Ping Pong 58: We are all in it Now
In a previous Rant of this series, I argued that the medieval conception of law was linked to an absent liege lord. The law therefore, was what one had instead of the personal judgement of the monarch. Under its gaze, under the witness of an absent judge, individuals then were expecting to live their lives. It provided in a sense, a transcendental element beyond reality, to which reality always needed to nod and which one was expected to allow for and respect. The present ‘absent law’ challenges people to understand who and what they are in a certain manner. It creates a paradigm of aspiration and an appeal to a perpetual otherness. But such a motif clearly need not be restricted to medieval conceptions of justice, or even modern conceptions of law. Since at least the early nineteen sixties, humanity has had very much the same feeling about its technology.
It is the power of technology after all (as Marx realized) to challenge our conceptions of what we can do, and who we are. The peasant is simply not the same kind of human being as the capitalist. They literally think differently and judge differently. Each bringing with them, their own world and their own expectations of what is within that world. But Marx envisaged these changes in terms of discrete epochs punctuated by specific revolutions. But for us, this is clearly not quite the case. Or perhaps rather we live in state of perpetual technological change and revolution. The result is of course that we can no longer easily predict what a human is and what they can or ought to do. Our powers in the world of the internet and mass communication are simply not the same as they were twenty years ago, when being connected to computers was the exception and not the norm. Or again forty years ago (or so) mass car and colour television ownership transformed the expectations of a generation and the way they looked out upon the world. To be human is therefore no longer anything about existing in a steady state awaiting a change. On the contrary, humanity is in a perpetual chrysalis, always evolving towards other stages and other types of humanity. We are caught therefore in the gaze of a perpetual flux.
But then what does it mean to be caught up in a world of change? A world where it is no longer clear exactly what powers one has? Here it is as well to understand exactly what is new about our situation. There is nothing odd about change in itself. Since the late eighteenth century, human society has been being changed through the effects of industrialization. Change itself and for want of a better word, progress, is itself nothing at all new. So what is different in its current incarnations? Technology, again as Marx understood it, had effectively a linear development; so that the greater technologies of the nineteenth century progressed in a steady way. Things improved. This improvement then encouraged the belief that there were a special group of people who were the peculiar beneficiaries of this change. This improvement was therefore, to help the ‘best able’ to take up and use that change. Earlier industrialization was therefore the time of racist theories and the belief in progress that racism reflected. The fact that one group were doing rather well out of progressive changes was meant to testify that this certain group was somehow special and different. They mattered more and all the rest could go hang. Technological change therefore produced an ordered and hierarchical society. It was the society of Eugenics, the society where biology ought to reflect the ethic of stable progress and development towards the better. But what then happens to this world when the gates of technology are thrown open? So that no one can actually control what technologies are bubbling up or the directions in which they lead a society. Such technology presents a double-edged direct challenge to the stable order that preceded it (as well as opening a host of indirect challenges as well).
The first of these direct challenges is to the control and manipulation of information. Information in a society of slow communication and unsteady connection is a very viscous phenomenon. One can treat one’s fellow humans horrifically in the sure knowledge that by the time that any news reaches other parts of the world, it will be far too late for anything to be done about it, and any subsequent reaction by others will be framed in the knowledge that any actual effect is hopeless and pointless, and all that might be enacted is revenge. If however the effects of a policy (such as napalming children or beating up certain ethnic groups) are immediately broadcast to be seen in a million homes, the ethics of a society of course become rather different. They become more volatile and more responsive. In short exactly what one sees and when one sees it, is ultimately a moral problem. Our morality itself hangs upon how and when we have seen a thing. If it is current, if it is now, if we feel a part of the action, our reaction is necessarily different to when it was ‘long ago’ and far removed. The former of course calls for quick and decisive action, while the latter demands slow and grinding justice. This is to not say that these two systems of judging are either new or mutually exclusive. On the contrary, in some way or other both at least hark back to that medieval problem of justice. However what has changed is the power and provenance of the former model. We can see more and so want to react more - and more quickly. We want therefore to expand the world of ready to hand and immediate justice, possibly at the expense of the more slow and steady sort. Or to put it another way, we seek to discipline a world as a parent disciplines a child, it is a world of immediate reaction to situations, of fierce roars and nick-of-time interventions, and not the far more hands off world of the school with its rules and clear boundaries. It is of course not then immediately obvious that the augmenting of this approach is really much of a gain when all is said and done, on the older perhaps more thorough methodology.
The second direct challenge is a far deeper one. For if it is no longer clear what a human can do and what they can be, it is also no longer clear that the old imposed hierarchies of race or sex have any value. Why should a people be held to be different or inferior when we are all partially differed by our own technologies? Perhaps technologies that allowed for and compensated for any difference might be found. Or perhaps other peoples or genders might actually be the true heirs of the technological world. Perhaps in the chrysalis in which we all now live, it is ‘they’ that will come out with a better package of elements to move technology on or use it more effectively. Well perhaps. What is certain, is that the entire algebra of progress and advance has been blown aside. One group or one set of people really cannot claim superior access to the holy grail of technology. They have no God-given right to be what they are at the expense of the rest. The effect is of course that the maelstrom of technology is associated with a profound othering of rights. The rights that supported the old order are seen as suspect (and without good reason). And the old rules that kept social groups (women or ethnic groups) in certain places are swept aside. The vision of a promised land is thereby opened up, a land where all are equal or where the difference between peoples do not matter, or are even useful. A vision where all have an equal right to the possibility to change what they are and where they are.
Or to put it another way, the challenge that technology issues is the silent challenge that we no longer can simply assume we know what it is to be human. That is, the old simplistic connections which we had lived with for around a hundred and fifty years which connected humanity with certain perceived categories (men, white, etc) are taken out of the definition. To be human is rather to be understood as having a certain type of mind. One is therefore human because one dreams in a certain way, and effects those dreams using technology. If they, you, and I will be taken up and transformed by whatever tumbles into our worlds from the white hot crucible of technology, then we are together human. This definition of course greatly extends the rights and privileges of humanity. Differently-abled groups are included and their lives are also transformed through the technology. Their rights therefore will also be thought to matter and must be included within the general array of rights along with all the rest. Technology therefore levels a playing field, and creates a system within which a series or set of rights is to be devised for all humanity, whatever their ability (or current technological development).
However such a ‘dream’ is likely to gloss over two distinct tensions within such a world. On the one hand the old model of non-linear development which favours a certain group simply has not gone away. On the contrary any grouping within society could make the claim to be special and different. Technology, it might be argued, is going their way, and they ought to be proud of the fact. Society is therefore potentially torn by a thousand vanities and the distinct and disruptive powers which run alongside such a vanity. It is not therefore tolerance that is created within such technological melting pots, so much as a free for all of prejudice, where every group claims its right to be superior.
This effect has both a deepening and broadening effect. That is, on a very mundane level different groups (men or women or Asians) endlessly construct worlds of difference and shifting kaleidoscopes of difference (and what makes that group better or not). But at the same time there is a tendency for those within these broad categories for certain groups (Muslim fundamentalists are an example here) to harken to these distinctions and really take them to heart. And to therefore build a world in the light of the assertion of a supposed superiority, an assertion made in the face of reality and in spite of the evidence to the contrary. In a sense therefore racism and sexism are as alive today as they was in the colonial period, all that is different is that it is no longer so easy to predict who the racists/sexists are…(eg; ‘women are better at multi-tasking’).
On the other hand once again more problematically, it is clear that technology, in challenging the boundaries of humanity makes one have to rethink exactly what one values in a human. In the above I assumed that what defined humanity was a mind. That is, what defined a being was an ability to take up a world and comprehend its use in a certain series or set of ways. What we value about ourselves according to such a thesis is our ability to comprehend a world and share this comprehension with others. However this is not the only definition one might allow for. The Catholic Church will of course pedal a very different definition, where what defines humanity is actually the seed of life itself. It is therefore the very possibility or potentiality for humanity that ought to be protected and nurtured at every and any cost. These two definitions in effect open out a very problematic territory where the precise interplay of what is thought to be human is likely to unfold. Is humanity ultimately something special to a species (homo sapiens) and their living descendents? Or is it defined in a demand for comprehension that might include other species or even machines? These alternatives are not actually mutually exclusive and various conjunctions between the two across the landscape of technology are likely to be the order of successive days, as successive waves of technology makes us examine and re-examine who and what we are.
The last point therefore in effect blows apart once again the problem of justice. We might now aspire to a justice that does not discriminate against peoples and does not seek to impose a set order upon the world, or a direction to development, and yet to not impose such an order is then to have to pay a considerable price. This price is that the exact model of what it is to be a human, the ideal type, the definition of Man, becomes unthinkable. The problem of course is then, that an awful lot of humanistic morality assumed that the nature of humanity was itself relatively straightforward and could be simply and readily defined. All the great statements of the Rights of Man had assumed as much. If we now take our starting point for morality to be somewhere else, to be with another less clear and less tangible humanity, what then? Where are we to find the grounding for our rights? And who or what might they include? And just as problematically, how does that inclusion link back to our technological world and the perpetual change that appears to radiate from it? These are questions for the next Rant to consider in detail.
