, and awful, moment.
Postwar auto-safety discourse invested that eventful, awful moment with profound urgency and significance. It
stressed that everything truly consequential about automobile catastrophe was to be found therein: the excessive
forces, the uncontrolled actions, the structural failures, the deadly blows. If crash injuries and fatalities were to be
reduced, so the logic went, the instant of impact would have to be mined for information, studied in depth and
detail, revealed and rationalized. Long considered terra incognita, the destructive split second was now, for the
first time in automotive history, terra incognita that demanded to be explored and explained, and high-speed
cinematography offered collision experimenters of the 1950s a unique and compelling means of mapping and
making sense of it. Behind this peculiar cartographic-cinematographic project lay a broader cultural desire to
turn the accident—scourge of accelerated modernity, recurrent source of dread and disruption—into an
object of scientific knowledge and institutional control. This essay examines the role of high-speed
cinematography in the development of scientific crash testing during the 1950s, taking as a paradigmatic case the
Institute of Transportation and Traffic Engineering (ITTE) at the University of California, Los Angeles. Particular
attention is paid to how the strategic pairing of cinematographic technique and collision experimentation instantiated
the epistemological assumptions and enacted the institutional priorities of postwar auto-safety discourse. Although
this discourse abandoned the dream of eliminating accidents, it nonetheless mobilized a distinctive "will to
master" them, a will that found concrete expression—and, ironically, the constant threat of its own
nullification—in the rigors of scientific crash testing.
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LINK: RAILROADS
THE RAILROAD EMBODIES A SOCIOTECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEM THAT REIFIES VIOLENT
FORMS OF MANAGERIALISM.
MARX, 2010 (Leo, “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept”, Technology and
Culture, Volume 51, Number 3, July 2010, accessed through Project MUSE)
Turning now to the substantive or material changes in the character and organizational matrix of the mechanic arts
in nineteenth-century America, it is evident that they too helped to create the semantic void that the concept of
technology eventually would fill. In his 1847 speech, Webster depicted the railroad and the telegraph as
wondrous mechanical innovations with a far-reaching capacity to alter prevailing ways of life. During the early
phase of industrialization, innovations in the mechanic arts typically had been represented as single, freestanding, more or less self-contained mechanical devices: the spinning jenny, the power loom, the steam engine,
the steamboat, the locomotive, the dynamo, or, in a word, machines. By Webster's time, however, the discrete
machine was being replaced, as the typical embodiment of the new power, by a new kind of sociotechnological
system. The railroad was one of the earliest and most visible of the largescale, complex systems of the modern
era.12 A novel feature of these elaborate [End Page 567] systems is that the single, typifying, tangible, physicalartifactual, or mechanical component—the steam locomotive, for example, despite its commanding symbolic
stature—constitutes a relatively small but crucially definitive part of the whole. Thus, in addition to the
crucially important engine itself, the operation of the railroad required: (1) several kinds of ancillary equipment
(rolling stock, stations, yards, bridges, tunnels, viaducts, signal systems, and a huge network of tracks); (2) a
corporate business organization with a large capital investment; (3) specialized forms of technical knowledge
(railroad engineering, telegraphy); (4) a specially trained workforce with unique railroading skills, including civil
and locomotive engineers, firemen, telegraphers, brakemen, conductors—a workforce large and resourceful enough
to keep the system functioning day and night, in all kinds of weather, 365 days a year; and (5) various facilitating
institutional changes, such as regulations establishing standardized track gauges and a national system of
standardized time zones. With the formation of these large, sociotechnical systems—the telegraph and wireless
systems, the electric power and use system, the urban water and waste disposal systems—the private family (father
& sons) firm was supplanted by the anonymous, public corporation as the typical form of American business
organization, and a new kind of professional or (as it later would be called) "scientific" management.13 A
prominent feature of these complex, ad hoc systems is the blurring of the borderlines between their
constituent elements—notably the boundary separating the artifactual equipment (the machinery or
hardware) and all the rest: the reservoir of technical—scientific—knowledge; the specially trained
workforce; the financial apparatus; and the means of acquiring raw materials.
K OF TECHNOLOGY—6/78
LINK: INFRASTRUCTURE
AFF’S FOCUS ON INFRASTRUCTURE RENDERS HUMANS FACELESS EXTENSIONS OF THE
TRANSPORTATION GRID.
MARX, 2010 (Leo, “Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept”, Technology and
Culture, Volume 51, Number 3, July 2010, accessed through Project MUSE)
In common parlance, nonetheless, when we refer to one of these complex systems as a technology, the material
component more often than not serves as the tacit referent. But that restricted sense of the word, as in the case
of the railroad, can be ambiguous and misleading. It is ambiguous because the whole system, apart from the
hardware, is so inclusive, so various—its boundaries so vague as to defy exact representation. This ambiguity
evidently is what Heidegger had in mind by his paradoxical if telling assertion that "the essence of technology is by
no means anything technological."25 In advanced industrial societies, of course, most technological [End Page
574] systems serve a predominantly economic purpose. In capitalist economies they characteristically take the form
of private-sector manufacturing corporations, banks, or public utilities with large capital investments. It is
noteworthy that the concept of technology gained currency during the "incorporation of America," as Alan
Trachtenberg persuasively describes the era during which "machines became working parts of a dynamic system,
and the motives for change, the source of industrial dynamism, lay not in the inanimate machine but in the economic
necessities perceived by its owners." 26 There is a compelling logic in the retrospective application of the nebulous
adjective technological to these hybrid, dynamic, expansionary profitmaking enterprises. It exemplifies the
congruence of technology and corporate capitalism, recalling Raymond Williams's observations about the
circularity, or reflexivity, involved in the social construction of keywords—words like culture, industry,
democracy—which came to serve as historical markers for the periods when they acquired new, fundamentally
altered, meanings. So with technology. It is now customary to single out the transformative power of technology
as the defining characteristic of the era when, in response to remarkable advances in the mechanic arts, the
meaning of the word technology underwent a radical change. The term that formerly had named a field of study
now referred to the society's entire stock of technical knowledge and equipment. Williams's analysis is borne
out, in the case of technology, by the blurring of the boundary between the material (physical, or artifactual)
components of these large socio-technological systems and the other, bureaucratic and ideological
components. Even more significant, perhaps, is the erosion of the "outer" boundaries, as it were, those separating
the whole technological system from the surrounding society and culture. Consider, once again, automotive
technology. Its defining, indispensable material core was of course the internal combustion engine, plus—
naturally—the rest of the automobile chassis. But surely the technology also includes the mechanized assembly
lines, the factories, the skilled workforce, the automotive engineers, the engineering knowledge, the corporate
structures including the stockholders and the huge capital investments, and the networks of dealers and
repair facilities. Where, then, do we draw the boundary between the system and the rest of the society and
culture? Do we include among the facets of automotive technology the road-building and maintenance
systems, the trucking industry, the indispensable feeder industries—glass, rubber, steel, aluminum, plastics,
etc.? What about the mines that provide the raw materials? The extended economic or societal [End Page 575]
reach of this technology is almost incalculable. As a source of jobs, indeed, it for a time accounted for a large
fraction—perhaps a sixth—of the national workforce. And finally, what about the global oil industry? It is in large
part an offspring of automotive technology, yet at one point it probably surpassed its parent in size and wealth, not
to mention its ecological costs and geopolitical influence. Estimating the "impact" of this technology on our society
is a bit like estimating the impact of the bone structure on the human body. The hazardous character of technology—
the word, the concept—is a consequence of the history just outlined. As I have argued, the generality of the word—
its lack of specificity, the very aspect which evidently enabled it to supplant its more explicit and substantial
precursors—also made it peculiarly susceptible to reification. Reification, as the philosopher George Lukacs
famously explained, is what occurs when we endow a human activity with the characteristics of a thing or
things. It thereby acquires, as he put it, "a 'phantom-objectivity,' an autonomy that seems so strictly rational
and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people."27 In
contemporary discourse, private and public, technologies are habitually represented by "things"—by their most
conspicuous artifactual embodiments: transportation technology by automobiles, airplanes, and railroads;
K OF TECHNOLOGY—7/78
nuclear technology by reactors, power plants, and bombs; information technology by computers, mobile
telephones, and television; and so on. By consigning technologies to the realm of things, this well-established
iconography distracts attention from the human—socioeconomic and political—relations which largely
determine who uses them and for what purposes. Because most technologies in our corporate capitalist system
have the legal status of private property, vital decisions about their use are made by the individual businessmen who
own them or by the corporate managers and government officials who exercise the virtual rights of ownership. The
complexity and obscurity of the legal relations governing the use of our technologies, abetted by the reification that
assigns them to the realm of things—all of these help to create the aura of "phantom objectivity" that envelops
them.We amplify the hazardous character of the concept by investing it with agency—by using the word technology
as the subject of active verbs. Take, for example, a stock historical generalization such as: "the cotton-picking [End
Page 576] machine transformed the southern agricultural economy and set off the Great Migration of black farm
workers to northern cities." Here we tacitly invest a machine with the power to initiate change, as if it were
capable of altering the course of events, of history itself. By treating these inanimate objects—machines—as
causal agents, we divert attention from the human (especially socioeconomic and political) relations
responsible for precipitating this social upheaval. Contemporary discourse, private and public, is filled with
hackneyed vignettes of technologically activated social change—pithy accounts of "the direction technology is
taking us" or "changing our lives."28
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LINK: TRANSPORTATION
TRANSPORTATION TECHNOLOGY CREATES A TECHNOLOGICAL COCOON THAT LOCKS
HUMANITY IN A PERMINANT STATE OF ALIENATION AND MAKES VIOLENCE AND
ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION INEVITABLE.
KIMBRELL, ’00 (Andrew, Executive Director of the International Center for Technology
Assessment), 2000, “Cold Evil: Modern Technology and Ethics”, published by the E.F.
Schumacher Society, http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/kimbrell_00.html)
In recent years the technological system has engendered the ultimate in psychic distancing. Whether we
are in the automobile, office, or airplane or using the television, computer, or telephone, we are ever surrounded
and circumscribed by technologies and technocratic thinking. Our daily work usually involves being cocooned
indoors in artificially lit, temperature-controlled, machine-laden office cubicles and locked into the technocratic
hierarchies emblematic of corporate and bureaucratic life. As for our non-work hours, the average American
spends more than four hours a day in front of the TV and an increasing number of hours using a computer.
In the transition between home and work the majority of Americans commute to work alone, inside
temperature-controlled cars and utilizing their radios or stereo systems. This absorption of each
individual into what I call the “techno-cocoon” profoundly limits our experience and consciousness of
anything not part of the technosphere. As a result of techno-cocooning, huge segments of the population have
become autistic in relation to the natural world. Non-human creation is almost completely ignored; when we do
notice nature, it is usually viewed on television or glimpsed from a whizzing car, train, or plane. For the short
periods when we are in nature, it is usually experienced as technological recreation (re-creation)
mediated through the roar of RVs, motor boats, jet skis, snowmobiles, and other power toys . Our
circumscription by technology has also made us autistic in relation to one another, markedly eroding
our social lives in recent years. Come twilight time, I often note the startling difference between the streets of
suburban northern Virginia, where I currently live, and those of Queens, New York City, where I was raised more
than three decades ago. When I was growing up, people talked on the stoops in the evening, kids played games
together, babies were walked in strollers—there was a real sense of neighborhood. Now, as I walk my dog each
evening along successive suburban cul de sacs, what I see are the glowing blue lights emanating from the various
TVs and computers in each home as family members individually cocoon themselves into their favorite night-time
techno-entertainment or work. This technologically engendered isolation and collapse of community are not
merely anecdotal. Author and scholar Robert D. Putnam, in his aptly titled study and later book Bowling Alone,
carefully documents the precipitous decline in all forms of civic participation during recent decades. Many argue
that rather than eroding our social lives, techno-cocooning actually expands the scope of our interaction with
others. After all, people are making contacts at an astonishing rate. We are constantly communicating with
others by telephone, e-mail, and “chat rooms” as well as catching up with the rest of the world via TV, radio, and the
Internet. The obvious problem is that all these contacts are mediated through technology and its ever-present
distancing. All of the human connections in the techno-cocoon are “long-distance” ones. There is little or no
human-to-human (face-to-face) communication taking place. This creates a tragi-comic paradox for those
living in the techno-cocoon: in a world of ever expanding, near universal communications, we grow
ever more alone, locked into the noisy solitude of the cocoon. As activist Beth Burroughs quips, “Sex on
the Internet is mostly typing.” Ultimately, techno-cocooning makes impossible the “acts of will and
imagination” that Weizenbaum so aptly calls for to restore ethics to our society and to end cold-evil
distancing. Recovering a sense of ethics is permanently precluded by our circumscription into the
perpetual distancing of the cocoon. Passively and with little awareness, we abandon our minds and
wills to the convenience, power, and amusement offered by the technological cocoon. In fact, the
technological environment becomes to us as water is to fish; we do not consciously recognize that we are
K OF TECHNOLOGY—9/78
enclosed in a cocoon. We do not experience the ongoing devastation of nature, society, or even our own spirit . As
we slip into near total technological autism, we cannot hear the great machines as they level the world’s
forests and dig up and destroy the earth. We cannot hear the cries of animals being abused,
slaughtered, or harassed to extinction. We cannot see the suffering of our fellow humans, whether they
are the homeless we step over to reach our cars and offices or even despondent members of our own family locked
into nearby, but utterly separate, cocoons. We do not recognize the banalization and ultimate death of our own will
and imagination as we “amuse ourselves to death.” All in all, the techno-cocoon provides a kind of final anatomy of
cold evil, creating a continuous buffer between each person and the many horrific wrongs of our technological
system, sins in which we are all complicit and yet blissfully unaware of our complicity. We sit in our cocoons,
fully alienated from nature and one another while fully entranced by and engaged with machines.
This mass autism is surely unprecedented in both the scope and extent of its alienating impacts. We
literally are no longer present to participate in the Creation, the social world, or the spiritual world.
The diremption caused by cold evil is complete. We are deprived of the very relationships required for our
healing.
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TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE INVOKES IMAGES OF SPEED AND POWER TO
REPRESENT TECHNOLOGICAL DOMINION OVER SPACE AND TIME—THE WORLD IS
REDUCED TO A CACHE OF RESOURCES; ENDLESSLY EXPLOITED IN THE PURSUIT OF
EFFICIENCY.
MALPAS, ‘02 (Jeff. Prof of Phil at U of Tasmania, “Uncovering the Space of Disclosedness:
Heidegger, Technology, and the Problem of Spatiality in Being and Time.” Heidegger,
Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus. Volume 1. MIT Press, pp.
205-207//shree)
Of all the ways in which modern technology has brought about a transformation in the world and our
experience of it, it is in our relationship to space - and thereby also time - that its effects have been most
striking and pervasive. Indeed, technological development has often taken as its icons images of speed and
power that are representative of precisely the technological mastery of space - the locomotive, the aeroplane, the
automobile. Moreover, many of the technologies that have been most significant in their impact on everyday
life have been those that enable the overcoming of distance through new forms, not only of transportation, but
of communication as well. In 1950, Heidegger took television to represent what he then called “the peak of this
abolition of every possibility of remoteness”; in the 1990s the Internet achieved an even more radical abolition of
“remoteness,” allowing not merely to see and hear, but also to act in relation to things far removed from us in
physical space. It is easy to think of the technological “conquest” of space as having vastly increased the
accessibility and availability of things, yet Heidegger claims that in its seeming “abolition of remoteness,”
technology actually brings about a profound “distancing” of ourselves from the things around us and from
the world. Indeed, although technology is, as Heidegger acknowledges, a mode of disclosedness or revealing, its
particular “en-framing” of things also entails a covering-over of things as they extend beyond the
technological frame: within the domain of the technological, things are disclosed, not as things, but as
resource, material, or “stock” (“Bestand” - often translated as “standing-reserve”) - as commodities to be
transformed, stored, and consumed in a way that obliterates difference and renders everything in a onedimensional sameness. Thus Heidegger writes of the essence of technology that it “conceals that revealing
which, in the sense of poiesis, lets what presences come forth into appearance. . . . The coming to presence of
technology threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed by
ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealedness of the standing-reserve.”
Appearing only as resource, the thing is stripped of its complex and multiple connections with the world reduced to a single “aspect” - and, in this way, the very fact of disclosedness is itself covered over - within the
technological frame, there is nothing to disclose other than what appears and what appears Is just resource.
Disclosedness, understood as the bringing to appearance of what would otherwise remain hidden (and so as an
unconcealing that always presupposes hidden-ness), is itself covered over by technological revealing.
K OF TECHNOLOGY—11/78
TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE RENDERS NATURE A FACELESS EXTENSION OF
THE GRID, CULIMINATING IN THE ENDLESS EXPLOITATION OF EARTH’S RESOURCES.
SOFIA, ‘00 (Zoe, Senior Lecturer in feminist studies and cultural studies and Chair of the
School of Cultural Histories and Futures at the University of Western Sydney, “Container
Technologies”, Hypatia, 15.2 (2000), pg. 181-201, accessed through Project MUSE)
The global ordering of containment and supply in the modern technoscientific era is a key theme in Heidegger's
essay "The Question Concerning Technology." As part of his effort to show the limits of modern instrumental
notions of causality, Heidegger conducts an Aristotelian causal analysis of the making of a container technology
similar to the jug: the sacramental chalice. The artisan making the chalice is involved in a practice of techne, a way
of revealing the world in a creative and reverential "bringing forth" of the thing, that brings together the four causes
(1977b, 6-12). Heidegger contrasts this [End Page 194] to the modern modes of aggressive use of resources and
mass scale production and supply (1977b, 14). In contrast to the artisan-dominated modes of production in antiquity
or pre-modern Europe, where art and technique came together in techne, stands the modern epoch with its large
power plants, airplanes, nuclear reactors, and industrialized science. Heidegger's analysis of this epoch in "The
Question Concerning Technology" and related essays (especially "The Age of the World Picture" [1977a, first
published 1950] and "Science and Reflection" [1977d, first published 1954]) draws connections between the
exploitation of the Earth as a calculable resource, the demands of profit-driven development, the character of
modern research, apparatus-dependent science, and the mathematization or "informatization" of the world.
"Bringing forth" has been reduced to something like imposing upon and ripping out, via an aggressive
technoscientific "challenging-forth" of the world to reveal itself in the form of resources and information for
consumption, the process Heidegger calls Herausforderung (1977b, 14). Now the Earth or a river is revealed as
a source of extractable resources (such as ore or hydroelectricity) whose extent and yield are already mapped
and calculated in advance (1977b, 21). The outcome of this challenging-forth is a macro-technology of re-sourcing
that Heidegger calls the Bestand. This "standing-reserve" is a mobilizable stockpile of resources available for
instant supply: "Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand
there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering" (1977b, 17). The plane on the runway, ready for
take-off, epitomizes this on-call orderability of resources: the plane might look like an autonomous machine, but
it only exists "to ensure the possibility of transportation" (1977b, 17). Another image might be rows of stacked
large containers ready equally for transport by road, rail, or sea. In this modern formation, making resources
available predominates over appreciating the unique qualities of the thing. The object loses its qualities as the
Gegenstand--that which resists and stands against--and the machine loses its standing as an autonomous tool,
dissolved into the Bestand, where it is just another "completely unautonomous" element in the abstract and
global grid of the resourced world (1977b, 17). So we might add another Heideggerian variant to the Winnicottian
conjugations: There's no such thing as a technology [apart from the standing-reserve]. Popular culture celebrates
each new machine or commodity as a revolutionary wonder. But it is easy for the macro-apparatus of supply (the
Bestand ) to keep supplying new tools/toys out of the resources on hand to it. What is harder to alter, and what
continues to give contemporary lives and inventions their particular stamp, is the macro-apparatus itself and
the logics of re-sourcing and supply that order it. Heidegger names as Gestell (enframing) the [End Page 195]
dangerous modern technological mindset that calls on the world to reveal it-self as available resource. One
danger of this framework, as Michael Zimmerman explains, is that it turns everything, even ourselves, into
the same: neither thing, object or subject, but raw material, standing-reserve, human resource: "While
humanity itself can never be transformed completely into standing-reserve, technological humanity has
become in effect the most important raw material in a process which no longer makes basic ontological
distinctions among different kinds of entities" (Zimmerman 1990, 215-16). Heidegger's description of how the
standing-reserve is created by challenging the world to make itself available as a pile of mobile resources implies
processes that not only involve "dynamic" machines, such as bulldozers and drills, for extracting and unlocking
resources, but also utensils, apparatus, and utilities for storage and distribution of these unlocked treasures: That
challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is
transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever
anew. (1977b, 16) The quote could almost equally well apply to the decoding, recoding, storage, and distribution of
information over computer networks as it does to Heidegger's example of a power plant on the Rhine and its
attendant web of distributor lines. But aside from such world-spanning utilities as the internet or the power grid--
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each a network carrying dynamic flows (of energy or information)--there are many other technologies involved in
the distribution and switching about of resources, from wagons to coal trains, trucks to cargo ships, and
roads, railways, and ports, not to mention the Mother Shop of the suburban shopping mall (Sofia 1996), the
humble supermarket trolley, or the ubiquitous plastic shopping bag.
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LINK: TECHNOLOGY
TECHNOLOGY ROBS INDIVIDUALS OF THEIR ABILITY TO ENGAGE THE WORLD AS
THINKING BEINGS VIA THE INSTRUMENTALIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE-PRODUCTION.
HEIDEGGER, ‘59 (Martin, An Introduction to Metaphysics, P. 46-50)
The crux of the matter is the reinterpretation of the spirit as intelligence , or mere cleverness in examining and
calculating given things and the possibility of changing them and complementing them to make new things. This
cleverness is a matter of mere talent and practice and mass division of labor . The cleverness itself is subject to the
possibility of organization, which is never true of spirit. The attitude of the litterateur and esthete is merely a late
consequence and variation of the spirit falsified into intelligence. Mere intelligence is a semblance of spirit, masking its
access. The spirit is falsified into intelligence thus falls to the level of a tool in the service of others, a tool the
manipulation of which can be taught and learned. Whether this use of intelligence relates to the regulation and
domination of the material conditions of production (as in Marxism) or in general to the intelligent ordering
and explanation of everything that is present and already posited at any time (as in positivism) or whether it is
applied to the organization and regulation of a nation’s vital resources and race – in any case the spirit as
intelligence becomes the impotent superstructure of something else, which, because it is without spirit or even opposed to
the spirit, is taken for the actual reality. If the spirit is taken as intelligence, as is done in the most extreme form of Marxism, then it is
perfectly correct to say, in defense against it, that in the order of the effective forces of human being-there, the spirit, ie intelligence, must
always be ranked below healthy physical activity and character. But this order becomes false once we understand the true essence of the
spirit. For all true power and beauty of the body, all sureness and boldness in standing, are grounded in the spirit and rise or fall only through
the power or impotence of spirit. The spirit is the sustaining, dominating principle, the first and the last, not merely and indispensible third
factor. As soon as the misinterpretation sets in that degrades the spirit to a tool, the energies of the spiritual
process, poetry and art, statesmanship and religion, become subject to conscious cultivation and planning . They are split
into branches. The spiritual world becomes culture and the individual strives to perfect himself in the creation and preservation of this
culture. These branches become fields of free endeavor, which sets its own standards and barely manage to live up to them. These
standards of production and consumption are called values. The cultural values preserve their meaning
only by restricting themselves to an autonomous field: poetry for the sake of poetry, art for the sake of art, science for the
sake of science. Let us consider the example of science, which is of particular concern to us at the university. The state of science since the
turn of the century – it had remained unchanged despite a certain amount of house cleaning – is easy to see. Though today two seemingly
different conceptions of science seem to combat one another – science as technical, practical, professional knowledge and science as cultural
value per se – both are moving along the same downgrade of misinterpretation and emasculation of the spirit. They differ only in this: in the
present situation the technical, practical conception of science as specialization can at least lay claim to frank
and clear consistency, while the reactionary interpretation of science as cultural value now making its
reappearance seeks to conceal the impotence of the spirit behind an unconscious lie. The confusion of
spiritlessness can even go so far as to lead the upholders of the technical, practical view of science to profess their belief in science as a
cultural value; then the two understand eachother perfectly in the same spiritlessness. We may choose to call the institution where the
specialized sciences are grouped together for purposes of teaching and research a university, but this is no more than a name; the “university”
has ceased to be a fundamental force for unity and responsibility. What I said here in 1929, in my inaugural address, is still true of the
German university: “The scientific fields are still far apart. Their subjects are treated in fundamentally different ways. Today this
hodgepodge of disciplines is held together only by the technical organization of the universities and
faculties and preserves what meaning it has only through the practical aims of the different branches.
The sciences have lost their roots in their essential ground.” Science today in all its branches is a
technical, practical business of gaining and transmitting information. An awakening of the spirit cannot
take its departure from such science. It is itself in need of an awakening. The last misinterpretation of the spirit is
based on the above-mentioned falsifications which represent the spirit as intelligence, and intelligence as a serviceable tool which, along with
its product, is situated in the realm of culture. In the end the spirit as utilitarian intelligence and the spirit as culture
become holiday ornaments cultivated along with many other things. They are brought out and exhibited as a proof that
there is no intention to combat culture or favor barbarism. In the beginning Russian Communism took a purely negative attitude but soon
went over to propagandist tactics of this kind. In opposition to this multiple misinterpretation of spirit, we define the essence of the spirit as
follows (I shall quote from the address I delivered on the occasion of my appointment as rector, because of its succinct formulation):
“Spirit is neither empty cleverness nor the irresponsible play of the wit, nor the boundless work of dismemberment carried on by
the practical intelligence; much less is it world-reason; no, spirit is a fundamental, knowing resolve toward the
essence of being.” Spirit is the mobilization of the powers of the essent as such and as a whole. Where spirit
prevails, the essent as such becomes always and at times more essent. Thus the inquiry into essent as such and as a whole, the asking of
the question of being, is one of the essential and fundamental conditions for an awakening of the spirit and hence for an original world
of historical being-there. It is indespensible if the peril of world darkening is to be forestalled and if our nation in the
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center of the Western world is to take on its historical mission. Here we can explain only in these broad outlines why the asking of the
question of being is in itself through and through historical, and why, accordingly, our question as to whether being will remain a mere vapor
for us or become the destiny of the West is anything but an exaggeration and a rhetorical figure.
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LINK: HEGEMONY
HEGEMONY SCENARIOS INSTRUMENTALIZE LIFE VIA TECHNOCRATIC CONCEPTIONS OF
THE WORLD ORDER.
SWAZO, ’02 (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alaska (Norman K., “Crisis Theory
and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections”, p. 110-11)
The inevitability of such a fight issues from the pathology of nihilism— all political thought and practice in our time cannot but be
"pathologically conditioned" (Twilight of the Idols, "The Problem of Socrates," note 10). The attraction to "rational design"
of
the world order is today motivated by a Sense of imminent catastrophe and, thus, by the human impulse
to self preservation. Here, however, it is life itself that compels; and precisely in this attraction to rational design of the world
order is there betrayed what Nietzsche recognizes in Western moralism: It is pathologically conditioned. And what is this
pathology? It is nothing other than the strife of subjective egoisms as yet unmastered. Such is the essence of powerpolitics. But this, presumably, is life (will to power); and, as Nietzsche puts it, "life itself forces us to posit values; life itself
values through us when we posit values" (Twilight of the Idols, "Morality as Anti-Nature," note 5). In world order thinking, I
submit, the West discharges the energy of its moral essence, doing so as author of the prevailing morality
and as the locus of the dominant subjective egoisms which have been inevitably diffused to determine all
political cultures, the latter of which are now bound to the West's hegemony over world political culture .
The contemporary world order in structure and value orientation is instituted on the basis of Western
reason, and as such it is characterized by an "order of rank" in which European values have primacy, i.e., are hegemonous vis-a-vis all
"other" (Asian, African, Latin American, etc.) plausibly autochthonous valuations. World order thinking, thus, compelled by life
itself in all its prevalent pathology, posits its values-peace, justice, economic well-being, ecological balance-over
against all that shows itself as the contemporary pathology of "petty politics" and all that is
countervaluation in the strife motivated by the requirements of global hegemony. In this positing of
primacy to the Western valuation, the Occident reveals its near exhaustion , if not its desperation, in the face of
competing modes of subjectivity as manifest by a fragmented and antagonistic "system" of nation-states,
each with its "splinter-will." Given that this world order movement is transnational, the West co-opting sympathetic forces in the
developing world, twit her this exhaustion nor this desperation is restricted to the West: The "crisis" is effectively planetary.
Nietzsche was not amiss in his articulation of the great task that would define the twentieth century, i.e., the problem of global governance.
Neither was he amiss in appreciating its hesitant approach, despite its inexorability. That is, Nietzsche recognizes the persistent, though
declining, influence of the Christian ideal with respect to the problem of global governance, anticipating that this ideal would yet issue in the
call for a moral world order: Notwithstanding the death of God, Christian value judgments would be transmuted into the political domain.
The twentieth century's emerging order would be a "hybrid" of sickness, the will to power heightening the demands of modern man's selfdetermination, the Christian conscience yet restraining-in short, a "fettered" moment in humanity's movement toward total self-affirmation,
total sovereignty in the absence of God and transcendent norms. "They are rid of the Christian God," writes Nietzsche in his Twilight of the
Idols ("Skirmishes of an Untimely Man," note 5), yet "now believe Al the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality." It is not
yet realized, observes Nietzsche, that "when one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's
feet." Accordingly, the contemporary world order movement expresses a commitment to transforming the philosophic orientation (values) as
well as transforming institutional structures and patterns of behavior. World order thinking is, thus, normative. That world order
thinking is value thinking is evidence of its essential debt to the Nietzschean metaphysic, to thinking the
world order from the vantage of subjectness, for it is only with Nietzsche that value thinking comes to
predominate in the twentieth century."' As Heidegger puts it, "Values stem from valuation; valuation corresponds to the will to
power." That is, insofar as the creation of secureness is grounded in value-positing and world order thinkers
on their own essential authority (understood metaphysically, not personally) seek to secure a world order, then world
order thinking cannot but be so grounded. It is precisely this ground, i.e., a self-grounded value-posit, that
entails the technocratic conception of world order and, thus, eliminates a meaningful distinction between
the normative and technocratic approaches. How so? Heidegger answers in words that indict all value thinking: "thinking
in terms of values is a radical killing. It ... strikes down that which is as such, in its being-in itself. . . ."
Everything which is "is transformed into object" and "swallowed up into the immanence of subjectivity. ""'
Commensurate with this subjectivity is that objectivity which, in the essence of the technological, is total, and which finds its instrument in
technocracy.
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THE 1AC IS THE NARRATIVE THAT NATURALIZES TECHNOLOGICAL MANAGERIALISM-HEGEMONY SCENARIOS ARE THE ULTIMATE EMBODIMENT OF THE DESIRE TO OWN
AND CONTROL.
SWAZO, ‘02 (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alaska, Norman K., Crisis Theory and
World Order: Heideggerian Reflections, p. 55-58)
Gadamer poses fundamental questions in view of the "victorious course of modern science" and "the development of scientific methods to
guide the life of society," i.e., the pervasiveness of scientific thinking in "all aspects of social praxis."" Observing (a) that the
application of science in many areas of social praxis "gives expertise a commanding position in the economy
and society" and (b) that there has been a shift from "simply understanding the existing order of things" to
"the difficulties of planning and creating an order not yet in being," Gadamer asks: Should something
that does not yet exist be planned and implemented? ... Does talk of creating a world-order still make sense
if, from the start, we are faced with irreconcilable ideas on the constitution of a right order? Can one plan
according to a standard of world-order if one is ignorant of the end towards which all mediating and
possible steps proceed? Does not all planning on a world scale depend on the existence of a definite mutual conception of the goal?
Gadamer's concern in this writing is with what is held to count as "a meaningful standard" for politics
when politics "presupposes the changeability of conditions." Thus, when speaking of politics at the world scale the
question is: According to what criteria is correctness of a universal political order to be measured? To the extent that scientific precision
underscores planning for the future, Gadamer is concerned that precise political arrangements may rather "provoke all
the very opposite ideas of world-order." He (a) contends that "there exists no rational basis for believing that
the expansion of those areas in which rational planning and administration is successful would bring a
reasonable world-wide political system any closer to realization," and (b) considers that it may rather be "the
overdependence on science" that "has increased the uncertainty regarding the intended goals , the content of a
world-order as it should be, by first subjecting the design of our world to scientifically informed and guided planning, while obfuscating the
uncertainty which surrounds the standards."" In short, Gadamer thinks the task to be wrongly posited, for here is "an ideal of administration
... which does not specify its content" and in which "the issue is not which order should rule, but that everything should have its order." This
is nothing less than "the idea of a superior techne"-as Gadamer puts it, "the political techne," "the ultimate expertise." The key question, then,
is: "Does the ideal of techne, the teachable and learnable expertise, satisfy the demands confronting man's political existence?"" The
philosophic issue here is that between the moderns and the ancients concerning the nature and purpose of
politics, between science applied to society, i.e., techne, and practical knowledge or phronesis. This, for Gadamer, is the real
antinomy confronting world order thinkers: The question we pose goes completely against the grain of the unquestioned belief in science so
characteristic of our age. It has to be asked because it goes further back in time. The problem must be viewed in a more general context, as a
broader question posited with the inception of modern science in the seventeenth century and unresolved since then. All reflection
about the potential ordering of our world must proceed from the deep tension which exists between the
asserted authority of science and the ethics and customs of national forms of life transmitted by religion.... It seems
to me less urgent to find ways of reconciling occidental civilization with alien traditions in distant lands and bringing them to a fruitful
symbiosis, than to evaluate the significance of the civilizing progress, made possible by science, in terms of our own cultural heritage and to
discover ways of reconciling such progress with our moral and religious traditions. For that in truth is the problem of worldorder which occupies us at present, because, by virtue of the civilizing achievements of European science, the problem
has been raised to a uniform level of importance throughout the world ." Like Gadamer questioning the legitimacy of
the "scientific" planning the implementation of a world Order, von Weizsacker raises the quid juris question, "With what concepts are we to
think into the future, and with what right do we think towards it?" In asking this question von Weizsacker expresses concern for
what he calls the uncanny phenomenon of "ambivalence"-"that frightening phenomenon that we have all
seen and experienced in our own actions, namely that a position taken which then requires a radical form
destroys itself and produces its own negation." Despite the desirability of the world order values and the
rationality of assent to them, von Weizsacker notes that "insight into ambivalence simultaneously shakes the
naïveté" of this set of values, inasmuch as there remain vital questions having to do with the process of
"self-enlightenment" which cannot be answered or resolved by means of a "program." It is von Weizsacker's
insight that "What this world cannot master are the realities in man that are not present in his expressed ideas. These show themselves in the
phenomena . . . described under the name ambivalence." Given his views on human nature, von Weizsacker believes that the "actual
task" towards which world order thinking must contribute, "on whose success the possibility of a true
K OF TECHNOLOGY—17/78
world peace stands or falls, is the realization of the human self."" Only thus can it be expected that "a
whole society should come of age." Yet, this possibility, as the possibility of living together, requires a "communal truth." Here lies
a fundamental difficulty. As von Weizsacker observes: There is a pluralism of truths and forms of peace. Traditional societies lived by a
religious truth and by the peace it made possible. The modern world lives by the truth of science and the technocratic peace it makes
possible. But in the face of this pluralism what does truth mean?" Again, as with Gadamer, the authority of tradition in contradistinction to
that of modem science is at issue here. If world peace is a principal desideratum of the world order quest, is
technocratic peace the fitting response? That is, if a process of self-enlightenment is what is essential, does a whole society come
of age when technocratic peace prevails? For von Weizsacker, to think the possibility of self-realization is to understand that only the great
traditions of religious thought pose and answer the question in depth." The JudeoChristian tradition which belongs to European culture,
observes von Weizsacker, yields its "answer" in its ethic of nonviolence-but in a distinction between what men can bring about and what
only God will bring about, thus in comprehension of what is and is not achievable: The actual overcoming of violence can
occur only where its roots are, in the human soul. Society will always give cause enough for acts of
violence; I can overcome the violence in myself only when I can renounce the unquestionable right I have to hit back, can "turn the other
cheek!" The overcoming of violence must always originate in myself. Here the ethic of nonviolence has its basis in truth. Only he who finds
peace with himself, and that means peace with God, can radiate peace. But the peace that arises from a group of such men is
no possible target of a plan any longer, no "preferred world" for intellectual activists. But it is impossible that a
genuine, everlasting world peace will be secured without this force. Scientifically speaking this is no political programme, but psychology, in
exact form." In short, the world that claims us out of the future in which world peace is achieved is for von
Weizsacker not "a world of will and understanding," i.e., of Western reason. To understand the phenomenon of
ambivalence is to understand that "the sphere of the will and understanding has the character of the
empty boundlessness of power." Yet, this is so "only when the other realities in man are not developed,
realities that set limits to this sphere and give it content." Von Weizsacker's concern for the phenomenon of ambivalence is
consonant with what cultural historian William Irwin Thompson, in his meditation on the ineradicability of evil from the human order, has
called the phenomenon of enantiodromia. Says Thompson, "the most perplexing form of evil, and especially so for all
idealists, is that kind of evil which comes out of our efforts to do good ."" Like von Weizsacker who speaks of the
phenomenon of love as that which is essential to self-fulfillment, i.e., to the overcoming of individual and group egoism, and which remains
"completely incomprehensible in terms of expedient rationality," Thompson speaks of love in the context of those egoistic motivations to do
good which result in enantiodromia: There can be no love in one who does not love himself, and one can only love
himself if he has the compassion that grows out of the terrifying confrontation with one's own self . To look
into one's shadow is to learn compassion for the shadow of others, and if one has no compassion for himself, then he can have no compassion
for others. If you hate yourself with a fierce loathing, you may try to run from your own shadow in a campaign to do good, not for love, but
to rescue your ego and convince yourself that you are not evil. In the eyes of how many world-transforming activists do we see dissonance,
anxiety, fear, and self-loathing? They would reform the world, but they cannot even reform themselves."
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LINK: ECONOMY
ECONOMIC EXTINCTION SCENARIOS MASK THE VIOLENT, CALCULATIVE LOGIC OF
TECHNOLOGICAL MANAGERIALISM.
JORONEN, ‘10 (Mikko, Doctoral candidate in Human Geography @ The University of
Turku, The Age of Planetary Space Planetary System of Ordering, 2010
http://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/66733/AnnalesAII257Joronen.pdf?sequence=1)
Under such colonization of calculable price mechanism, the whole globe eventually becomes an area of domination: the
metaphysical essence of markets is to bring all beings into a quasi-Darwinian struggle for survival between
the powers of business calculation. It is precisely because this survival is based on successful accumulation
and efficient commodification of beings, that under the contemporary global capitalism the whole globe
becomes conquered for its market. Under such economic malleability everything is established as producible
products and hence delivered to the markets in terms of growing efficiency and competitiveness. Out of the colossal competition
between the figures of calculation and machination, globalization turns into a struggle between different technological worldviews
(Heidegger 1977d:134–135; See also Joronen 2008; Moisio 2008:89–90). Globalization – growing giganticism fuelled by the competition
between powers of efficient manipulation – and survival – a struggle to maximize the utility and control of beings under the pre-delineating
framework of gigantic calculation – are both manifestations of the operational logic of technological Gestell. Consequently, economic
survival struggle and the glorification of competitiveness hide the fact that they aim at massive ordering ,
thus admiring the megalomania of endless growth and expansion . By penetrating and spreading, and hence, by turning
all beings under the logic of technological manipulation, the techno-capitalist logic of optimization of productivity and
competitiveness that constantly seeks to open new markets by turning things into products of profit
making eventually present one of the ontic realities that have accelerated the globalization of Gestell.
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TECHNO-ECONOMIC INNOVATION IS THE ROOT CAUSE OF WAR.
KARNOOUH, ’02 (Claude Karnoouh, visiting professor at the National University of Arts
Bucharest, 2002, “Technology and Destiny” Telos 124 (Summer 2002): 71-94)
It should not be forgotten that war is a function of techno-economic progress. Despite all the evidence,
humanists still refuse to admit it. They argue that only totalitarian regimes misuse science and technology. They
act as if, since the Enlightenment, an ethical imperative dominates politi- cal systems as well as institutional and
legislative tools, which requires the peaceful settlement of conflicts. But war is a formidable instrument of
production and techno-scientific innovation.23 It is not only a violent confrontation between peoples
(war being as old as their presence on earth); since the invention of artillery, it also has been part of the endless
process of scientific invention. It is a pawn of power, because it is com- mitted to the creation of more
effective means of killing, of destroying what took centuries to build. This scientificity of war has
erased ancient notions of courage and bravery and replaced them with industrial con- cepts that
promote an ever-growing need for new arms, new munitions, new buildings better able to resist
gunfire, etc., i.e., a programmatic calculus.24 Today, the power of mobilized human masses has been substi- tuted
by the production of “intelligent” weapons and of more sophisticated tools in general. This implies new needs, new
management, and a multi- tude of ever more rationalized means of transportation. It also implies an unprecedented
progress in medicine, surgery, psychiatry, etc.25 War con- stantly innovates,26 and within this process of mass
destruction there are even more gigantic plans for reconstruction. War (or its preparation, as in the case of the Cold
War, which lasted 45 years) has become a decisive factor in the deployment of techno-science and
capital. In other words, war requires a rationalization similar to that involved in the most complex kinds of
industrial production. To consider war the result of a degenerated use of science or as some kind of social pathology,
as humanist philistines do, is metaphysical tomfoolery. When all is said and done, it is an escape without any
consideration of reality, as if the latter was nothing but another illusion. As for “realist” strategists, they proclaim the
end of metaphysics. Consider the following, written in 1961 by Herman Kahn, an American expert on nuclear war:
“Objective examinations show that human trage- dies (sic) would enormously increase in the world [after nuclear
war] but that this increase would not exclude normal and happy existence for the majority of the survivors and their
descendents. The embryonic deaths would not have but relative importance . . . . It is probable that, in the first
generation, there would be around five million of these cases and about a hundred million in the next generations. I
consider this last figure as not weighing too much in the balance . . . . Nonetheless, humanity is so fecund that even a
small diminution of its fertility is not a reason to be taken particularly seriously, not even by the individual
affected.”27
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LINK: DEVELOPMENT
“DEVELOPMENT” SIGNAL ONTOLOGICAL COMMITMENT TO THE EUROCENTRIC
TRADITION OF “UNIHABITED” SPACES TO NATURALIZE THE VIOLENT PROCESS OF
TECHNOCRATIC MANAGEMENT.
Spanos 2000 (William V., Prof of English @ Binghamton, America’s Shadow, p. 41-44)
What, however, the panoptic Eurocentric eye of the Enlightenment comes to see in the space within this reconfigured trope of the circle
is no longer - or at least not exclusively - a vast "uninhabited" emptiness, in which the natives do not count as human beings. Rather, it
comes primarily to see an uninformed terra incognita. As the texts of early European travel writers (and social historians) invariably
characterize this amorphous and ahistorical "new world," the European panoptic gaze falls on an "unimproved"
space. As the privative prefix emphatically suggests, it is a space-time in which everything in it flora, fauna, minerals,
animals, and, later, human beings - is seen and encoded not so much as threatening, though that meaning is clearly there as well,
as wasteful or uneconomical and thus as an untended fallow (female) terrain calling futurally for the
beneficial ministrations of the (adult, male) center.72 The predestinarian metaphorics of the circle
precipitates a whole rhetoric of moral necessity. The "wilderness" as "underdeveloped" or
"unimproved" or "uncultivated" (i.e., "unfulfilled" or "uncircular") space must, as the privative prefixes
demand, be developed, improved, cultivated (i.e., fulfilled or circularized). Indeed, it is the wilderness's
destiny. From this representation of the colonial Others as mired in and by their own chaotic
primordial condition, one of the most debilitating of which is unproductive perpetual war, it is an
easy.. step to representing them, as American writers and historians did the Indian race in the
nineteenth century, as either self-doomed73 or appealing to the European to save them from
themselves by way of imposing his peace on their multiply wasteful strife.74 Referring to John Barrow's
representative (enlightened) "anticonquest" narrative about his travels as an agent of the British colonial governor in the interior of the Cape
Colony at the end of the eighteenth century, Mary Louise Pratt writes: The visual descriptions presuppose - naturalize - a transformative
project embodied in the Europeans. Often the project surfaces explicitly in Barrow's text, in visions of "improvement" whose value
is often expressed as aesthetic.. It is the task of the advanced scouts for capitalist "improvement" to encode
what they encounter as "unimproved" and, in keeping with the terms of the anti-conquest, as disponible,
available for improvement. European aspirations must be represented as uncontested. Here the textual apartheid that separates
landscapes from people, accounts of inhabitants from accounts of their habitats, fulfills its logic. The European improving eye produces
subsistence habitats as "empty" landscapes, meaningful only in terms of a capitalist future and of their potential for producing a
marketable surplus. From the point of view of their inhabitants, of course, these same spaces are lived as intensely humanized, saturated
with local history and meaning, where plants, creatures, and geographical formations have names, uses, symbolic functions, histories,
places in indigenous knowledge formations.75 This is an acute observation about the "anti-conquest" imperialist discourse of
Enlightenment travel writing. But it is limited by its characteristic restriction of the word "improvement" to the historical context of
modern capitalism (though the aside referring to the expression of the vision of improvement in aesthetic terms is suggestive). Like so
much "postcolonial" criticism, its historicist problematic is blind to the genealogy of this modern
"anti-conquest" concept. It fails to see that the rhetoric of "improvement" is a capitalist extension of a
much older system of imperial tropes, one that, in naturalizing the latter, obscures the will to power
over the Other that is visible in its earlier form. This word, that is, not only looks forward to
"underdeveloped," the sedimented counterword that constitutes the base of the neocolonialist
discourse of late capitalism, as Pratt seems to be suggesting. It also harks back to what Enrique Dussel calls
the "developmental fallacy" informing Enlightenment philosophy of history from Adam Smith and John Locke through Hegel
"and a certain Marx to Habermas. Tracing the genealogy of Habermas's Eurocentric representation of modernity back to Hegel, Dussel
writes:In the Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, Hegel portrays _ world history (Weltgeschichte) as the selfrealization of God, as a theodicy of reason and of liberty (Freiheit), and as a process of Enlightenment (Aufklarung)....In Hegelian
ontology, the concept of development (Entwicklung) plays a central role. This concept determines the movement of the concept
(Begriff) until it culminates in the idea - that is, as it moves from indeterminate being to the absolute knowledge in the Logic.
Development... unfolds according to a linear dialectic; although originally an ontological category, today it is primarily considered as a
sociological one with implications for world history. Furthermore, this development has a direction: Universal history goes from East to
West. Europe is absolutely the end of universal history. Asia is the beginning. But this alleged East-West movement clearly precludes
Latin America and Africa from world history and characterizes Asia as essentially confined to a state of immaturity and childhood
(Kindheit).... The immaturity (Umrei fe) marking America is total and physical; even the vegetables and the animals are more primitive,
brutal, monstrous, or simply more weak or degenerate.76 Even more fundamentally, Pratt's "unimproved" has its
origins in the more deeply inscribed metaphorics of the seed and its cultivation, as Dussel's recurrent
invocation of the rhetoric of "immaturity that in-. forms the Hegelian discourse suggests. This is the
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trope (which is also an aesthetics) that, along with the gaze and the centered circle, informs the very
etymology of "metaphysics" and that is encoded and naturalized in the truth discourse of the
Occident. That is to say, the genealogy of the word "improvement" in the discourse of postEnlightenment travel literature is traceable to the origins of Occidental history . (The metaphor of the "virgin
land," which, as I have intimated, is equally pervasive in the discourse of early colonialism, constitutes a particularly telling gendered
allotrope of this metaphorical system circulating around the seed. It focalizes the identification of the panoptic gaze that perceives this
"unimproved" circular space with the brutal phallic will.)77 A retrieval of the equally inaugural visual metaphorics with which it is
affiliated will bring into visibility the ideological agenda hidden in the benign connotations of the metaphor of "improvement." In the
positivist Enlightenment, the "unimproved" space of the "wilderness" is understood as a darkness in
the sense not so much of savage or barbarous (though, again, that meaning: resonates in the word as well), as of a
potentially knowable and usable unknown. What its eye beholds primarily is a terrain that, as the
European cliche about the "inscrutability" of the Orient has it, compels knowing and naming precisely
because its darkly unimproved state resists scrutiny- and domestication. For the French--natural scientist Michel
Adanson, for example, the world of nature wasa confused mingling of beings that seem to have been. brought together by chance: here,
gold is mixed with another metal, with stone, with earth; there, the violet grows side by side with an oak. Among these plants, too,
wander the quadruped, the reptile, and the insect; the fishes are confused, one might say, with the aqueous element in which they swim,
and with the plants grow in the depth of the waters.... This mixture is indeed so general and so multifarious that it appears to be one of
nature's laws.7In thematizing this knowledge-producing naming-this Linnaean classificatory motif -I do not, despite its decisive
contribution to the imperial project proper, want to limit its origins to the Enlightenment. As the natural affiliation of seed with light (the
spatialization of differential temporal phenomena) suggests, its ultimate origin lies in the Occident's appropriation of the biblical
narrative of Adam, armed with the Logos, naming the beasts. In combinations with the classical apotheosis of the sun/seed , this
narrative has played a decisive role of persuasion throughout the history of Christian European
imperial conquest, not least in that history of genocidal American expansionism inaugurated by the
Adamic Puritans' pacification of the American wilderness.
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LINK: GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT
GLOBAL MODELS OF ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE FRAME THE WORLD AS A
MACHINE TO NATURALIZE VIOLENT MANAGERIALISM.
McWHORTER, ‘92 (Ladelle, Professor of Philosophy, Northeast Missouri State, “Heidegger
and the Earth”, 1992, p.27.)
A few years after the Americans landed on the moon, the Club of Rome published those famous computer
predictions, entitled "The Limits of Growth," which showed that, if things continue the way they have gone on
"spaceship earth," soon it could not go on. Better founded and more oppressing still was the study commissioned by
President Jimmy Carter, which appeared in 1980 with the title Global 2000 Study. Both studies are honest
appraisals and cautious predictions, which can shake up humankind. However, since they take for granted
the basis of "world-models" or" spaceship earth," they can also solidify the opinion that the world is a machine.
Spaceship earth and the world model correspond to a worldview of objectifying subjectivism and are snares
along the way of descent from the throne of master and owner of nature. Actually the question emerges whether
the objectifying reductionism of natural science - which can be detected in many notions of the ecological
movement - should not also become questionable for this movement.
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LINK: DISASTER IMAGES
THE PACKAGING OF DISASTER SCENARIOUS REPRESENTS THE COMMODIFICATION OF
INDIVIDUAL LIVES—THIS IS THE ULTIMATE SUBORDINATION TO TECHNOLOGICAL
THOUGHT.
GREEN, ’02 (“Technoculture: From Alphabet to Cybersex”, pg. 76, Chapter 1:What Fuels
Technology Change, accessed through Questia)
Neighbourless electronic neighbourhoods, the trading of vital information for capital gain, the packaging and sale
of images (of famine, disaster and catastrophe, for example)—all these-are aspects of the commodification of
individual lives. They are also examples of the conjunction of technology and culture. Newsworthy or
potentially, profitable events and information are extracted from their context, then refined and packaged for
sale. The disembodiment of the communication from the communicant, of information from the informant,
sometimes seen as a prime constituent of the postmodern, and of postindustrial society. The postmodern promotes
surface impact rather than contextual depth, commodification rather than exchange, and consumption rather
than production. Put crudely, it reduces human' society to its icons and to its material possessions. According
to Frederic Jameson (1984), postmodern communities no longer need members, they need consumers.
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LINK: “ECO-FRIENDLY” TECH
ATTEMPTS TO PREVENT IMPENDING DESTRUCTION VIA TECHNOLOGICAL
INNOVATION RECREATE THE ROOT CAUSE OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS.
PATTISON, ’00 (George, “Philosophy Guidebook to the Later Heiddeger”, Chapter 3:
Technology, pg. 64-65, accessed through Questia)
This reflects what was previously discussed in terms of total mobilisation and the transformation of humanity into the
primary resource of technology. Precisely in inaugurating space programmes, developing new generations of computer
technology or managing genetic engineering projects, humanity is absorbed into the service of technology itself,
'lending a hand' to the coming to presence of technology and forgetting the question as to its own essence and
meaning. In this situation it follows that humanity’s repeated attempts to control technology, to manage the pace of
change and innovation, to retain a sense of direction in the whole, is inevitable futile, precisely because control,
management and direction are themselves values inscribed in the basic project of enframing. The view that what
we need to do in the face of environmental devastation is to manage our technology more effectively is itself a
technological response to the crisis in which we stand.
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Impacts
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IMPACT: MANAGERIALISM
INSTRUMENTAL APPROACHES TO TECHNOLOGY REDUCE THE WORLD TO A STANDING
RESERVE OF RESOURCES THAT CAN BE ENDLESSLY EXPLOITED.
JERKINS, ‘09 [Jae, Professor of Philosophy Florida State University, Florida Philosophical
Review Vol. IX, issue 2 pg129-130, “Heidegger’s Bridge: The Social and Phenomenological
Construction of Mars,”)
Martin Heidegger also claims that people in the 20th century falsely view technology as a Kantian
“means to an end”—when in reality, Heidegger maintains, technology is not a means but rather “a
mode,” or “a way of revealing.” 42 This revealing that modern technology is responsible for is a
challenge, a “demand” to nature “that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such.” 43
Heidegger uses the river Rhine as an example of the demands of modern technology. The Rhine has
been dammed up in order to provide hydraulic pressure for a hydroelectric power plant. This use of
technology changes our phenomenological perception of the Rhine. A vast ecological system, the
ancient source of legends and songs, the home of lush forests and breathtaking castles, has been relegated
to a “water power supplier.” 44 This modern ability to take nature out of its original context of being
and reassign it within a use-value technological context is known as enframing. In the modern age, we
have begun to reorganize everything around us into technological frames of reference and usage;
Heidegger warns that the river Rhine is now a power source, the once mystical German soil is now a mineral
deposit, and the refreshing mountain air is simply a supply of nitrogen. 45 The objects that make up our
world have become resources—subjects for us to master, purchase, and own. We have alienated
ourselves from all things and placed them into a standing reserve, a standby mode in which “whatever
stands by…no longer stands over us as object.” 46 Our general disregard for the meaningfulness of the
world is precisely what causes objects to lose any coherent status for us. Heidegger finds that the
consequence of enframing, whereby the entire natural world inevitably becomes “orderable as standing
reserve,” is that “man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standingreserve… [who inevitably] comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standingreserve.” 47 We may shape the world, but the world inevitably shapes us.
TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT NATURALIZES ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION BY
FRAMING THE PLANET AS A STANDING RESERVE OF RESOURCES.
LEITCH, ’04 (Vincent B., Chair of English @ the University of Oklahoma, Postmodern
Theory of Technology: Agendas, 2004,
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/symploke/v012/12.1leitch.html )
In Heidegger's account, Descartes symbolizes the moment when science and technology get harnessed
together, creating the tragic project of "Enframing" (Gestell), which is characterized by its devotion to
standing-reserve or storing up resources (Bestand): "Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be
immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering"(17). What
typifies modern technological rationality is its desire for order, control, domination, security; its mastery,
willfulness, utilitarianism; its dedication to calculation, objectification, representation; its frantic
transformation of everything including nature and human beings into efficient machines and resources.
More and more, nothing is permitted to be what it is. Letting things be appears increasingly impossible.
Openness to being, to uncertainty, to spontaneous and responsive awareness—such ways of living fall
away and human being becomes further estranged from self and environment. Not surprisingly, numerous
strands of modern and postmodern theory seek to reclaim openness to being. For Heidegger technology, in
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its dangerous late modern scientific form, contends with everything, sets upon it, and requisitions it for
use.
COMMITMENT TO TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM FRAMES THE PLANET AS A
DISPOSABLE RESOURCE—THIS IS THE ROOT CAUSE OF ALL ENVIRONMENTAL
DESTRUCTION.
JORONEN, ’10 (Mikko, Doctoral candidate in Human Geography @ The University of Turku,
“The Age of Planetary Space”, Introduction, 2010
http://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/66733/AnnalesAII257Joronen.pdf?sequence=1)
Accordingly, Heidegger understands modern technology above all as a metaphysical project. Modern
technological devices, from the “manual technology and manufacture” of the industrial age to the revolutions
made first by the “engine technology” and then by what Heidegger (1998h:132–133) calls the ruling determination
of modern technology as “cybernetics” (i.e. the rise and irruption of the systems of maximum possible automation
of command), all manifest a peculiar mode of revealing that is not just total in nature, but an ever-growing
imperial drive structured to constantly reach towards global enlargement and intensification. Eventually
such technological unfolding leads to a diversity of phenomena, including the worldwide homogenization of
modes of living, the constant mobilization of cultural and economic practices, the global circulation of
information, goods, capital, people, and knowledge, the establishment of colossal stocks of energy with massive
potentiality of destruction as well (with the weapons of mass destruction), and the commodification and
productisation of all aspects of life from nature to culture, from genetic information to consumption culture –
even a certain insensibility with regard to tragedies of suffering (for instance through the television spectacles of
war and catastrophe), as Haar adds (1993:80; see also Gillespie 1984:128; Mugerauer 2008:xv-xviii). In spite of the
seemingly diverging characters, the former phenomena are nothing but epiphenomena of the age defining
metaphysical scaffolding of technological revealing; it is the ‘framework’ of calculative drive, the technological
revealing of ‘enframing’, which allows for multiple set of phenomena to emerge. As will be later shown in more
detail, such sense of unity is first and foremost typical for a metaphysical mechanism of unfolding operative
throughout the 2300 year tradition of Western thinking, a mechanism still being constitutive for the contemporary
technological ‘enframing’ (Gestell) and self-heightening ‘machination’ (Machenschaft) of all things. As a matter of
fact, it is the planetary outcome of such a technological mode of unfolding, which according to Peter Sloterdijk
(2009) was first initiated and started as a ‘mathematical globalization’ – as a project that in Heideggerean
reading was boosted into its technological form by early modern philosophers and mathematical physicists –
further proceeding as a ‘terrestrial globalization’, finally leading to an age of ‘planetary globe’, which
eventually turned the earth into a mere planet under totally penetrable networks of orderings (Thrift
2008:234–235; Morin 2009; See also Heidegger 1998h:133; Dallmayr 2005:44; Radloff 2007b:36–48). As the
thesis will show, the contemporary planetary unfolding was first initiated by the latent ground of thought behind
the metaphysical formulations of early Greek philosophers, further boosted by the mathematical developments of
early modern thinkers, finally coming forth as cybernetic systems of ordering cast upon the planet. In such a planet,
conceived as a mass of matter wandering in empty universe, everything is called to be useable, penetrable,
mouldable, ‘decodable’ and mobile.
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TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT POSITS LIFE AS A COMMODITY THAT CAN BE USED AND
MANIPULATED VIA VIOLENT FORMS OF MANAGERIALISM.
CONDELLA, ‘2001(Craig A., Fordham University, “Overcoming the Destining Of
Technological Being,” Fall 2001 Symposium: Humanity’s Place in the Cosmos, November 6,
2001, http://www.fordham.edu/philosophy/fps/symposia/2001fall/condella.htm)
What, then, is the essence of technology? In searching for an answer to this all-important question, Heidegger (as he so often does) looks
back to the ancient Greeks to locate techne as a form of poiesis, i.e. a bringing-forth. It is a way of bringing something forth from
concealment to unconcealment. Technology, simply put, is a mode of revealing which brings something into presence. As a form of
revealing or unconcealment, technology evinces itself fundamentally as a happening of truth – an occurrence
referred to by the Greeks as aletheia. In sum, the essence of technology is a bringing-forth from concealment to unconcealment and,
consequently, an occasioning of truth. Curiously enough, nothing overtly dangerous emerges from the essence of technology as identified by
Heidegger, but then again why should it? After all, nothing about the ancient Greek notion of techne, which included the fine arts no less
than the works of the craftsman, strikes us as straightaway threatening. For Heidegger, then, the Greek notion of techne allows us to grasp
technology’s essence, but not the danger which we presently encounter. To find the latter, we must determine what it is exactly that makes
the technology of modernity so unique. According to Heidegger, “The revealing that rules in modern technology is a
challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted
and stored as such.” Herein we encounter the essence of modern technology as a challenging-forth, along
with its rendering of nature as standing-reserve. With modern technology, the bringing-forth of techne is fundamentally
transformed into a challenging-forth. What modern technology challenges can be see as twofold. First, and perhaps
more obvious, is its challenging of nature. Modern technology essentially transforms nature into an energy
source which it manipulates and uses at its own discretion. Nature, at the hands of modern technology, is
reduced to Bestand (standing-reserve). Beyond even this challenging, however, are the demands placed upon man
who, put simply, is challenged-forth into the challenging of nature. Heidegger calls this challenging-forth of
man to order nature as standing-reserve Ge-stell (enframing) and thus locates the essence of modern technology outside
of human control. Modern technology, as a revealing that orders, is thus no mere human doing . Therefore we must
take the challenging that sets upon man to order the actual as standing-reserve in accordance with the way it shows itself. That challenging
gathers man into ordering. This gathering concentrates man upon ordering the actual as standing-reserve. In the
end, modern technology as Ge-stell creates a situation in which man orders nature and thus posits himself
as “lord of the earth” when, in all reality, he himself is being ordered in just the same way. Within such a
situation, man becomes blind to all other modes of revealing outside of the technological. He sees nature as
existing fundamentally for him while being driven by a power greater than himself, a power which not
only distorts nature but obfuscates man’s understanding of his own self . With modern technology, man is
hoodwinked into believing that he fulfills his true essence to the very extent that he dominates his
surroundings. Whereas man prides himself on using technology to his own advantage, it is modern
technology which, in all reality, uses man. Not until we see modern technology as something outside of our control can we even
begin to overcome the danger harbored within its very essence.
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TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT REDUCES THE PLANET TO AN OBJECT THAT CAN BE
EXPLOITED AND DISCARDED—THIS IS THE ROOT CAUSE OF ENVIRONMENTAL
DESTRUCTION.
PATTISON, ’00 (George, “Philosophy Guidebook to the Later Heiddeger”, Chapter 3:
Technology, pg. 54-55, accessed through Questia)
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IMPACT: ENVIRONMENT
TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM PRECCLUDES ANY POSSIBILITY OF ETHICS AND
DESTROYS THE ENVIRONMENT.
SCHUURMAN, ’02 (Egbert, Professor, Department of Christian Philosophy, Technological
Universities of Delft and Eindhoven and the Agricultural University of Wageningen, 2002,
published by the Lily Fellows Program, http://www.nd.edu/~ecoltheo/text_schuurman.htm)
The technological worldview not only causes specific problems, but is mostly also decisive for the ethical solutions
sought. By means of the technological worldview there is coherence in the current approach. Ethics finds difficulty
in freeing itself from the technological system. The current recipe for the treatment of technological
problems amounts to attempts to investigate 'cases' in order to develop rules of thumb for the future.
Man seldom goes back to the roots of the problem and to the connection between problems. This
results in the frequent trading of one problem for another, because people are caught in a type of technological
labyrinth. The current ethics of technology prevents them from taking risks by acting in a controlled and cautious
way. I have once called this the technological ethics. Ethics becomes a technique because people attempt to
streamline and guide technological development. A 'technological control perspective' then
dominates the ethics of technology. People limit themselves to unfavorable symptoms of an
otherwise boundless developing scientific-technological control. The problems in technological
development is somewhat softened by this ethics. In a certain sense this state of affairs confirms - following
Habermas - what can be termed the ideology of technology. The ideology, inspired by the Enlightenment, implicates
viewpoint-restricting limitations. Fundamental or essential questions are excluded, for instance questions concerning
the background to technological development, questions regarding the origin, meaning, motives, values and norms
for technology. I would like to call this partial nihilism. Changes in the development, the search for alternatives or
even rejection are rarely accounted. In a certain sense people are entangled in technology, which they try
to untangle without providing a well-founded direction. This imprisonment or adjustment is reinforced
by ICT. In the process of adjustment it becomes increasingly difficult to adopt a specific vision of
reality, from a certain picture of reality, entailing other motives, values and norms. The technological or
industrial and the post-industrial society are permeated with strong technological values, attitudes and ways of
thinking. The main motive in this fundamental ethical attitude is that of striving for power over reality. This power
has the pursuance of technical artificiality as its dominating value. The concomitant implicit values are those of
being lord and master of man, the human passion for control, technological advancement, the (economic) selfinterest and, in coherence herewith, growing consumption as added-value: that is to say, benefit for all. No attention
is given to the ecological and social context values. At most it subsequently receives political attention. The norms
that follow from the values of the technological worldview are effectiveness, normalization or standardization,
efficiency, success, maximum profit, with no or insufficient attention given to the cost to humanity, society and the
environment. We continually encounter more problems in which the technological worldview and its
befitting ethics fail us. This is clear from problems concerned with sustainability. Sustainability aims to
comply with the requirements of the present generation, without possibly jeopardizing the ability of
coming generations to fulfill their needs. Why is sustainability under pressure? The commanding
technological worldview dominates the current economy via a control model, which from the start, forces
one-sided growth. In this development sustainability cannot be reached. In the context of environmental
problems we may advance one step by means of environmental technology, but this step is nullified
in subsequent development because the step is taken within the framework of a materialistic
economy. The technological worldview also prevents abatement of the growing concern over climatic
change. Our way of dealing with creation is preventing the gaining of a new perspective within which
these problems can be lessened. Werner Heisenberg has drawn an impressive picture of this situation. "With
the seeming limitless expansion of material power man has arrived in a situation of a captain whose ship was so well
constructed from steel and iron that the needle of his compass reacted only on the iron mass of the ship and no
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longer pointed to the North. With such a ship the correct direction can no longer be established, it simply circles
around or is at the mercy of wind and currents" (Werner Heisenberg, Das Naturbild der Heutigen Physik, rde 8,
p.22). We have abandoned our culture in favour of this lack of orientation. Man undoubtedly has
received power, but the threatening devastation increases. Technological advancement per se can
turn itself against man and his environment. This threatening frequently hides behind the desired superiority
of technological effectiveness and economic efficiency. The ethical reduction contained therein is scarcely
recognized. We saw that the current cultural view is fed by a technological expectation of salvation
and is mentally and spiritually oriented to technology itself. In addition real questions or a quest for
meaning are excluded and reality becomes a reality to be controlled. A clue is the picture of a
continuously self-empowering technological construction in which reality is not real but has a merely instrumental
value. Thus plants and animals are largely seen in the light of their material benefit to humans through science and
technology. Even man himself is increasingly seen as 'makeable'. In addition, the needle of the compass - to
return to that picture once more - points only to man and his technology. Technological man appears to be the last
point of orientation.
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THE DRIVE TO INCORPORATE MORE OF THE PLANET INTO THE TECHNOSPHERE IS THE
ROOT CAUSE OF ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION.
KIMBRELL, ’00 (Andrew, Executive Director of the International Center for Technology
Assessment), 2000, “Cold Evil: Modern Technology and Ethics”, published by the E.F.
Schumacher Society, http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/kimbrell_00.html)
Further, living fully in the technosphere is now seen as the ultimate goal of human endeavor. So much
so, that we patronizingly refer to societies still living in natural or social milieus as “undeveloped,” no
matter how sustainable their relation to the natural world or how sophisticated their social
organization, arts, or philosophic and religious beliefs. A central and disturbing question is: What
happens to the natural and social spheres when they are subsumed into (i.e., developed into) the
technosphere? In The Technological System Ellul gives us the chilling answer: The technological
environment could not exist if it did not find its support and resources in the natural world (nature
and society). But it eliminates the natural as a milieu, supplanting it while wasting and exhausting it. .
. . Technology acts upon the past environments by dividing and fracturing the natural and cultural realities. That
implies destructuring the past milieu as an environment and exploiting it to such an extreme that
nothing is left of it. For example, the well known “depletion” of natural resources results not only from
abuse by the technologies, but from the very establishment of technology as man’s new milieu.
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IMPACT: ALIENATION
VIOLENT ECO-MANAGERIALISM IS THE ULTIMATE FORM OF ALIENATION.
KINSELLA, ’07 (William, Associate professor in the Department of Communication at North
Carolina State University, “Environmental Communication” Vol. 1 Issue 2 pg. 196, “Heidegger
and Being at the Hanford Reservation: Standing Reserve, Enframing, and Environmental
Communication Theory.” November 2007)
Heidegger believed that the reduction of nature to a standing reserve alienates us not only from the elements
of our environment, but also, in a fundamental existential sense, from our very being . 2 Human
being*understood by Heidegger as both actor and activity*is always being-in-the-world, involving ongoing
engagement with the other phenomena of that world. To be authentically, this engagement requires meeting
the world not only on our terms, but also on its own terms; only through such meeting can we realize true being.
Linking this concept of being to the problematic of technology, Heidegger (1977a) proposed that ‘‘the essence
of technology is by no means anything technological’’ (p. 4); rather, it is manifested in modes of thinking,
language, and action that are oriented toward enframing. These approaches alienate us from the radical
otherness of the phenomena that surround us, disabling the possibilities for authentic being. Well aware of the
material hazards posed by nuclear weapons and nuclear wastes, Heidegger nevertheless saw an even greater
threat in the prospect that human being might be reduced, along with the rest of nature, through the
modality of enframing.
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TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM RESULTS IN ALIENATION AND DESTROYS VALUE TO
LIFE.
SCHUURMAN, ’02 (Egbert, Professor, Department of Christian Philosophy, Technological
Universities of Delft and Eindhoven and the Agricultural University of Wageningen, 2002,
published by the Lily Fellows Program, http://www.nd.edu/~ecoltheo/text_schuurman.htm)
I have shown in miscellaneous publications - with reference to reputable philosophers, that, under the influence of
the Renaissance and in particular the Enlightenment, modern philosophy and modern thinking became increasingly a
scientific-technological mentality. Man as ' lord and master' - a term used by Descartes, the father of modern
philosophy - articulates technological rationality by which the natural sciences and the technical
sciences are used as instruments under the pretension that everything can be manipulated in order to
solve problems - both old and new - relating to man and culture. It was especially the ideas of Frances Bacon that
kept alive the utopia which promised a return to the lost paradise by means of scientific-technological advance. The
technological control mentality originates in man's pretence of being autonomous. He desires to
strengthen his freedom by means of scientific-technological command. All problems are considered
to be solvable by this mentality. In a sense only those problems are recognized that can be solved through
science and technology. All questions relating to spiritual reflection and religious problems are ruled out. The
technological culture therefore is accompanied by secularization, with spiritual emptiness on a scale previously
unheard of. We could say that, behind the mask of modern technology and of autonomous freedom, a spiritual
emptiness hides. The situation is made more serious by the fact that this is not recognized. The result is that culture
is wholly saturated by technological way of thinking or the technological mentality. Society is experiencing it's
influence in many sectors. The whole complex of science, technology and economy is being influenced
by an over-excited technological spirit. This causes problems. Let me provide two examples: In
biotechnology, justice is mostly not done to life in advance. The technological model of life disregards life. Small
wonder that genetic manipulation has to deal with so many problems. Another actual example: sometimes people
think that the danger of the Internet is the so-called pollution of information and that the ethical problems
can be solved by a 'clean' net. Yet, here also certain technological thought processes force behavioral pattern
which reduce the fullness of life. The thought pattern built into computers influences the uncritical user. He
will increasingly use the same mental patterns. When man is occupied with technology day in and day out, it
will eventually conquer his heart. Therefore, also spiritually, man is becoming more technological, making him
deaf and insensitive to other dimensions. Thus: more information, less meaning; more interactions, less contact;
more information, less wisdom and depth. In other words, more communication, less spirituality. The overuse of
material technology isolates man spiritually. Stated once more: the advance of the technological
mentality is in our time leading to growing secularization.
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IMPACT: VTL
TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT DESTROYS VALUE TO LIFE BY REDUCING PEOPLE TO
OBJECTS AND THE EARTH TO A STANDING RESERVE OF EXPLOITABLE RESOURCES.
ROSEMANN, ‘02 (Philipp, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dallas,
Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.4, “Heidegger’s Trancendental History”, 2002, SM,
Accessed: 6/28/11)
For Heidegger, the technological age—we could perhaps say, postmodernity 63 —is deeply ambiguous, perhaps more so
than any other economy of presence. On the one hand, in the technological world the human being comes to be so caught
up in the task of efficiently "ordering" his environment and himself, that the oblivion of the Mystery must
seem total. Heidegger thus speaks of the "supreme danger" technology poses. 64 Yet on the other hand, "where
danger is grows the saving power also"—not only in the sense that art may lead us to the forgotten, mysterious essence of
technology, but also insofar as the very triumph of technological ordering could prepare its own demise :
"the frenziedness of technology may entrench itself everywhere to such an extent," Heidegger writes,
"that someday, throughout everything technological, the essence of technology may unfold essentially in
the propriative event of truth." 65 This opportunity is, I think, due to the fact that technology represents, in some way, a return to
antiquity, though under radically different auspices. In fact, postmodern technology reverses the process of the gradual differentiation and
fragmentation of the unity of the Greek world. 66 Heidegger's analysis of the essence of technology confirms this
suggestion. "Enframing," the essence of technology, completes the modern project of representing ,
vorstellen, nature in a systematically ordered "picture." This project, however, acquires a new rigor, indeed rigidity, such that
the modern Vorstellen transmutes into a simple Stellen. Heidegger terms the essence of technology, Ge-stell. The German word
stellen means "to place, to put, to stand"—in the sense of, "I stood the jug on the table"—but also "to apprehend." In German,
you would say of a thief that he is gestellt, apprehended, an expression in which stellen connotes some kind of chase and subsequent
cornering. Nature, in the technological age, is cornered to such an extent that it becomes impossible to
encounter it as anything but a resource for the efficient functioning of the technological system. Heidegger
uses the example of the river Rhine, which even well-meaning holiday-makers can no longer experience as anything but a resource for
relaxation "stood" there for them by the vacation industry. 67 [End Page 512] On the face of it, technology thus appears as a
hardening of modernity, of the subject's domination over the object . At the same time, however, it constitutes the
dissolution of modernity. Heidegger speaks of the "objectlessness" (das Gegenstandslose) 68 of standing-reserve:
"Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve [i.e., resource] no longer stands over against us as
object." 69 An example serves to elucidate Heidegger's meaning. Is an airliner sitting on a runway not an object? "Certainly. We can
represent (vorstellen) the machine so." 70 Yet the aircraft is no longer experienced as an ob-ject, that is to say, an entity
with a certain degree of autonomy that limits the subject's sphere of action. Nowadays airports have become huge
shopping-malls meant to distract us from the actual object of our presence there, namely, to traverse space rapidly. We board through
air-conditioned gangways that prevent us from seeing the body of the aircraft we are about to enter; and
once we are inside, a television screen lights up, even before we are given further opportunities to eat, drink, and shop. The
dissolution of the object is paralleled by the disappearance of the subject. Postmodern people are no
longer subjects in the sense of beings upon which all that is, is grounded . "The current talk about human
resources, about the supply of patients for a clinic, gives evidence of this." 71 People are no longer
conceived of as the ultimate agents and ends of the technological process, but as one more element that
needs to be factored into the systemic whole. In this way, the complex system of "interlocking processes" that constitutes
contemporary technology turns into an end in itself; it threatens to dissolve subject and object alike as it transforms both into Be-stand,
standing-reserve to promote and secure its own efficiency. Nonetheless, Heidegger emphasizes that, in contradistinction to the object, the
subject can never fully be absorbed into the system, "[s]ince man drives technology forward." 72 Following Heidegger's great contemporary
Ernst Cassirer, the postmodern tendency to regard subject and object as functional elements of a larger system could be described as a move
from substance to function. 73
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TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT REDUCES PEOPLE TO PIECES OF MACHINERY, DESTROYING
ALL VALUE TO LIFE.
BELU, ‘10 (Dana, Department of Philosophy California State University, Inquiry, Vol. 53 Issue
1, pg. 4-5. “Heidegger’s Aporetic Ontology of Technology,” February 2010.)
Machine technology is, fundamentally, no mere mechanism (Räderwerk) and it is not a particular instantiation of
enframing as a universal concept. 17 Rather, enframing is an essential dispensation as that sine qua non without
which machines cannot exist. In fact, “Modern technology is what it is not only through the machine, rather
the machine is what it is and how it is from out of the essence of technology . One says nothing about the essence of
modern technology when one represents it as machine technology.” 18 The staggering implication is that machine
technology is somehow superfluous for understanding the essence of technology . 19 Heidegger underscores
this point when he says, elsewhere, that “the utilization of machinery and the manufacture of machines. . . is
only an instrument concordant with technology, whereby the nature of technology is established in the
objective character of its raw materials.” 20How does this affect human beings? Heidegger claims that
“because man cannot decide, out of himself and by himself, regarding his own essence it follows that the
ordering of standing-reserve and enframing is not only something human”. 21 But insofar as it is something
human, humans are coresponsible because they exercise a capacity (Fähigkeit) for determined participation. The apparent autonomy
and self-determination humans enjoy gives the impression that they can opt out of continuous ordering
but this is merely the way that enframing dissimulates itself as the illusion of agency. If people “are in their
essence already enframed as standing-reserve”, 22 what kind of freedom is this but a mechanical and nihilistic reproduction
of the same? When Heidegger insists on the universal character of enframing he underscores this point. 23 In Heidegger’s view freedom is
to be conceived only ontologically, as openness to being in the form of enframing, rather than ontically or instrumentally (as the ability of the
autonomous agent to choose among a variety of options). Unable to change his urge to order and control, the technicized
being is sub-jected to the imperatives of the system. Substantive goals and meaningful differences are
leveled by the ubiquity of technical reason and replaced with a self-optimizing system. Total enframing
thus totally encompasses humans. “To the enframed belongs also man, admittedly in his own way, be it
that he serves the machine or that within ordering he designs and constructs the machine. The human
being is in his own way a stock-piece in the strongest sense of the words, stock and piece.” 24 Thus, as technical makers,
users and designers, human beings are resources too. Because all activities today are in one way or another
technologically mediated everyone is enframed as either a technical maker, user and/or designer or a combination thereof. In
his most extreme statements of the case the difference between humans and things is effaced. For instance, the technological ordering of
nature is of a different kind than the one through which the earlier peasant ordered his acres. The peasant’s doing did not impose upon, nor
challenge the earth; it concerned itself with the potential growing powers of the seed; it sheltered them in their thriving. In the meantime the
ordering of the fields crosses over in the same ordering, reducing the air to oxygen, the earth to coal and ore, the ore to uranium, the uranium
to atomic energy and this to an orderable destruction. Agriculture is now the motorized food industry, in essence the same as the production
of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same as the embargo and starvation of countries, the same as the production
of hydrogen bombs. 25
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IMPACT: DEHUMANIZATION
TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT LEADS TO THE DEHUMANIZATION AND ALIENATION OF
WORKERS—INDIVIDUALS ARE REDUCED TO APPENDAGES OF THE MACHINE.
FALZON, ’02 (Christopher, “Philosophy Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Philosophy”, pg.
164, Chapter 5: MODERN TIMES—SOCIETY, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, ROUTLEDGE,
accessed through Questia)
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TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT CREATES AN IMPERSONAL, DEHUMANIZING WORLD.
FALZON, ’02 (Christopher, “Philosophy Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Philosophy”, pg.
164, Chapter 5: MODERN TIMES—SOCIETY, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, ROUTLEDGE,
accessed through Questia)
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TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT DEHUMANIZES INDIVIDUALS BY REDUCING THEM TO THE
STATUS OF A RESOURCE.
PATTISON, ’00 (George, “Philosophy Guidebook to the Later Heiddeger”, Chapter 3:
Technology, pg. 64-65, accessed through Questia)
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IMPACT: SLAVERY/TOTALITARIANISM
TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT MAKES US SLAVES OF THE TECHNOCRATES AND
SUBORDINATE TO THE MACHINE.
FALZON, ’02 (Christopher, “Philosophy Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Philosophy”, pg.
167, Chapter 5: MODERN TIMES—SOCIETY, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, ROUTLEDGE,
accessed through Questia)
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TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT REDUCES HUMAN BEINGS TO OBJECTS AND PROMOTES
NEW AND MORE INSIDIOUS FORMS OF SOCIAL CONTROL.
FALZON, ’02 (Christopher, “Philosophy Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Philosophy”, pg.
164, Chapter 5: MODERN TIMES—SOCIETY, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, ROUTLEDGE,
accessed through Questia)
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TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT DESTROYS DEMOCRACY.
DAY, ’88 (“Democratic Theory and Technological Society”, Introduction, pg. xi-xii, accessed
through Questia)
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IMPACT: WAR/VIOLENCE
TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT CAN ONLY CONFRONT ITS INHERENT LIMITATIONS
THROUGH THE CREATION OF DEATH AND VIOLENCE.
SWAZO, ‘02 (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alaska, Norman K., “Crisis Theory
and World Order: Heideggerian Reflections”, p. 157-60)
The grounding question claims us today in the historical moment of philosophy's completion. It cannot but claim us out of the authentic
future and, hence, in a transformed manner: Metaphysical thinking asks and hears "what is ..."; essential thinking asks and hears "what calls
for. . . ." The grounding question properly formulated, then, is not merely "What is politics?" but, rather
"What calls for politics?"' In this question we have a pathway for essential political thinking. It is incumbent
upon us to understand the question, to hold out the question as a possibility of thinking without presuming to answer forthwith.
Obscurity, uncertainty, and precariousness hold sway along this pathway of transition; to think otherwise is to surrender the authentic future
to that inauthentic future in which historicism and actualism give determination to the political. To think along the pathway of this
question is to understand the relation between planetary thinking and planetary building in new light .
Inasmuch as there is an essential connection between planetary politics and the planetary domination of technology, the question of the
relation of planetary thinking and planetary building must first be understood in terms of "a preparation of man for taking over a worlddomination." We must recognize, however, that both the manner of preparation and the character of this
world-domination are problematic, especially to the extent that modern subjectivity drives humanity
towards this goal. Nietzsche is the first thinker to recognize our historical moment as just such a preparation, notes Heidegger:
"Nietzsche is the first thinker who, in view of a world history emerging for the first time, asks the decisive question and thinks through its
metaphysical implications. The question is: Is man, as man in his nature til now, prepared to assume dominion over
the whole earth?"' Bernard Dauenhauer's comments on this issue are illuminating. Following Heidegger's reflections, Dauenhauer
claims that the "decisive question" as posed by Nietzsche is "not well formulated" inasmuch as "it is still asked from the standpoint of
metaphysics," i.e., from a standpoint yet having to overcome "metaphysical vengeance."' In the preceding chapter, we have considered how a
"fundamental metaphysical position" is articulated by Nietzsche. We have also understood something of the relationship
between this metaphysics and the normative and technocratic dimensions of contemporary world order
thinking, insofar as quiescent in this thinking is the Nietzschean appeal to that autonomous creativity
which posits new values on the basis of humanity's self-affirmation. With this in mind, Dauenhauer's remarks are
especially pertinent: Heidegger tells us that Nietzsche was the first to see that both to come to his own essence and to be
prepared to rule the earth, man must be healed of vengeance.... Vengeance ... is that response to what is
other than oneself which debases the other in order to place oneself in a superior position and thus to
maintain that the only thing which counts is one's own importance. In ... his reflections on technique, Heidegger has
pointed out the vengeance involved in the technocratic reduction of nature first to an object of research and
ultimately to mere raw material to be disposed of at man's pleasure. The logic of this movement eventually
engulfs man himself so that he, too, is only raw material. Vengeance culminates, then, in nihilism.' In short, says
Dauenhauer, "The man of vengeance cannot protect the earth. Since he would debase it to raw material for
his own purposes, he cannot rule the earth. Rather, he destroys it as earth." Thus, both the normative and
technocratic dimensions of world order thinking, grounded as they are in n subjectivist metaphysics,
entail a world-domination wholly indefensible: Global dominion under the sway of metaphysical
vengeance-in which the human himself succumbs to the enhancement of his power-ultimately entails
precisely that crucible of tragedy and catastrophe about which world order scholar Richard Falk has warned. It is in
recognition of this imminent consequence that Heidegger asks: But, how could man accede to rulership over the earth, how can he take under
his protection the earth as earth, if and for so long as he debases what is terrestrial, in permitting the spirit of vengeance to determine his
meditation? If it is a question of saving the earth as earth, it is necessary from the outset that the spirit of
vengeance disappear." It may be said that, despite the lack of an explicit thematic treatment of the political in his thought, Heidegger
concerns himself with the same decisive question raised by Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger seeks to overcome the spirit of vengeance.
Heidegger's "solution" (to use the word loosely), however, is unlike Nietzsche's insofar as Heidegger does not think ontologically in terms of
values or a mere reversal of Platonism." The whole of Heidegger's later thinking, as a meditation on this
preparation of humanity for global governance, attends to the decisive question in a way that is no longer
metaphysical but essential. Heidegger is the first to think this decisive question essentially inasmuch as he thinks this question in
terms of the history of Being. Only thus is it possible to overcome metaphysical vengeance, for in questioning
concerning the meaning of Being in general the tension between a `transcendent-permanent' and an
`earthly-temporal’ is transformed.
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TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT REPLICATES THOUGHTLESS VIOLENCE AND CREATES
HISTORY’S WORST ATROCITIES.
ARENDT, ‘61 [Hannah, American political philosopher, “The Conquest of Space and the
Stature of Man” The New Atlantis Fall 2007]
The magnitude of the space enterprise seems to me beyond dispute, and all objections raised against it on
the purely utilitarian level—that it is too expensive, that the money were better spent on education and the improvement of the
citizens, on the fight against poverty and disease, or whatever other worthy purposes may come to mind—sound to me slightly
absurd, out of tune with the things that are at stake and whose consequences today appear still quite
unpredictable. There is, moreover, another reason why I think these arguments are beside the point. They are singularly
inapplicable because the enterprise itself could come about only through an amazing development of
man’s scientific capabilities. The very integrity of science demands that not only utilitarian considerations
but the reflection upon the stature of man as well be left in abeyance. Has not each of the advances of
science, since the time of Copernicus, almost automatically resulted in a decrease in his stature? And is the often repeated
argument that it was man who achieved his own debasement in his search for truth, thus proving anew his superiority and even increasing his
stature, more than a sophism? Perhaps it will turn out that way. At any event, man, insofar as he is a scientist, does not care about
his own stature in the universe or about his position on the evolutionary ladder of animal life; this “carelessness” is his pride and
his glory. The simple fact that physicists split the atom without any hesitations the very moment they knew
how to do it, although they realized full well the enormous destructive potentialities of their operation,
demonstrates that the scientist qua scientist does not even care about the survival of the human race on
earth or, for that matter, about the survival of the planet itself. All associations for “Atoms for Peace,” all warnings not to use
the new power unwisely, and even the pangs of conscience many scientists felt when the first bombs fell on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki cannot obscure this simple, elementary fact. For in all these efforts the scientists acted not as
scientists but as citizens, and if their voices have more authority than the voices of laymen, they do so only because the scientists are in
possession of more precise information. Valid and plausible arguments against the “conquest of space” could be
raised only if they were to show that the whole enterprise might be self-defeating in its own terms.
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IMPACT: ETHICS
THE AFF’S ONTOLOGICAL COMMITMENT TO THE TECHNOSPHERE FORECLOSES ANY
POSSIBILITY OF ETHICS.
KIMBRELL, ’00 (Andrew, Executive Director of the International Center for Technology
Assessment), 2000, “Cold Evil: Modern Technology and Ethics”, published by the E.F.
Schumacher Society, http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/kimbrell_00.html)
Even as it exploits, wastes, and exhausts our natural and social resources, the technosphere provides
us with our means of production and survival. We utterly depend on our technological system for
sustenance, and it provides us with the basis of our collective and individual dreams and desires —from
visions of an endless array of products to our hopes for new techniques that will cure all disease, feed the world, and
conquer the solar system. Clearly, living in the technosphere raises very different ethical questions and
responsibilities than did the past milieus of human existence. We find ourselves not only in a novel
physical environment, the technological system, but also in a new ethical landscape. For technology is never
neutral. Whether it’s a hammer or a nuclear bomb or a piano or genetic engineering, technology always
represents power, an extension of human power. And the question always arises, Is that power appropriate.
Simply put, when power is inappropriate, evil results. Understanding the full ethical revolution brought to us
by the technosphere is beyond both my ken and the boundaries of this lecture; however, I believe we can now see
a dramatic dichotomy between evil as it occurred in the social era of human history and evil as
incarnated in the current technological sphere. When humanity was still in the social sphere, ethics
tended to be a matter for the individual. Right and wrong were choices each of us could make. Evil
thrived on the emotionally unstable, vulnerable, or violent individual or on those who were confused
or misguided, and it had a tendency toward the irrational. By contrast, the technosphere has created
a technological, institutional plane on which “the system” effectuates evil in circumstances where
individuals and their emotions, ethics, or morals play no significant role.
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IMPACT: LAUNDRY LIST
TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT SHATTERS THE PSYCHE, DESTROYS VALUE TO LIFE AND
FUELS ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION AND POVERTY.
BECKER, ’96 (Gerhold K., “Changing Nature’s Course: The Ethical Challenge of Biotechnology”,
Pg. 86, Hong Kong University Press, 1996, accessed through Questia)
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IMPACT: KRITIK O/W
KRITIK OUTWEIGHS—THE ECOCIDE AND GENOCIDE OF TECHNOLOGICAL
MANAGERIALISM SYSTEMICALLY CONCEALS ITSELF VIA THE CALCULATED
RATIONALIZATIONS OF THE 1AC.
KIMBRELL, ’00 (Andrew, Executive Director of the International Center for Technology
Assessment), 2000, “Cold Evil: Modern Technology and Ethics”, published by the E.F.
Schumacher Society, http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/kimbrell_00.html)
The passionate, pathological, or satanic villainy of yesteryear has been largely replaced by a technified
evil which appears cold and impersonal and as faceless as daily life in the technological milieu.
Passionate, feverish “hot evil,” though clearly still with us, has been largely usurped by this automatic, systemic
“cold evil” in which we all partake, in which we all are complicit. As noted by M. Scott Peck, modern evil is that
which “one percent of the people cause, but in which 100 percent of us ordinary sinners participate
through our everyday sins.” In The Enigma of Evil theologian Alfred Schutze sums up this evolution of ethics
in our technological times: Whereas only a few centuries ago evil, so-called, had to be considered pertinent
to moral behavior, more specifically the backsliding or weakness of the individual, today it also
appears in a manner detached from the individual. It shows up impersonally in arrangements and
conditions of social, industrial, technical and general life which, admittedly, are created and tolerated
by man. It appears anonymously as injustice, or hardship in an interpersonal realm where nobody
seems directly liable or responsible. . . . It has become the grey eminence infiltrating all areas of human
existence . . . .Unfortunately, despite the unprecedented perils it spawns, this “grey eminence,” this cold
evil, so intrinsic to the technosphere with its systemic exploitation of nature, culture, and societies
goes virtually unrecognized. Our society continues to be deeply concerned about the remaining “evils”
brought to us by the natural sphere (e.g.., floods and tornadoes) and nearly obsessed with the acts of
personal hot evil endemic to the social sphere. We have utterly failed, however, to register the
appropriate recognition and abhorrence of this new form of institutional evil produced by and
through the technological system. Our churches, moral leaders, and teachers rarely recognize or speak out
against the cold evil that has impersonally devastated so many lives and destroyed and disfigured so much of
creation. The tragic result of this failure is that cold evil flourishes, causing ever greater ecocide and
genocide even as it remains unnamed and unaddressed.
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Alt
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ALT: REJECT
ALT SOLVES—REJECTING TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT IS THE ONLY WAY TO OPEN UP
THE POSSIBILITY FOR AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH THE WORLD.
SWAZO, ’02 (Philosophy—University of Alaska, Fairbanks, 2002 (Crisis Theory and
World Order: Heideggerian Reflections, p.141-2)
Insofar as it is in thinking and speech that phenomena are disclosed to and for a public, it is critical to
concede that calculative thinking is but one way in which the relation of word and thing is expressed.
Calculative thinking is but one way in which political phenomena can be understood. Here language—
that phenomenon through which the relation of word and thing is disclosed—is what matters in
clarifying political phenomena. This means we must come to see that 'word' rules in that it is not "just
a name-giving grasp reaching for what is present and already portrayed, it is not only a means of
portraying what lies before us. On the contrary, the word first bestows presence, that is, Being in which
things appear as beings."" Such is the power of the word in its disclosure of reality. Political science
under the sway of an isomorphy of conceptual frameworks already, i.e., from the inception, bestows
presence to political things in a way that must distort. Inasmuch as it is the theoretic conception that holds
sway here, determining in advance what truth is to be revealed in things, there is here already a
failure. That is, what matters in genuine disclosure is "fulfilling the requirement ... to take the
phenomena as they offer themselves as against all firmly rooted theory and even despite it, that is,
the requirement to align theory according to the phenomena rather than the opposite, to do violence
to the phenomena by a preconceived theory."" Yet, in the absence of any heed to what is happening
in this manner of revealing the political, it is precisely this distortion which rules in contemporary
political thinking and doing as if it were a fate that compels without exception. In short, political
science as swayed by the theoretic conception and systems science never lets political things be as
they are, never lets human beings be in their most proper politicality. Consequently, for all that political science
says in its theoretic conceptions, the domain of the political and the essence of being-political remain
enigmatic. It is this enigma which calls for another thinking, an essential (wesentliche) or originary
(anfangliche) thinking, indeed an essential political thinking in which the presumed self-evidence of
tradition is rendered questionable. Despite the urgency of the world order crisis which solicits
answers to questions and solutions to global problems, a reflective insight into "the crisis of political
understanding" insists on renouncing representational saying, i.e., discourse steeped in subjectivity such
that the thingness of things issues from representation by the human subject. "Renunciation commits itself to
the higher rule of the word which first lets a thing be as thing."" This is no mere negation. On the
contrary, it is affirmation, openness to the original claim of the political and political beings, to what this claim
vouchsafes to a thinking attuned to the ecstatic-temporal character of being-political. Only along this way can
thinking prepare what may endure. Thus must an essential thinking concerning the future of the world
order pit itself against a calculative thinking largely inattentive to the need for reflective insights.
Hence, one is led to conclude: (a) The systems approach to world order is not the same as essential
political thinking; (b) world system consciousness is not the same as planetary thinking; (c) global
homeostasis is not the same as planetary dwelling. The former conceptions are yet under the sway of
mode of metaphysics and, moreover, manifest an extreme possibility of metaphysical thinking which,
as I have tried to make clear, is ontologically questionable. Heidegger's insights as I have tried to articulate them
provide reasons for being wary of world order thinking qua technocratic reason. Heidegger's
understanding of the essence of technology, over against the instrumental definition of technology
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and the presupposition that the future is inevitably and unalterably technocratic, requires that one
reject the legitimacy of the systems approach to world order theorizing.
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ALT SOLVES—A TOTAL BREAK WITH TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT IS A REFUSAL TO
VIOLENTLY SACRIFICE ONESELF ON THE ALTAR OF PROGRESS.
KIMBRELL, ’00 (Andrew, Executive Director of the International Center for Technology
Assessment), 2000, “Cold Evil: Modern Technology and Ethics”, published by the E.F.
Schumacher Society, http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/kimbrell_00.html)
Modernity has brought with it increasing tolerance for diverse religious beliefs and traditions. We are rightfully
proud of our pluralistic religious environment. Yet over the years I have grown skeptical about this purported robust
religious pluralism. The almost unquestioned acceptance of the cold-evil ideologies of objectivity,
efficiency, and competition makes it obvious how little our religious beliefs affect our social practice. I
have come to a far different conclusion about the diversity of our religious life: I now believe that we tolerate
various religions with increasing ease because they have gradually become tangential and irrelevant
to the actual workings of the technosphere and do virtually nothing to impede the work of that grey
eminence “cold evil.” I see somewhere in the dark oracular workings of the technosphere a single
“default” religion made up of these ideologies, a religion whose doctrines the vast majority consciously or
unconsciously believes. This new secular religion is, of course, Progress. Almost a half century ago
philosopher Richard Weaver, in The Ethics of Rhetoric, noted the central religious position that “progress” has taken
in the modern technological state: “. . . ‘progress’ becomes the salvation man is placed on earth to work out; and just
as there can be no achievement more important than salvation, so there can be no activity more justified in enlisting
our sympathy and support than ‘progress.’” Our faith in technological progress may be obvious, but I think
it is more difficult, and not completely fanciful, to see that it has a governing trinity. The secular “cold
trinity” of Progress apes the Christian trinity in a tragi-comic way: Science will let us know everything;
Technology will let us do everything; the Market will let us buy everything. Science takes the place of
God the Father in this new trinity. Mysterious and unknowable to all but the cognoscenti, science has
its own objective, unemotional laws and rules, which define the universe. To find “the Truth” it has its
own unwavering impersonal process (ritual), known as “the scientific method.” Any statement that
begins “Science tells us . . . has the imprimatur of unquestioned truth.” Technology plays the role of the
incarnated God, The Son. Science incarnates in our daily lives as technology. It is an admittedly inhuman, cold,
mechanical incarnation, yet it manufactures miracles. Technology saves lives, allows us to fly and to speak to others
who are thousands of miles away, and creates so many other everyday wonders. Our belief in the Father (Science) is
bolstered by the acts of the Son (Technology), which appear to be devoted to making our lives a “heaven on earth.”
Technology also has its impersonal, unquestioned commandments based on its mechanical nature, the
aforementioned “laws” of efficiency. Importantly, Technology takes on the mysterious nature of its
progenitor Science. After all, few of us understand how even the most basic technologies (telephone,
television) actually work. So Technology is in this world but, at least to our consciousness, not wholly
of this world. It is a kind of incarnated magic. Our adoration of Technology, despite its dominance
over our lives, is not with us at all times, nor does it fully motivate our daily lives. Although we do not
understand our technologies, we soon tend to take them for granted, so an animating, ever-visiting
third member of the trinity is needed: the Spirit (the Market). We wake every day, go to work, and
make money—with a deep desire to buy. Just as in traditional theology the Holy Spirit gives us access to the Son, so too the
Market gives us access to (the ability to purchase) Technology and brings it into our lives. It is this spirit of acquisition that brings us fully to
the trinity. The Market also takes on the numinous quality of Science and Technology. As noted, its “laws” of supply and demand and
competition are unquestioned dogmas that control public policy in virtually every sphere of our national and global economic lives. They are laws
to which almost all of our economists and politicians genuflect on a daily basis. The cold trinity provides a powerful, though mostly unconscious,
No matter what environmental horror or exploitation of animals or humans
occurs, it can be rationalized through the trinity, whereas complaints against cold evil are routinely
condemned as heresies. The trinity acts as a kind of implicit enclosure of the spirit, a spiritual cocoon,
blocking society from any incursion against the cold and binding laws of Science, Technology, and the
arsenal for the defense of cold evil.
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Market. Questioning any one part of the trinity leads to immediate suspicion, the potential ouster
from serious discussion, or loss of influence. Those “heretics” who would expose the cold evil inherent
in this default religion of Progress risk ridicule as well as academic and social excommunication.
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ALT: DO NOTHING
REJECTING THE COMPULSIVE DESIRE TO ACT REORIENTS OUR ONTOLOGICAL
UNDERSTANDING OF TECHNOLOGY.
HARMAN, ‘09 (Graham, Professor of Philosophy @ American University in Cairo,
“Cambridge Journal of Economics”, 2009, Vol. 34(1), “Technology, objects and things in
Heidegger”, p.17-25)
Another word in Heidegger's constellation of technology terms is danger , which turns out to be yet another
synonym for a presence-at-hand that strips the world of all concealed mystery . ‘The essence of technology
is en-framing. The essence of en-framing is danger’ (Heidegger, 1994, p. 54). Though the danger is already with
us, we do not yet experience it as danger (Heidegger, 1994, p. 55). And to add yet another term to the mix: ‘in the wake of every
danger, there looms a distress. Distress compels. [Not nötigt]’ (Heidegger, 1994, p. 55). This talk of danger also links up with one of
Heidegger's favourite passages from the poet Friedrich Hölderin. In the hymn ‘Patmos’, Hölderlin writes: ‘Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das
Rettende auch’ [‘But where danger is, there grows / also that which saves’]. This two-sided interplay of danger and saving power reflects the
two faces of being itself. Being presents itself as a present-at-hand façade, but also withdraws into inscrutable subterranean depth.
Technology is not a lamentable human deed of Neolithic times or the Industrial Revolution, but an unavoidable facet
of being itself. For being (or sometimes ‘beyng’ [Seyn], to use Heidegger's beloved archaic spelling) lies far beyond the
normal cause-and-effect relationships of the world: ‘beyng is not accompanied by anything comparable to it. It is caused by
nothing else, and is not the cause of itself. Beyng does not proceed, and never proceeds, from a causal connection’ (Heidegger, 1994, p. 75).
Hence, humans cannot force a change in the essence of technology to occur and must passively wait . But this
still leaves us with a special role denied to all other entities: ‘the great human essence resides in the fact that it belongs to
the essence of being, is used by it to preserve the essence of being in its truth’ (Heidegger, 1994, p. 70). In the
danger of being lies the possibility of a turn (Kehre) away from the forgetting of being into the truth of being
itself (Heidegger, 1994, p. 71). Despite the horror of technology, Heidegger contends that we can see the
lightning-flash of being in the essence of technology . By stripping everything down to such a miserable form of
presence-at-hand, it confronts us with the call of distress from being itself (Heidegger, 1994, p. 77). But humans,
the shepherds of being, must continue to wait: ‘Only when humans, as the shepherds of being, wait upon
the truth of being can they in any way anticipate the arrival of the other destiny of being, without
degenerating into a mere wish to know’ (Heidegger, 1994, pp. 71–2).
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ALT: RETHINK TECHNOLOGY
QUESTIONING OUR RELATIONSHIP TO TECHNOLOGY IS THE ONLY WAY TO STOP
FRAMING THE WORLD AS SOMETHING CALCUABLE AND CONTROLLABLE.
PATTISON, ’00 (George, “Philosophy Guidebook to the Later Heiddeger”, Chapter 3:
Technology, pg. 64-65, accessed through Questia)
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ALT: DO NOTHING
TO STEP AWAY FROM THE PLAN IS TO CULTIVATE A RADICAL AWARENESS OF THE
TECHNOLOGICAL PROJECT—SOLVES ALIENATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL
DESTRUCTION.
CHARLEY, 09 (Mejame Ejede, Associate Professor of Philosophy @ Mary Washington
University, “Problematic of Technology and the Realms of Salvation in Heidegger’s
Philosophy”, Technology and the Disclosure of Being, p. 357-8, September 1 2009)
While Heidegger is pessimistic regarding the future of a humanity dominated by Gestell, he proposes a way out,
a salvation, the decision by which man could come out of his errancy. This salvation being paradoxically
contained in technology itself or in its essence. This could be the meaning of the citation from the poet Hölderlin
found at the end of the „Question concerning Technology’’: „but where danger is, grows the saving power also’’.
Heidegger’s conclusion has left many critics unsatisfied and has raised the fundamental question: how indeed can
technology be at the same time a mortal danger and that which saves from this danger? As far as we are
concerned, Heidegger says in substance that the imperialistic character of technology comes from reason
itself, insofar as it claims to stretch its empire everywhere and dominate all objects. Now a reason at the
service of the will to power is a lost reason. Techno-science is the implementation of a project, whose essence is
contained in reason taking the form of the scientifi c representation of the world. The form becomes explicit with the
objectifi ed system of science. Plus, the sword of Damocles that hangs over man does not in the fi rst place come
from machines and appliances of technology, whose action could eventually be deadly. The danger, contrary to
what we naively believe, is not in the use that is made of technology, but in the spirit determining it since its
origin, in the logic leading to it. The danger of dangers, is the lack of awareness of this danger. A radical
awareness of the nature of the technological project is necessary. That is why Heidegger cites Hölderlin: „But
where danger is, grows the saving power also’’. A critical lucidity with respect to the technological process is
the only way open for us to get out of this alienation. This is the only way that would enable us to
rediscover a bit of the humility which characterised the relation of traditional man to nature, and the
relation of man to man. This entirely presupposes the modification of the representation of man’s relation
with nature. We must recover the meaning of man’s integration in Nature instead of seeking to dominate it.
In the language of Heidegger, it is our relation to Being that is at issue. Thus of the peasant in those days,
Heidegger says: „The work of the peasant does not enframe the cultivated earth. When he sows grain, he confi des
it to the forces he wakes such that it prospers’’. Traditional people did not challenge the earth, they knew how
to respect it, and to watch, as a shepherd who watches his sheep. The peasant confi des the seed to the earth
and watches it. What has happened in man’s relation to the earth? Agriculture has become industrial, it has
become technical. The earth is only matter to be exploited technically. It is requisitioned by technology.
K OF TECHNOLOGY—56/78
ALT: WALKING
WALKING IS AN ONTOLOGICAL REJECTION OF HUMANITY’S APOTHEOSIS OF SPEED; A
VIOLENT FORM OF HOMOGENIZATION THAT CONDENSES DIFFERENCE INTO A
QUESTION OF MILES PER HOUR AND RENDERS LIFE MEANINGLESS AND ABSTRACT.
BAUGH, 2010 (Bruce, Mosaic, Vol. 43, 2010, “Space and Place: Walking Through Kamloops”,
accessed through Questia)
There are car people and foot people, with different attitudes and values (Soderstrom 80), although the same
people can be both at different times. These different worlds of cars and walkers occupy and overlap what the
surveyor maps as the same terrain, but they remain not only strangers but enemies, with walkers sustaining
the greatest number of casualties in this conflict. In these conditions, "the solitary walker is, himself, an
insurgent against the contemporary world, an ambulatory time traveller" (Self 15) in revolt against the
automobile, "which compresses the space-time continuum and decouples human from physical geography"
(Self 69). If the automobile's "apotheosis of speed" makes human bodies seem anachronistic or feeble, then
walking, on the other hand, "is a subversive detour through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and
experiences" (Solnit 12). In the world of cars and drivers, space does in fact approximate the impersonal,
indifferent aspect of abstract, geometrical space. By car, it is largely immaterial whether a store is five or
fifteen kilometres away, as long as there is plenty of parking (Soderstrom 150, 212). Places become functions of
time, and time becomes impersonal and abstract. "Abstract space relates negatively to that which underpins it-namely, the historical and religio-political spheres," and positively to its consequences, "technology, applied
sciences, knowledge bound to power," which obliterate differences in global and homogenizing networks; it is the
"home" of the abstract "one" (l'on) who is no one in particular (Lefebvre 50-51). In this space, "time is money,"
that is, "it is consumed, used up, and that is all" (Lefebvre 95-96). Far from giving us more free time, "the
multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible
to maximize the time and place for production [and consumption] and minimize the unstructured travel time
in between" (Solnit 10). When time is erased in this fashion, place--as a space "that has been made room for,"
where we gather together the things and people that belong together because of mutual concerns and shared
history--disappears (Heidegger, "Building" 154-55). The space of high-speed global networks of finance,
transportation, and communications, planned by engineers of "territory, communication and speed" (Foucault
244), connects Kamloops to the world in a "frantic abolition of all distances" that brings only a "uniformity
in which everything is neither far nor near" to us and our sense of belonging (Heidegger, "Thing" 165-66).
There can be no nearness and no neighbourhood when "in the absence of distance, everything becomes equal
and indifferent" (Heidegger, "Nature" 103-05); technology's abolition of distance is a "refusal of nearness" and
of neighbourhood (103). In the uniformity of Anywhere, "place," as a site where people, things, and activities
belong together or are gathered together, vanishes (Heidegger, "Language" 159-60). Walking makes this
painfully apparent. As Will Self explains, "People always say that you can't walk in American cities--implying that
the very sidewalks curl up in front of your feet, or that the traffic mows you down. But that isn't it: no one walks
through East New York [...] because it's so fucking dull" (54). Everybody knows this is nowhere.
K OF TECHNOLOGY—57/78
WALKING IS SYMBOLIC OF AN ONTOLOGY THAT REJECTS HUMANITY’S DRIVE TO
CONTROL TIME AND SPACE.
BAUGH, 2010 (Bruce, Mosaic, Vol. 43, 2010, “Space and Place: Walking Through Kamloops”,
accessed through Questia)
Walking is then perhaps a privileged mode of encountering space and place, as the walker is a part of the
very fabric of the space being traversed, exposed to the natural and social forces it contains and revealing
those forces through the body's reactions to them: "there is a sense of place that can only be gained on foot"
(Solnit 9). Walking is an act that reveals different aspects of an object in much the way that, Merleau-Ponty
says, the body's senses and capacities for movement and action reveal different aspects of the material world
we inhabit (98-153, 243-98). It is the active engagement of the body in the world, not merely passive
spectatorship but rather, as Rebecca Solnit argues, making and working, a way of "knowing the world
through the body and the body through the world" (29). Walking can become "an investigation, a ritual, a
meditation" (Solnit 3), the mode of investigation par excellence of what Guy Debord calls
"psychogeography," "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment,
consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals," because of the way walking
reveals the ambience of a street or neighbourhood (5).
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WALKING IS AN ONTOLOGICAL ACT THAT CREATES A POSSIBILITY FOR NEW MODES OF
BEING.
BAUGH, 2010 (Bruce, Mosaic, Vol. 43, 2010, “Space and Place: Walking Through Kamloops”, accessed through
Questia)
One might naturally object that these purely personal experiences reveal nothing about the space and place of
Kamloops, that is, the space and place of "anyone." That is correct, if "anyone" is taken to be the impersonal and
anonymous "anyone" who is the object of the bureaucratic city planners and politicians, rather than other real, living
individuals, with their own plans and projects, habits and abilities. My map is purely personal. That does not
mean, though, that such a map is revelatory only for me and opaque and meaningless to everyone else.
Walking and its accompanying thoughts can reveal truths not just about the walker, but about a place and
how we inhabit it. Walking is a kind of thinking and, even when solitary, might reveal truths as universal as
Descartes's solitary thought, "I think, therefore I am." Descartes's contemporary critic Pierre Gassendi countered, "I
walk, therefore I am" (ambulo ergo sum), for as embodied and mobile beings, our acts of walking are as much
a part of our being as thinking (see Descartes 180, 182). Walking is itself a kind of thinking, a way of
perceiving and relating to the world, "intuition in action" (Deleuze and Guattari 409). Jean-Jacques Rousseau
remarked, "I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind works only with my
legs" (Confessions 382); "my body has to be on the move to set my mind going" (158). The mind of the walker
is active and engaged, alive to its surroundings: "when we walk a good deal, we are never dull" (Rousseau,
Emile 312). For Rousseau, to walk is to be free: to set one's own pace and one's own course, to be able to
depart from regular routes, is the way of the philosopher, who examines the environment and its inhabitants
at leisure and from close up (374-75). The thoughts of a walker share the pace of walking, respond to the
effort and ease involved, and are more sensitive and responsive to the surrounding world than those of
someone cocooned in the exclusionary "mobile private space" of a car or carriage (Solnit 67; Rousseau, Emile
374).
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ALT: WALKING (A2—ABLEISM)
ACCUSATIONS OF ABLEISM ASSUME A LEVEL OF OBJECTIVITY THAT OUR ALTERNATIVE
REJECTS.
BAUGH, 2010 (Bruce, Mosaic, Vol. 43, 2010, “Space and Place: Walking Through Kamloops”, accessed through
Questia)
Although such thoughts belong to lived experience and will vary from person to person, they are nonetheless
as universal as are our bodily capabilities. It may be, for example, that the road is steeper for the arthritic
walker than for the young and fit, but the difference between a hill and a flat space relative to the human body is not
personal but general, a function of a body that is not just "mine" but that of any human being capable of walking
(Merleau-Ponty 440). Even the most personal and individual experience has its own universality: the difficulty
encountered by the arthritic walker that constitutes the hill's steepness, the ease of effort that flattens the curves
for the fit athlete, reveal real qualities of the environment, illuminated differently through differing subjective
experiences. These revealed qualities are absolutes at the heart of the relative, as Sartre would say, irreducible
to any form of averaging out of experiences (Sartre, Situations II 15, 243, 251-55, 327).
K OF TECHNOLOGY—60/78
ALT: WALKING (A2—PRIVILEDGE)
THE ALTERNATIVE SHATTERS THE NOTION OF OBJECTIVITY UPON WHICH THE NOTION
OF PRIVILEDGE RESTS. .
BAUGH, 2010 (Bruce, Mosaic, Vol. 43, 2010, “Space and Place: Walking Through Kamloops”,
accessed through Questia)
Walking reveals more than just the rise and fall of the ground; it presents the substance and texture of what
is underfoot (concrete sidewalks, asphalt, dirt paths, mud, sand, snow) and delineates the lived spatial shapes
traversed by the walker, with their rhythms (monotonous flat stretches, the drama of a winding steep path), their
proximity to or remoteness from other people (cars, houses, other pedestrians), their affective qualities (friendly
or hostile, gentle or harsh). The experiences of these things vary according to the characteristics of the walker
(young or old, male or female, fit or out of shape, of some specific race or ethnicity): "All sorts of different
people make use of this [...] path. Their movements are infinitely variable. Their steps betray the multiple
motions of their hearts. The labourer's heavy tread, the young girl's soft footfall, and the murderer in urgent
flight" (Aragon 188-89). In my case, I enjoy what Solnit identifies as the prerequisites of walking for pleasure:
"Free time, a place to go, and a body unhindered by illness or social restraints" (168 and 234). I am privileged
to be male, reasonably fit, white, and middle-aged, and hence both mobile and someone who can either pass
unnoticed or even be greeted in a friendly way by those I encounter; I am less subject to fears or threats than other
walkers. No one, for example, would mistake me for a prostitute or a drug addict, or attack me for being of the
wrong race or skin colour. Mine is then a very particular, determinate experience of walking through Kamloops.
Yet, every walking experience illuminates different real qualities of the environment, different paths
corresponding to different infinitely variable movements, mine no less than others. If, as Solnit suggests, "the
subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings" (3), it is
equally about how we invest particular experiences with universal significance as a "moment" in the process
of truth, a particular act of unveiling that stands (or walks) alongside all the others and claims its own
validity.
K OF TECHNOLOGY—61/78
K OF TECHNOLOGY—62/78
Answers To
K OF TECHNOLOGY—63/78
ONTOLOGY 1st
ONTOLOGY CONSTRUES ACTION—IT IS A PREREQUISITE TO ALL FORMS OF DECISIONMAKING.
DILLON, ‘99 (Michael, “The Scandal of the Refugee: Some Reflections on the ‘Inter’ of International
Relations and Continental Thought,” in Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics, eds. David
Campbell and Michael Shapiro (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) pg. 97-99)
As Heidegger-himself an especially revealing figure of the deep and mutual implication of the philosophical and
the political-never tired of pointing out, the relevance of ontology to all other kinds of thinking is
fundamental and inescapable. For one cannot say anything about that is, without always already having
made assumptions about the is as such. Any mode of thought, in short, always already carries an ontology
sequestered within it. What this ontological turn does to other-regional-modes of thought is to challenge the
ontology within which they operate. The implications of that review reverberate through the entire mode of
thought, demanding a reappraisal as fundamental as the reappraisal ontology has demanded of philosophy. With
ontology at issue, the entire foundations or underpinnings of any mode of thought are rendered
problematic. This applies as much to any modern discipline of thought as it does to the question of
modernity as such, with the exception, it seems, of science, which, having long ago given up the ontological
questioning of when it called itself natural philosophy, appears now, in its industrialized and corporatized form,
to be invulnerable to ontological perturbation. With its foundations at issue, the very authority of a mode of
thought and the ways in which it characterizes the critical issues of freedom and judgment (of what kind of
universe human beings inhabit, how they inhabit it, and what counts as reliable knowledge for them in it) is also
put in question. The very ways in which Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other continental philosophers challenged
Western ontology, simultaneously, therefore reposed the fundamental and inescapable difficulty, or aporia, for
human being of decision and judgment. In other words, whatever ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or
unknowingly, as a human being you still have to act. Whether or not you know or acknowledge it, the
ontology you subscribe to will construe the problem of action for you in one way rather than another.
You may think ontology is some arcane question of philosophy, but Nietzsche and Heidegger showed that
it intimately shapes not only a way of thinking, but a way of being, a form of life. Decision, a fortiori
political decision, in short, is no mere technique. It is instead a way of being that bears an understanding
of Being, and of the fundaments of the human way of being within it. This applies, indeed applies most, to
those mock-innocent political slaves who claim only to be technocrats of decision making. While Certain
continental thinkers like Blumenberg and Lowith, for example, were prompted to interrogate or challenge the
modern’s claim to being distinctively “modern,” and others such as Adorno questioned its enlightened
credentials, philosophers like Derrida and Levinas pursued the metaphysical implications (or rather the
implications for metaphysics) of the thinking initiated by Kierkegaard, as well as by Nietzsche and Heidegger.
The violence of metaphysics, together with another way of thinking about the question of the ethical, emerged as
the defining theme of their work. Other, notably Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Bataille turned the
thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger into a novel kind of social and political critique of both the regimes and the
effects of power that have come to distinguish late modern times; they concentrated, in detail, upon how the
violence identified by these other thinkers manifested itself not only in the mundane practices of modern life, but
also in those areas that claimed to be most free of it, especially the freedom and security of the subject as well as
its allied will to truth and knowledge. Questioning the appeal to the secure self-grounding common to both its
epistemic structures and its political imagination, and in the course of reinterrogating both the political character
of the modern and the modern character of the political, this problematization of modernity has begun to prompt
an ontopolitcally driven reappraisal of modern political thought.
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ONTOLOGY COMES FIRST—THE QUESTION OF BEING IS THE FOUNDATION OF
KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE. UNDERSTANDING THE PROCESS BY WHICH WE
INTERPRET TRUTH IS A PREREQUISITE TO THE TRUTH ITSELF.
JEROME, 92 (Miller, Professor of Philosophy at Salisbury State University in Maryland, “In
the Throe of Wonder: Intimations of the Sacred in a Post-Modern World”, pg. 197-198, 1992)
This is a question each must answer for herself since it involves nothing less than deciding whether to be
oneself. In my judgment, no one can take seriously the whole process of intelligent inquiry and rational
reflection which culminates in making judgments and not take seriously those primal experiences in which
all inquiry originates. To be fully intelligent, fully rational, we must side with wonder and against the selfevidence of the present- at- hand, with horror and against the recoil that wants to flee from nothingness, with awe and against
the self- importance that refuses to acknowledge the possibility of there being a reality greater than
ourselves. The decision to trust these experiences as the primal sources of knowing is more crucial than
our affirmation of any proposition. For theories and propositions themselves owe their existence to the
creative eros of intelligence which is itself set in motion by the unknown which these experiences alone
make accessible to us. None of the specific realizations to which inquiry leads us, no matter how important
they may be, can rival the transformative effect of our primal decision to turn from the given to the eros of
questioning. That turn is our fundamental conversion. But the distinguishing characteristic of this conversion is that
instead of providing us with an unshakable foundation of an unquestionable truth on which to base all we
think and do, it pulls all foundation out from under us and throws what we thought were our certainties
into question. It requires our giving up all the hope we ever had of grounding our thought on an arche
that can be known directly, without having to trust ourselves to the uncontrollable, unpredictable throe of inquiry. To make this
conversion is not to acquire a dogma but to become a questioner . But we cannot enter fully into the ordeal of
questioning unless we allow ourselves to be bound by its own immanent imperatives. If we leave our safe harbor and venture
into the unknown which both fascinates and horrifies, we cannot possibly know where we are going. But
exploring is different from pointless drifting- not because the explorer has a destination but because her
movement is governed by the throe of the unknown itself . The fact that the given does not provide us with
an immovable truth on which to erect the edifice of our thought does not mean, as the pragmatists of postmodern culture claim, that the idea of truth itself has to be jettisoned . Indeed, it is only our habit of equating truth with
the given which would lead us to jump to that conclusion. But if being is not the given, is not the from- which of wonder,
horror, or awe, if, rather, being is the unknown toward- which of all our questions, then the knowledge of
being becomes possible only when we relinquish our hold on the given and open ourselves to those truths
which cannot be reached except by trusting the eros of inquiry . The post- modern dismissal of truth as a philosophical
objective, far from demonstrating a radically deconstructive approach to traditional foundationalism, only confirms that the post- modern
pragmatist remains wedded to its presuppositions. He has simply despaired of achieving what the foundationalist still hopes to accomplish.
The underlying cause of such despair is our refusal to give up the dream of having the truth given to us. To
relinquish that dream is a kind of death, and requires a willingness to suffer nothingness. Such suffering is intrinsic to the very nature of the
turn- we cannot make the turn unless we experience it. In the experience of wonder, nothingness remains implicit; in horror it becomes
conscious and is explicitly addressed; in awe it is fully acknowledged and finally embraced. Immanent within each of these
experiences is an imperative to let go of that from which they wrench us. Thus we can become explorers
only to the degree that we are willing to surrender our hold on life. That we can live fully only by letting
go of everything and becoming destitute, that our enthusiasm for life can be heartfelt only if our hearts are broken open- this is
the paradox which lies at the crux of that turn which is constitutive of our very being, the turn which, when we make it, engages us in the
throe of questioning and so converts us into lovers of wisdom. To surrender to that throe unconditionally, to be willing
follow it wherever it leads is not an imperative just for the philosopher. It is the only way to be fully
human.
to
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ONTOLOGY COMES 1ST—ADDRESSING QUESTIONS OF BEING IS A PRE-REQUISITE TO
RESOLVING VIOLENT US/THEM BINARIES.
RAE, ‘10 (Gavin, PhD in Philosophy @ The University of Warwick “Re-Thinking the
Human: Heidegger, Fundamental Ontology, and Humanism” Hum Stud (2010) 33:23–39)
At the start of his seminal work on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, Hubert Dreyfus notes that ‘‘ Heidegger claims that the
tradition has misdescribed and misinterpreted human being. Therefore, as a first step in his project, he attempts to work
out a fresh analysis of what it is to be human’’ (1991, p. 1). Importantly, however, while the human being plays a crucially important role in
Heidegger’s project, it does not have fundamental importance; as we will see, a study of the human being is a necessary
precursor to the study of that which Heidegger holds to be fundamentally important: being. Heidegger’s attempt to re-think
the human being in-line with the question of being leads him to criticise traditional conceptions of the
human on two related accounts: first, that they forget the question of being; and secondly, that they are underpinned
by a binary logic that forestalls any thinking of being. To correct what he sees as the fundamental failing of traditional
accounts of the human being, Heidegger, in Being and Time, emphasises the primary importance of being . However, the
means through which being can be understood is by first analysing a specific type of being, namely, the human being; what Heidegger calls
‘‘Dasein’’ (1962, p. 27). This brings Heidegger to propose an ontological analysis of the human being as the means to understand being. As
Tom Rockmore (1995, pp. 95–96) notes, however, frequently the second movement to being was forgotten or ignored and Heidegger’s
thought was interpreted as a philosophical anthropology of the human being. For Heidegger, however, while philosophical
anthropology can tell us something about the human being, it can not tell us the whole truth. Disclosing
the truth about the human being requires that the being of the human being be disclosed. But Heidegger
does not simply suggest that traditional philosophical accounts of the human being have forgotten and/or ignored the question of being.
He goes further by suggesting that traditional philosophical accounts of the human being cannot think of being
because their thinking is constrained within a logic of binary oppositions. Most notable of these binary
oppositions is that between essence and existence. For Heidegger, the human being has traditionally been
thought to possess a fixed defining essence that either determines human being or that exists as a potential
to be made actual. The problem with this conception of the human being is, according to Heidegger, that it fails
to understand that the human being is defined by existential ‘‘possibility’’ (1962, p. 33). Its existential possibility
means that the truth of the human being cannot be captured within fixed conceptual boundaries; the open-ended ‘‘nature’’ of the human
being is defined by its ‘‘existence’’ (Heidegger 1962, pp. 32, 68). However, the problem with defining the human being in terms of its
existence was that it appeared to many commentators that Heidegger was simply inverting the privileging of essence constitutive of
traditional conceptions of the human being. Such thinking misinterprets Heidegger’s thought. It assumes that Heidegger’s notion of
existence is the existence that has been thought to exist in opposition to essence. For Heidegger, defining the human being by its existence
does not mean that the human being is simply defined by its actions; by existence, Heidegger means something very specific. This specificity
can only be understood by remembering his privileging of being. Defining the human being by its existence means, for
Heidegger, not that the human being is what it does, but that the human being exists in such a relation to
being that it, and it alone amongst beings, is able to disclose being.
K OF TECHNOLOGY—66/78
PERM FAILS
PERM FAILS: EVEN THE BENEVOLENT USE OF TECHNOLOGICAL THINKING DESTROYS
VALUE TO LIFE.
HERSHOCK, ’01 (Peter D. Hershock, East-West Center Asian Studies Development Program, 2001,
published by East-West Center Asian Studies Development Program,
http://www.buddhismtoday.com/english/sociology/020-changing.htm)
The effectiveness and efficiency of "hard," control-biased technologies depend on our using natural
laws -- horizons of possibility -- as fulcrums for leveraging or dictating changes in the structure of our
circumstances. Unlike improvised contributions to changes taking place in our situation, dictating the terms of
change effectively silences our situational partners. Technological authority thus renders our circumstances
mute and justifies ignoring the contributions that might be made by the seasons or the spiritual force
of the mountains to the meaning -- the direction of movement -- of our ongoing patterns of
interdependence. With the "perfection" of technically-mediated control, our wills would know no
limit. We would be as gods, existing with no imperatives, no external compulsions, and no priorities.
We would have no reason to do one thing first or hold one thing, and not another, as most sacred or
dear. Such "perfection" is, perhaps, as fabulous and unattainable as it is finally depressing. Yet the vast
energies of global capital are committed to moving in its direction, for the most part quite uncritically. The
consequences -- as revealed in the desecration and impoverishing of both 'external' and 'internal' wilderness (for
instance, the rainforests and our imaginations) -- are every day more evident. The critical question we must answer
is whether the "soft" technologies of legally-biased and controlled social change commit us to an
equivalent impoverishment and desecration.
K OF TECHNOLOGY—67/78
PERM FAILS—WORKING WITHIN THE STATE REIFIES TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT AND
DESTROYS VALUE TO LIFE.
HERSHOCK, ‘99 (East-West Center, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Vol. 6,
jbe.gold.ac.uk/6/hershock991.html)
The trouble is that, like other technologies biased toward control, the more successful legislation becomes, the more
it renders itself necessary. Because it aims at rigorous definition -- at establishing hard boundaries or limits -crossing the threshold of legislative utility means creating conditions under which the definition of freedom becomes
so complex as to be self-defeating. Taken to its logical end, legally-biased social activism is thus liable to
effect an infinite density of protocols for maintaining autonomy, generating a matrix of limits on
discrimination that would finally be conducive to what might be called "axiological entropy" -- a state
in which movement in any direction is equally unobstructed and empty of dramatic potential.
Contrary to expectations, complete "freedom of choice" would not mean the elimination of all impediments
to meaningful improvisation, but rather an erasure of the latter's conditions of possibility. The effectiveness
and efficiency of "hard," control-biased technologies depend on our using natural laws -- horizons of
possibility -- as fulcrums for leveraging or dictating changes in the structure of our circumstances .
Unlike improvised contributions to changes taking place in our situation, dictating the terms of change effectively
silences our situational partners. Technological authority thus renders our circumstances mute and justifies
ignoring the contributions that might be made by the seasons or the spiritual force of the mountains to the
meaning -- the direction of movement -- of our ongoing patterns of interdependence. With the
"perfection" of technically-mediated control, our wills would know no limit. We would be as gods,
existing with no imperatives, no external compulsions, and no priorities. We would have no reason to do one
thing first or hold one thing, and not another, as most sacred or dear. Such "perfection" is, perhaps, as
fabulous and unattainable as it is finally depressing. Yet the vast energies of global capital are committed to
moving in its direction, for the most part quite uncritically. The consequences -- as revealed in the desecration and
impoverishing of both 'external' and 'internal' wilderness (for instance, the rainforests and our imaginations) -- are
every day more evident. The critical question we must answer is whether the "soft" technologies of legally-biased
and controlled social change commit us to an equivalent impoverishment and desecration. The analogy between the
dependence of technological progress on natural laws and that of social activism on societal laws is by no means
perfect. Except among a scattering of philosophers and historians of science, for example, the laws of nature are not
viewed as changeable artifacts of human culture. But for present purposes, the analogy need only focus our attention
on the way legal institutions -- like natural laws -- do not prescriptively determine the shape of all things to
come, but rather establish generic limits for what relationships or states of affairs are factually admissible.
Laws that guarantee certain "freedoms" necessarily also prohibit others. Without the fulcrums of
unallowable acts, the work of changing a society would remain as purely idealistic as using wishful thinking
to move mountains. Changing legal institutions at once forces and enforces societal reform.
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PERM FAILS—FORECLOSES ANY POSSIBILITY OF ETHICS AND REPRODUCES
HIERARCHIES OF CONTROL.
HERSHOCK, ‘99 (East-West Center, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Vol. 6,
jbe.gold.ac.uk/6/hershock991.html)
According to this distinction, much of what has been called "social activism" has been correlated with and promoted
an increasingly societal movement of our narration -- the realization of an increasingly rational life-world,
globalizing economic "development," the fragmentation of community and family, and the legal
consolidation of individual and class rights. As such, it has ably secured and managed the interests of
factually subordinate but ideally autonomous 'individuals' who are themselves the end products of
both a technological lineage biased toward control and those political, philosophical, and religions
institutions that have systematized this bias. A truly social form of activism would by contrast be
oriented toward enhancing our capacity for uniquely responsive contribution, not increasing
capacities for living "as we want." It would express an ethics of responsibility, not one of protest or
refusal; a bias toward improvisation and the unprecedented, not regulation and predictability ; a focus
on realizing what it means to have no-self and to refrain from discharging blame. Rather than legally
ignoring our uniqueness, by aiming at dramatically satisfying interdependence, truly social activism would
facilitate improvising creative and surprising communities in which our differences always and thankfully
make a difference. The karmic implications of these two forms of activism are profoundly disparate. Like
technologies oriented toward control, to the extent that societal activism is successful, it brings about the conditions
of its continued necessity and success. In much the same way that our technological tradition has promised,
but not delivered, a life of ease and leisure,[4]societal activism promises an end of inequality and imposition
while instituting a need for ever finer institutional distinctions, definitions, and constraints. Societal
activism produces legal horizons. That is its business. And the more effective it is, the more effective it must be. Just
as getting better at getting what we want invariably means getting better at wanting, getting better at legally insuring
rights and freedoms for generic populations will mean developing further legal mechanisms for specifying and
enforcing those legally defined rights and freedoms. But if regulated freedom stands in need of "external"
enforcement -- that is, new patterns of policing and not just new policies -- it establishes fertile ground for
new hierarchies of control. Those institutions which police the enforcement of legally won rights and
freedoms will also need policing. The circle is, again, finally a vicious one. Freedom becomes an end-in-itself
-- an abstract status -- that in an irreducibly dynamic world can only be maintained by dramatic
disengagement or the loss of meaning. Instead of concentrating on patterns of conduct oriented toward the
institutional guarantee of generic rights and statuses, the basic strategy of a truly social activism is to foster
appreciative and contributory virtuosity -- primarily through encouraging practices for continuously relinquishing
our horizons for relevance, responsibility, and readiness.[5] The karmic ramifications of this shift away from
institutional control are both radical and profound. First, if consciousness is understood as irreducibly relational,
appreciation cannot be reduced to an emotionally decorative and dramatically superfluous acceptance of things as
they are. To the contrary, appreciation means attending to or relating with things in such a way the value of
our situation continuously increases or appreciates. Karmically, this not only develops the conditions for living
in circumstances that are increasingly valuable, but being more and more valuably placed within them. Moreover,
because our situation is always dramatic, the practice of appreciation is inseparable from discerning and attuning
ourselves to our situation's potential for superlative meaning -- the realization of dramatic and contributory
creativity. That is, in sharp contrast with the karma of control–oriented conduct, the better we get at
contributing to our situation in a dramatically satisfying way, the more opportunity we will have to do so. Truly
social activism means realizing our situation as one of horizonless value and opportunity through amplifying the
unique capacities each of us has for sui-shih-ying-yung or "according with our situation, responding as needed." The
result of radically social activism is a dramatic revision of our present circumstances as the bodhima.n.dala or "place
of enlightenment." As implied in this four-character narrative of Ch'an Buddhist enlightenment, increasing virtuosity
in contribution (dĀnapĀramitĀ, or perfection of offering) is inseparable from increasing virtuosity in appreciation
(praj~nĀpĀramitĀ, or the perfection of wisdom). If appreciation is not a subjective decoration of our
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circumstances, neither is it an attainment that comes -- as is sometimes maintained -- only after we have
established sufficiently comfortable and edifying circumstances for "serious" meditative discipline and the
exercise of compassion to be "really" possible. Again, if consciousness consists of patterns of interdependence
from which we abstract such things as 'individual beings' and their 'environments', there is no precedent
for assuming that the perfection of wisdom depends on the realization of certain material comforts or
that factually altering our circumstances is more effective or basic than changing minds. In a thoroughly
karmic world, attention and responsive activity are separable -- if at all -- only on heuristic grounds, not ontological
ones. Changing how we place ourselves in attending a situation is already to transform it. Appreciative virtuosity
directly alters the complexion of our interdependence with all things -- changing at once our 'world' and 'who we are
within it'.
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PERM FAILS: THE AFF’S RELATIONSHIP TO TECHNOLOGY PRECCLUDES THE POSSIBILITY
OF ALTERNATIVE ONTOLOGIES.
BOTHA, ‘02(Catherine, Dept of Philosophy @ Univ of Pretoria, “Heidegger, Technology, and
Ecology,” South African Journal of Philosophy, Vol 22, Issue 2)
Technology is ontologically devastating, because it usurps all other modes of revealing. With every
thing standing in reserve for our use, “distance” disapears (Heidegger, 1993:331). Here, Heidegger is
referring to distance as an existential sense of our proximity to horizons: those between earth and sky,
mortals and immortals. This blurring of borders is the main indicator of an unchecked
anthropomorphism. This anthropomorphism that objectifies the world in order to exploit it is also one
that creates the world in its own image, where every thing that human kind comes into contact with becomes
an extension of it self. Yet, human being as Dasein necessarily inhabits a “there” and so can never encounter
only her self (Heidegger, 1993:332). Since human being is a thinking being-in-the-world, a situated and
limited being, Heidegger can claim that the ultimate victory of tech no logical human kind is a delusion.
Its sovereignty would, how ever, not be any less catastrophic, be cause delusion may be come accepted as
reality. Human nature and human freedom, in Heidegger's special sense of the word (1993:330), still lie in
the balance. The Danger. The danger, there fore, is for Heidegger not the potential physical self-annihilation
of humanity, but rather that intensive technological production will over power human's capacity for
diverse modes of disclosure. Philosophic thought would be re placed with utilitarian cognition; artistic
creativity would atrophy as a result of end less innovative production, and political action would be obviated
by social en engineering. Heidegger's fear is that some day, calculative thinking would be accepted and
practised as the only way of thinking. Calculative thinking is the type of thought that deals only with the
quantifiable and the measurable. “Calculation refuses to let any thing appear except what is count able ...
Calculative thinking compels it self into a compulsion to master every thing on the basis of the consequential
correctness of its proce dure” (Heidegger, 1998:235). Most disturb ing is that technological calculation and
innovation may satisfy our needs to such an extent that we would not even notice what we had lost.
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PERM FAILS—THE AFF COMMODIFIES THE NOTION OF BEING TO CREATE A
TOTALIZING MODE OF THOUGHT THAT CROWDS OUT OTHER ONTOLOGICAL
POSSIBILITIES.
McWHORTER, 92 (Ladelle, Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Richmond,
Heidegger and the earth: Essays in environmental philosophy, Thomas Jefferson University
Press, pp. 6)
The danger of a managerial approach to the world lies not, then, in what it knows - not in its penetration
into the secrets of galactic emergence or nuclear fission - but in what it forgets, what it itself conceals. It
forgets that any other truths are possible, and it forgets that the belonging together of revealing with
concealing is forever beyond the power of human management. We can never have, or know, it all; we can
never manage everything. What is now especially dangerous about this sense of our own managerial
power, born of forgetfulness, is that it results in our viewing the world as mere resources to be stored or
consumed. Managerial or technological thinkers, Heidegger says, view the earth, the world, all things as
mere Bestand, standing-reserve. All is here simply for human use. No plant, no animal, no ecosystem has a
life of its own, has any significance, apart from human desire and need. Nothing, we say, other than
human beings, has any intrinsic value. All things are instruments for the working out of human will.
Whether we believe that God gave Man dominion or simply that human might (sometimes called intelligence or
rationality) in the face of ecological fragility makes us always right, we managerial, technological thinkers tend
to believe that the earth is only a stockpile or a set of commodities to be managed, bought, and sold. The forest
is timber; the river, a power source. Even people have become resources, human resources, personnel to
be managed, or populations to be controlled. This managerial, technological mode of revealing, Heidegger
says, is embedded in and constitutive of Western culture and has been gathering strength for centuries.
Now it is well on its way to extinguishing all other modes of revealing, all other ways of being human and
being earth. It will take tremendous effort to think through this danger, to think past it and beyond,
tremendous courage and resolve to allow thought of the mystery to come forth; thought of the
inevitability, along with revealing, of concealment, of loss, of ignorance; thought of the occurring of things
and their passage as events not ultimately under human control. And of course even the call to allow this
thinking - couched as it so often must he in a grammatical imperative appealing to an agent - is itself a
paradox, the first that must be faced and allowed to speak to us and to shatter us as it scatters thinking in
new directions, directions of which we have not yet dreamed, directions of which we may never dream.
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PERM FAILS: TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT FORECLOSES THE POSSIBILITY OF OTHER
KINDS OF THOUGHT.
FALZON, ’02 (Christopher, “Philosophy Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Philosophy”,
pg. 167, Chapter 5: MODERN TIMES—SOCIETY, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY,
ROUTLEDGE, accessed through Questia)
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A2: “TECH INEVITABLE”
TECHNOLOGY IS NOT AN INEVITABLE, NEUTRAL THING—IT IS THE MATERIALIZATION
OF WESTERN METAPHYSICS.
KATEB, 97 Professor of Politics, Princeton (George, Technology and philosophy,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_n3_v64/ai_19952031/pg_6)
Heidegger and Arendt amplify the story told by Weber, and also told, well before him, by Thoreau and Melville and others in the United
States. In such essays as "The Age of the World Picture" (1938), "The Question Concerning Technology" (1949-50), and "Science and
Reflection" (1954) (all three in Heidegger, 1977), Heidegger finds the origin of modern technology in Western
metaphysics. He emphasizes the outlook of thinkers as lawgivers, and sees in them the true bearers of the passions and drives and
motives that are the foundation of modern technology, rather than assigning the inspiration to common Western humanity as a whole.
When philosophers are not content to awaken wonder at the world, but instead strive to remake the world, they sometimes succeed.
Their greatest success is modern technology. Modern technology is, to repeat our phrase, a certain relation to nature or
reality or the world; it is therefore not merely the inevitable application of that immense scientific knowledge
that grows once humanity is rid of communal or religious superstition and repression. Certainly that is part of the story,
but for Heidegger it is not the principal part. Rather, modern technology is the materialization of Western
metaphysics, which is the parent of both modern technology and modern science. Indeed, the technological
aim drives the development of modern science. Western metaphysics is just one interpretation of reality, just as its offspring--modern
science and modern technology--are particular relations to reality, to what is given. Heidegger means to show that Western metaphysics-and metaphysics includes theology--is a continuously if sometimes covertly reiterated Platonism. By his method of exegesis, Heidegger
tries to persuade us that Platonic metaphysics converts the world into a picture for the mind's eye, and by doing that, prepares Western
humanity to lose sight of the mere fact of existence, the unsummoned thereness of reality, of the given. Metaphysics inveterately reduces
the world. The purpose of the reduction is to make the world intelligible and hence manageable, fit to be worked on, and made ready to
have practical order imposed on it. The world, as given, is disliked; it is disliked in large part just because it is given; the dislike
engenders anger, and from anger comes rebellion. Western humanity is and has always been at war with given reality, to a much greater
degree than the rest of humanity, and in a remarkably distinct manner. Technology is the most spectacular campaign in
the great war waged by Western humanity against nature or reality as given . To repeat: the deepest cause
of that war is not scarcity, not the failure of nature to make better provision for a necessitous
humanity, but, instead, a Western willfulness, a will to power, to mastery, an overflow of energy that
wants to shake the world to pieces and make it over. The craving is either to put the human stamp on reality or at least
to rescue nature from the absence of any honestly detectable stamp, any detectable natural purpose or intention. As Nietzsche says:
humanity, in its asceticism, "wants to become master not over something in life but over life itself, over its
most profound, powerful, and basic conditions " (Nietzsche, 1969, sec. 11, pp. 117-18). Western humanity cannot let
things be on their own terms or coax gently from them their own best potentiality; it is so far unable to practice what Heidegger calls
Gelassenheit. Western metaphysics is the sponsor of anger and hence of repeated violence towards nature.
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THERE IS NOTHING INEVITABLE ABOUT OUR METAPHYSICAL RELATIONSHIP TO
TECHNOLOGY.
KATEB, 97 (Professor of Politics, Princeton (George, Technology and philosophy,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_n3_v64/ai_19952031/pg_3)
I find in Weber, Heidegger, and Arendt the following themes, all of which are first stated or suggested by Weber in The Protestant Ethic and
the Spins of Capitalism (1958[1904-5]). All the themes go against both philosophical Marxism and against common sense. First, it is a fact
worthy of meditation that, in its origin, modern technology is not a human-species-wide phenomenon, but a
distinctively Western one. Although the West was and is indebted to the scientific and technical achievements
of other regions and cultures, it is responsible for modern technology . In the three thinkers, and others as well, the
Western distinctiveness is rendered ambivalently: celebration and profound disquiet are mixed together in the analysis of both the feats of
prowess and the underlying passions that brought those feats into existence. I would add that such ambivalence is one of the most prominent
features in a lot of the writing about technology. A second theme is that, just as modern technology was not a universal
phenomenon, so there was nothing inevitable about it in the West. All three philosophers have a keen feeling for
accident and contingency, for roads not taken, for opportunities either not accepted or forced into being. A
third theme is that the passions, drives, and motives that helped to promote technology are , to a significant extent, instigated
or inspired by ideas, religious or philosophical, that manage to be absorbed into the self-conception that many individuals
in a cross-national cultural setting hold of themselves. Modern technology is not only applied science; even more
profoundly, it is philosophy or theology enacted. Philosophers and theologians are the originators. Other people go along or are carried
along, because of the original reasons, or because of their own varied reasons, half-reasons, and nonreasons. The long and short of it is that
only in the West, but contingently so, modern technology emerged, and did so because of the birth and spread of hard, abstract ideas that are
not explainable in the Marxist manner as inevitable reflexive responses to material circumstances. And it has emerged and continues to
flourish as a special and particular project; what is more, a project of excess and extremism. The modern West, best seen as the creator
of modern technology, is not only distinctive, it is anomalous in comparison to the rest of the world ; and the anomaly is
stupendous and perhaps monstrous. The marvel lies not only in the results of the project but, to begin with, in the fact that the project of
modern technology was ever undertaken and then sustained. Humanity in the West has had a certain kind of relation to
nature and human beings not to be found elsewhere, or found in a much diluted form.
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A2: MARX
TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT IS THE ONLY VIABLE STARTING POINT FOR CRITICISM—
MARXIST THEORIES MASK THE DEHUMANIZATION INHERENT IN TECHNOLOGICAL
DETERMINISM.
DAY, ’88 (“Democratic Theory and Technological Society”, Introduction, pg. xi-xii, accessed
through Questia)
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A2: RATIONALITY
RATIONALITY AND CAUSALITY ARE DISCURSIVE TOOLS USED BY THE ELITES TO
CONTINUE IRRATIONAL FORMS OF ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION.
MURPHY, ’94 (Raymond, “Rationality and Nature: A Sociological Inquiry into a Changing
Relationship”, Chapter 1: Rationalization Under the Premise of Plasticity, accessed through
Questia)
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AFF
K OF TECHNOLOGY—78/78
AFF: PERM SOLVES
PERM: DO BOTH—A PRAGMATIC RELATIONSHIP TO TECHNOLOGY SOLVES THE AFF
AND OPENS SPACE FOR NEW WAYS OF RELATING TO ONTOLOGY.
MARGOLIS, ’06 (Joseph, “Pragmatism’s Advantage” 2006, Temple University
http://www.arsdisputandi.org/index.html?http://www.arsdisputandi.org/publish/articles/000126/i
ndex.html)
It was, of course, originally a parochial success, though it did gain adherents abroad; and it began to attract a wider Eurocentric interest in its
short second life, despite a distinctly poor showing at home. We may even speculate about a third career. For pragmatism has begun,
possibly for the first time in its history, to be seriously treated as a distinct alternative to – possibly more than an
alternative, perhaps a connective tissue spanning the great divide between – analytic and continental
philosophy. At any rate, it now counts as a distinctly strong constellation of doctrines and strategies
potentially capable of contesting the hegemonies of the day—within both the English-language analytic
movement of the last half of the twentieth century and the trailing forces of the Cartesian, Kantian, Husserlian, and
Heideggerean movements of late continental Europe. It would not be unreasonable to say that pragmatism’s promise at the
present time is a function of the fatigue of its principal competitors and of the economy and fluency with which it can coopt the principal
strengths that remain attractive among the many movements of Eurocentric philosophy, without betraying its own conviction. Rightly
perceived, pragmatism’s best feature lies with its post-Kantian ancestry coupled with its opposition to the extreme forms of analytic
scientism with which it has shared a gathering sense of conceptual rigor. It forms, for that reason, a natural bridge between
analytic and continental philosophy, for rigor is not inherently scientistic. In my opinion, none of the three
movements mentioned (hardly unified within themselves) is separately likely to overtake its own limitations or incorporate the best work of
the others in a compelling way. Still, within its own conceptual space, pragmatism favors a constructive realism drawn in
as spare a way as possible from post-Kantian resources, freed from every form of cognitive, rational, and
practical privilege, opposed to imagined necessities de re and de cogitatione, committed to the continuities
of animal nature and human culture, confined to the existential and historical contingencies of the human
condition, and open in principle to plural, partial, perspectived, provisional, even non-converging ways of
understanding what may be judged valid in any and every sort of factual and normative regard . There may
well be a touch of reportorial distortion in going beyond these clichés; but, risking that, it would not be unreasonable to say that pragmatists
believe that the analysts are likely to favor scientism and the continentals, to exceed the bounds of naturalism, and that both tendencies are
more extreme or extravagant than their policies require. In this fairly direct sense, pragmatism’s strength lies in the possibility of a
rapprochement by way of the ‘corrections’ mentioned. It could never have claimed such an advantage earlier, had not the main efforts of
analytic and continental philosophy perseverated too long in their obviously vulnerable commitments. Pragmatism has persevered as well, of
course, but it seems poised now for a larger venture.
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AFF: ALT FAILS
ALT FAILS—WITHDRAWAL FROM TECHNOLOGY LEADS TO EXTINCTION.
ZIMMERMAN,’89 (Philosophy Professor, Tulane (Michael, Introduction To Deep
Ecology, http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC22/Zimmrman.htm)
A critique I hear often is that deep ecologists want to return to a way of life that's totally tied to the
rhythms of the Earth , but at this point we have so disturbed those rhythms that we can't even
consider going back. To retreat to a pre-technological state would in fact be dooming the Earth to
destruction, whereas what we need now is to be more engaged in trying to repair the damage. How would a deep
ecologist respond? Michael: I think deep ecologists have mixed emotions about that, but I would agree with that
critique. For example, if we stopped our development at the current level, it would be a catastrophe,
because our production methods are so dirty and inefficient and destructive that if we keep this
up, we're really in trouble. Some deep ecologists say that it would be all for the best if the industrial world
were just to collapse, despite all the human suffering that would entail. If such a thing ever occurs, some people have
suggested, we could never revive industrialization again because the raw materials are no longer easily accessible. I
hope that doesn't happen, and yet it may happen. Now, social ecologists say that deep ecologists flirt with
fascism when they talk about returning to a n "organic" social system that is "attuned to nature ."
They note that reactionary thinkers often contrast the supposedly "natural" way of life - which to them means social
Darwinism and authoritarian social systems - with "modernity," which in politial terms means progressive social
movements like liberalism and Marxism. But deep ecologists recognize this danger. They call not for a regression to
collective authoritarianism, but for the evolution of a mode of awareness that doesn't lend itself to authoritarianism
of any kind. So I think the only thing we can do is to move forward. We need to develop our efficiency
and production methods so that we'll be able to take some of the pressure off the environment .
We also need to develop increasing wealth for the highly populated countries so their populations will go down. [Ed.
Note: See Lappé and Schurman, "The Population Puzzle," in IC #21.] There's a necessity for new
technology . The question is, can it be made consistent with our growing awareness that the planet is really
hurting?
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A RETURN TO PRE-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY LEADS TO PATRIARCHY, POVERTY AND
TOTALITARIANISM.
LEWIS, ‘92 (Martin W. Lewis, Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of
Radical Environmentalism, Duke University Press Durham and London Dystopia
of Craft production, 1992, professor of geography at George Washington
University pg 127-126, http://www.brontaylor.com/courses/pdf/Lewis-Technophobia.pdf)
Since eco-radicals idealize craftwork and disparage industrial produc- tion, it is first necessary to
examine the social relations and environmen- tal impacts associated with manufacturing prior to the
industrial revolu- tion. An appropriate starting point is Europe's medieval guild system, which several
writers have touted as exemplifying social and ecological harmony. If the guild system can be proved socially
exploitative, an important element of the eco-radical attack on industrialism will be discredited. Ecoradicals are correct in arguing that working conditions within the guilds were, on average, far more humane than
those imposed on the first industrial laborers. But medieval guilds most certainly were not the caring,
familial institutions pictured in eco-radical fantasies. Many were authoritarian, if paternal,
organizations; apprentices and journeymen worked firmly under the fists of their masters, and not all
graduated to the status of independent craftsmen. Moreover, in heavy proto-industrial crafts, like
metalwork, labor was hardly safe, let alone pleasant. The medieval system of craft production is revealed to be
even more objectionable when examined within its social context. The medieval world that made small-scale,
socially organized craft production possible was rigidly hierarchical. The vast majority of Europeans in
this period were impoverished peasants unable to buy anything produced by the guilds. In fact, until the
1820s members of the working class in France typically purchased their clothing second hand; only with the
introduc- tion of modem manufacturing and retailing could they afford to buy new goods (Reddy 1984:96) In
preindustrial times, Femand Braudel reminds us, the poor "lived in a state of almost complete
deprivation" (1981 :283). Sturdy craft objects were destined for the elite: the landed aristocracy, the
ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the small but rising bourgeoisie within the towns. The entire guild system
was founded on an extraordinarily inequitable distribution of resources. This should not surprise us; even
today, craft goods (as well as many "natural" products) are purchased primarily by the rich, the only group
able to afford them. It was precisely because medieval and early modem craft production was so
inefficient that only the truly wealthy could afford more than an extremely meager store of material
possessions (Braudel 1981). While one could argue that poverty was widespread because the
aristocracy monopolized consumption, it must be realized that the elite constituted a minuscule
fraction of the population (Braudel1982:466-7%). Moreover, even many medieval and early modem aristocrats
were not as wealthy as we enjoy picturing them. In preindustrial Europe there was nothing at all oxymoronic
in the phrase "impoverished noble"; some were even reduced to begging for living (Blum 1 9 8 7 : ~ ) .
The material deprivation of medieval Europeans was not founded on a spiritual appreciation of the world
uncorrupted by base material desires, as some em-radicals seem to believe. Quite the contrary, material goods were
actually valued more highly, relative to human life, than they are in modem society. As Braudel(1ggo:553J writes:
''In the thirteenth century, '30 meters of Flanders cloth sold a t Marseille [reached] two to four times the price of a
Saracen woman slave! [Such a price] may leave us 'ponder- ing the mentality of the age, the price set on human life,
the extraordi- nary value placed on a length of drapery from the Netherlands, and the considerable profits to be made
from it by producers and negociants.'" In select preindusuial societies, to be sure, certain social classes accumulated great hordes of material wealth, and in a few favored soci- eties, such as in the seventeenth-century
Netherlands, prosperous mid- dle classes grew to substantial proportions (Schama 1988). But such wealth as did
exist was made possible only by large-scale transregional exchange or imperial plundering. In the immediate
preindustrial period, much of Europe's prosperity rested on trade with, and exploitation of, the rest of the world.
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Even in the medieval period, trade networks spanned the subcontinent and extended ultimately to many far reaches
of the globe. Bioregionalism was never an operative principle in the world of the guild. One should also
recognize that centuries before the mechanization of cotton spinning, Europe as a whole had been
benefiting from technologi- cal innovations that many eco-radicals would disparage. Historian Jean
Gipel (1976) argues that the first industrial revolution occurred pre- cisely in the Middle Ages. Medieval
engineers and entrepreneurs were already damming rivers to harness water power, digging for coal in
strip mines, and processing select raw materials in reasonably large-scale operations. Such technical
advances vastly increased the subcontinent's meager store of wealth, but they also brought about a
sometimes sub- stantial level of industrial pollution. Gimpel's (1976:86) description of tannery wastes is
apposite here: "Tanning polluted the river because it subjected the hides to a whole series of chemical operations
requiring tannic acids and lime. Tawing used alum and oil. Dried blood, fat, sur- plus tissue, flesh impurities, and
hair were continually washed away with the acids and the lime into the streams running through the cities. The
waters flowing from the tanneries were certainly unpalatable, and there were tanneries in every medieval city!' In
short, the preindustrial world was far from the ecological and social paradise imagined by some ecoradicals. Only by embracing an idealized and ultimately fraudulent picture of life before mechanization can one
accept the eco-radical faith in craft production.
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AFF: TECH GOOD (ENVIRONMENT)
TURN: TECHNOLOGY IS KEY TO SOLVING ENVIRONMENTAL DEGREGATION.
LEWIS, ’92 (Martin W., Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical
Environmentalism, Duke University Press Durham and London, Natural Products and the
Destruction of nature, 1992, professor of geography at George Washington University pg
127-126, http://www.brontaylor.com/courses/pdf/Lewis--Technophobia.pdf)
Assessing the eco-radical aversion to technology also requires considering the environmental effects
of natural, low-tech products. Although this is an extremely intricate issue, many natural substances
actually prove to be far more ecologically destructive than their synthetic sub-stitutes. Wood provides
a good example of a destructive natural product. By rely-ing on wood for building materials, simple
chemicals, and fuel, countless societies have deforested their environments. The switch from wood to
coal as an energy source helped save European forests from total destruc-tion in the early modem age, just
a s it did for American forests in the 1880s (Perlin 1989). Pressures on forests were also reduced when the Leblanc process was developed,
allowing soda to be manufacwed from salt rather than from woodash. (This discovery also drastically reduced the cost of soap, tremendously
benefiting human health.) The Leblanc process was, however, highly polluting, but the subsequently developed ammonia process proved to be
considerably cleaner and more efficient as well(Mokyr I ~ ~ o : I ~ I ) . The
common belief that wood is an
environmentally benign and re- newable resource is dangerously naive. Forests are effectively
renewable only where population densities are extremely low. Unfortunately, areas of requisite
density are becoming increasingly rare throughout most of the world. In the contemporary Third World,
technological deprivation forces multitudes to continue living within an unsustainable wood economy. Poor women often spend hours each day scrounging for firewood, a process both ecologicdly
and socially destructive. Where electricity 137 is available and affordable-as it should be
everywhere-deforestation rates decline drastically. The use of wood as a construction material in
contemporary industrial societies is also environmentally devastating. The havoc wreaked on Southeast Asian
tropical rainforests by the Japanese construction indus- try is a commonly acknowledged environmental outrage (see Laarman 1988), but the
effect of American house-building on our own temperate rainforests is hardly less objectionable. Economic considerations ensure that even
sustainably and selectively harvested forests are degraded as wildlife habitat. Foresters shudder at the idea of preserving dead and dying stumps
that might form disease reservoirs, but it is precisely such hollow trees that provide denning sites for many mammals and nesting sites for many
While radical environmentalists might argue that we should therefore adopt less efficient forms
of forestry, the problems that would ensue because of the resulting decline in timber yield are not
addressed. With a growing population continuing to demand lumber, a deintensified forest industry
would be forced to seek new supplies else- where, thus degrading even larger expanses of land. In the
end, only by developing substitutes for wood can we begin to create an environmen- tally benign
construction industry. Many wood substitutes are readily available. Concrete, for example, is easily and efficiently employed in all
birds. s.
manner of construction. Yet eco-radicals like Catton (1g80:135) warn against using concrete on the grounds that it is a nonrenewable resource. I
would counter that the prospect of abandoning cement making and aggregate mining for fear that we will exhaust the planet's supply of
limestone, sand, and gravel is an example of green lunacy. We might as well dismantle the ceramics indus-try for fear of exhausting the earth's
Paper, another natural product, embodies extraordinary environmen- tal destruction.
Papermaking remains one of the most polluting indus- trial processes in existence. Even if paper-mill
wastes can be minimized (at some cost), and even if recycling becomes commonplace, paper production will continue to demand vast quantities of wood. Resource economics dictate that the necessary
clay deposits.
quantities of fresh pulp be derived largely from small, fast-growing trees, generally harvested in clear-cuts. The
resulting pulp plantations are typically as ecologically impoverished as agricultural fields. By continuing to
prefer paper to synthetic and electronic substitutes, we only ensure the needless degradation of
vast tracks of land. Many other examples of the ecological destruction inflicted by natural products
could easily be cited. The damage entailed in cotton production, for example, was noted twenty years ago by Ehrlich (cited in Paehlke
1989:60). While cotton could be cultivated without biocides, yields would plummet, necessitating a substantial increase in acreage to meet the
present demand. The area devoted to cotton is expanding at a rapid pace already, due both t o population growth and to the mounting demand for
K OF TECHNOLOGY—83/78
natural fibers. Vast expanses of natural vegetation are now being cleared in order to grow cotton and to supply it with the water it requires.
To provide high-class textiles, the Ogallala aquifer of America’s southern Great Plains is being depleted, rain forests in Central America are
being devastated, and the extensive Sudd Swamp of the southern Sudan is being threatened with drainage. The standard environmentalist credo
that renewable resources are intrinsically superior to nonrenewables rests on two fundamental errors. First, both eco-radicals and old-fashioned
conservationists presume life to be so abundant that through wise use, directed either by primal affinity or scientific management, humans can
obtain their needs organ-ically without detracting from other species. Second, both camps have assumed that nonrenewables are so scarce that if
we dare use them they will be quickly exhausted. Both principles are suspect. In fact, the primary organic productivity of the planet is essentially
The more living resources are channeled into human commu- nities, the more nature itself is
diminished. The essential nonrenewable resources, by contrast-elements such as silicon, iron,
aluminum, and carbon-may be tapped in extraordinary quantities without substan-tially detracting
from living ecosystems. Aluminum and silicon are so wildly abundant that it is ludicrous to fear that
we will exhaust the earth's supply. Moreover, except in nuclear processes, elements are never actually
destroyed; as recycling and sequestering techniques are per- fected, resource exhaustion will
become increasingly unproblematic. Even coal and oil would be fantastically abundant if only we would cease
limited.
the insane practice of burning them and instead, as suggested by Arnory Lovins, dedicate the remaining supplies to
the production of synthetic organic materials (see Paehlke 1989:77).
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AFF: TECH GOOD (DISEASE)
TURN: TECHNOLOGY IS KEY TO PREVENTING AND CURING FATAL DISEASES.
LEWIS, ’92 (Martin W., Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical
Environmentalism, Duke University Press Durham and London, Disease: Technological
and Natural,1992, professor of geography at George Washington University pg 127-126,
http://www.brontaylor.com/courses/pdf/Lewis--Technophobia.pdf)
No one acquainted with the rudiments of medical history could deny that health has vastly improved
since the industrial revolution. Most of the credit for such amelioration belongs precisely to the
medical, dietary, and sanitary advances associated with the transition to industrialism. One has only to
examine average longevity, which stood in the United States at a miserable forty-seven years as recently as 1900, to
grasp the magnitude of progress over this period. If we go back to medieval Europe, socio-ecological idyll of
many eco-radicals, we find that in some villages average life spans were as low as seventeen to
eighteen years (Cohen 1989:124]. By other indices as well, the health standards of most preindustrial
regimes were atrocious. Again, consider medieval and early modem Europe. As Braudel (1981:gr) relates, the
ancient regime was character- ized by "very high infant mortality, famine, chronic under-nourishment,
and formidable epidemics." Moreover, nonelite Europeans were contam- inated by a wide variety of toxins on a
regular basis. Few even experi-enced the delights of breathing clean air, for the atmospheres of their own dwellings
were horribly polluted. "It is difficult. . . to comprehend," writes Norman Pounds [1989:187), "how fetid and
offensive must have been the air about most cottages and homes." Indeed, indoor air pollu- tion has
long been [as it perhaps still is] a greater contributor to respira- tory illness than industrial airborne
waste. But the most severe toxic pollution problem of the premodern world was associated with
natural poisons produced by molds infecting the food supply. "Everyone suffered from food that was
tainted," Pounds reminds us, "and the number who died of food-poisoning must have been immense"
(1989:213). Especially pronounced where rye was the staple food, poisons produced by the ergot and Fusarium
molds massively suppressed immune systems, reduced fertility levels, brought on delu- sions and sometimes mass
insanity, and reduced blood circulation to such an extent that gangrene in the lower extremities was commonplace
(Matossian 19891. Even where the food supply was safe, poor nutrition resulted in wide- spread
immunological stress. Infectious diseases were rife, and periodic plagues would decimate most
populations in a cruel manner. Water supplies, especially in towns, were so contaminated by human waste
as to become deadly in their own right. Skin and venereal diseases were often rife and difficult, if not
impossible, to cure. Other scourges abounded, including those-such as leprosy-that have been
virtually eliminated by modem medicines and sanitary techniques. Individuals deformed by genetic
inheritance or accident typically led short and brutal lives. And every time a woman went into labor she faced a
very high risk of dying. This cursory review of the horrors of preindustrial European life may seem a
pointless exercise in overkill; all of this is, or at least used to be, common knowledge. But it is important to
recall in detail the kind of social environment many eco-radicals would seek to recreate. And were we to adhere
strictly to the tenets of bioregionalism, even the levels of prosperity achieved in the medieval world would
be difficult if not im- possible to maintain without first experiencing a truly massive human die-off.