Technology and Authority

(This is a term paper I wrote for a course on the philosophy of technology. The professor was pretty mundane and the topics just lightly brushed over. Here's my effort to shake things up a little bit in that class.)

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Technology and Authority:

Criticism and Complacency in the Scientific Attitude

In the burgeoning world, fewer and fewer ways of understanding are at the disposition of the general masses. As science and technology broaden to for an ever more encompassing view of reality, traditional ways of thinking become marginalized by an underlying ideological commitment to the scientific attitude. This way of thinking uses increasingly reductionist categorizations of phenomena, and the resulting world-view is fragmented into the understanding of a reality explicable only by the specialized experts, mostly inaccessible by meager minds. The prevailing paradigm enshrines the capacity for science to regulate the human experience by means of tacitly assumed authority. The scientific attitude implicitly compels the 'uninitiated many' to accept the authority of the 'expert few,' as intimate knowledge of all possible areas of expertise is impossible. We live in a technocratic regime whereby authority is determined by appeal to expertise and knowledge is dominated by the perspectives of that hierarchy alone. This is a serious problem for the wider body politic because when authority commands expertise and the expertise cannot control the authority is established, the technocracy is out of control. Perhaps we ought mark more clearly the margin where authority no longer holds claim over expertise, where our commitment to the reliability of the technocratic regime can no longer claim its legitimacy contrary to established objective results.

The scientific method is primarily espoused as a methodological naturalism; that is, what have previously asserted and real and true, if verifiable by observation, can be legitimately treated as knowledge. As the empirical knowledge about the world increases, more verifiable predictions and accurate testimony can be expected from our experiences. 'The goal of natural science is to explain contingent natural phenomena, that is...explanations refer only to natural objects and events and not to the personal choices and actions of human or divine agents' (Moreland 46). Insofar as the scientific method has reproduced consistently objective results through the application of technology, it does unquestioningly as the explanatory power par excellence to engender positively verifiable analysis of observable phenomena; and perhaps rightly so. For the more complicated and exacting disciplines like nuclear physics, organic chemistry, or space travel, this segregation is perhaps the better of potential scenarios; insofar as specialization contributes further to our general understanding of the world and ourselves as a species.

The consistency of the scientific attitude is confirmed by the increasing specialization and development of more radically isolated and defined expertises. "Modernity prides itself on the fragmentation of the world as its foremost achievement. Fragmentation is the prime source of it's strength. The world that falls apart into plethora of problems is a manageable world...Autonomy is the right to decide when to keep the eyes and when to close them down; the right to separate, to discriminate, to peel off, and to trim" (Bauman 12). Modernity, roughly speaking the scientific attitude, is a tool available to every individual; but as we delegate that responsibility for consistency to experts without our own critical analysis, we abdicate autonomous judgment based on that authority. We call this systematization, "technocracy [which], in political terms, refers to a system of governance in which technically trained experts rule by virtue of their specialized knowledge and position in dominant political and economic institutions" (Fischer 17). Authority and expertise are here conjoined, without perhaps the honest intentions required for individuals to maintain their living sovereignty, and become mutually reinforced as mechanisms of control. Expertise legitimates authority, and authority can delegate resources to develop further specialization.

The predominant mode of thought that has been inculcated throughout the past few generations of 'civilized' people has been scientific and rational; but even more profoundly, directed against critically important ways of thinking, that are non-rational, transcendental, mystical, etc., insofar as they challenge the status quo ways of thinking. Consistency in science is of utmost importance, however, when those human experiences that don't quite fit in are rejected, it seems we are inevitably losing an important part of our lives. Commitment to the scientific ideal has legitimized the segregation of other modes of thought. From an economist's perspective, "the belief that the correct technical solutions can only be found by the experts becomes a powerful legitimation of expert power, both within the technocratic workplaces and in the overall technocratic system" (Burris 153). And this attitude is paradigmatic of current governmental, educational, and social systems. As it stands, any claim of legitimacy must first be passed through the rigorous scrutiny of the technocratic institutional miasma.

We are weakened in our interpretation of the world as we rely on the technological paradigm to mediate our experiences; we have given up unmitigated experiential access to the world in favour of fragmented and specialized expertise. By participating in the technocracy, we abdicate out authority to those more knowledgeable than us. The fact remains that people are people, and if we put aside some time to look at what sort of implications out ideological commitments might entail, it may become obvious that something is awry. (ex, BP oil disaster)

tbc...