When the organizers of SHOT’s fiftieth anniversary celebration asked me to write something for the NSF workshop at George Mason University, I decided to take seriously the motto that they had chosen in honor of the occasion: “looking back; looking beyond.” What might I learn, I wondered, about the maturity of our field and its prospects for the future, if I were to re-read an essay that was once part of our communal canon, but is no longer, an essay that had played a crucial role, many years ago, in my own intellectual development, but had, in recent times, fallen into obscurity.

* * *

The summer of 1969 was a very difficult time in American national life, but for me it was something of a summer of liberation; I had no teaching obligations and had (finally!) finished my dissertation several months earlier. When the summer began, Richard Nixon had been in office for six months; Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, had decided that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable and had started talking about “a negotiated settlement”—although the United States was still bombing not just North Vietnam but also Cambodia. Streets and campuses were in turmoil. In February, Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, had called out the National Guard to quell protesters on the Berkeley campus; by May the entire city of Berkeley, not just the campus, was under military control. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the police had forcibly removed Harvard students from university offices, and in Hartford, Connecticut, black youngsters had rioted for three days and nights. The Black Panthers had become a national movement and several dissident members of the group had been murdered. At Cornell, in April, armed black students took over the student union, vowing not to leave until the administration had agreed to set up, of all things, a racially segregated dormitory—and in response, a fair number of faculty members had refused to meet their classes until the administration had removed from the campus every firearm, and every student who had carried a firearm.

In July, Senator Edward Kennedy will drive off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, drowning Mary Jo Kopechne. A month later Charles Manson and his followers will go on a killing spree in Southern California, hoping to stimulate a race war, and Woodstock will take place. Later, some of the Weathermen, after the failure of the Chicago “Days of Rage,” will go into hiding (only to emerge, a few months later, by blowing themselves up in a Manhattan townhouse). And in the midst of all this carnage and mayhem, John Lennon and Yoko Ono will record “Give Peace a Chance.”

My intellectual adventure as a historian of technology began during and because of that very distressing summer, the summer of our national discontent. A few months earlier, in response to the chaos on the campus at which I was then teaching, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, some junior members of the faculty had come up with the idea that in order to make our courses more “relevant” to our students, we would each teach a freshman seminar on a subject we knew nothing about. We would, in the language of the time, teach a process rather than a subject; that is, we would learn along with our students, thereby teaching them how to learn. This notion now seems ludicrous to me, after more than forty years at the lectern, but at the time I had only been a university instructor for two years, and I took it very seriously.

In the spring, preoccupied with typing and editing, I had chosen a topic for my seminar, “Technological Determinism,” but by the end of June, with my degree now in hand, I was beginning to feel the need to create some sort of syllabus, or, at the very least, some initial reading assignments with which to begin the fall semester. Well, yes, I thought, it was a good thing to learn along with my students, but if I really knew nothing at all about my topic, how was I going to begin? So there I was, sweltering in the magnificent (but un-air-conditioned) South Reading Room of the Research Collections of the New York Public Library, trying to read up, just a little bit, on this subject that I was supposed to know nothing about.

Of course “technological determinism” is not a topic that you suddenly pluck out of thin air, no matter how rarified an academic you happen to be. The term had been bruited about, sometimes dismissively, sometimes surreptitiously, during my graduate education in the history of science. Looking back, I strongly suspect that it was the dismissive and the surreptitious that attracted me to the topic: The summer of our national discontent was going to be the summer of my personal liberation—at least from the structures and strictures of my scholarly training.1 I suppose that I had heard the term first, when I was beginning my graduate studies, because Stephen F. Mason’s A History of the Sciences (which had just come out in 1962) was assigned in a general historiography course. Mason was a Marxist, I remember being told, and therefore a technological determinist—and that is why he worked so hard to demonstrate that artisans made important contributions to the Scientific Revolution. We could skip those chapters, I also remember being told, because Mason’s Marxism was just an ideology; mathematicians and philosophers were responsible for the Scientific Revolution, not masons (!) and lens-grinders. The same message was delivered a few years later, when we were asked to read J. D. Bernal’s Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century (1953), only to be told that Bernal’s tendentious desire to describe the sciences that were connected to technological developments (e.g., thermodynamics) as “progressive” and all the others as “retrogressive” derived from his Marxist convictions about technological determinism, and were therefore not to be taken seriously.

Technological determinism was thus doubly fascinating to me because doubly derided by my professors. It had something to do with technology (which was just the application of science and therefore of no interest to historians of the pure sciences), and it had something do to with Marxism (which was just an ideology and therefore unquestionably wrong). Perfect!

Except for one small problem that was starting to loom large by late July: I could not find a reading selection, neither from Mason nor Bernal, nor anyone else for that matter, that explained, clearly, what technological determinism meant as a theory of history. I had located several paragraphs on the subject from the original primary source, Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, but I deemed these unlikely to start a lively discussion among Stony Brook freshmen, partly because they were written in fairly opaque and convoluted Germanic English, and partly because their historical subject matter ranged from pre-history to the feudal period, subjects of less than minimal interest to the average Long Island teenager.

A month earlier I had already discovered that virtually all the books to be found under the heading “Technology and Social Change” in the New York Public Library (index card) catalog were the works of anthropologists and archaeologists: unlikely to yield readings that could be adapted to my needs. By the end of July, I had also decided that the sole historical work under that subject heading, Lynn White jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962), was entirely unsuitable for my course, not only because of its focus on the Middle Ages, but also because White was about as far from being a Marxist as it was possible to get. (I was not yet sophisticated enough to realize that an anti-Marxist who nonetheless believed that technological changes had helped create the feudal social order would be worth further investigation.)

Because it was so hot in the library, I tended to get drowsy after lunch and in order to keep myself from the embarrassment of falling asleep in public, I usually carried some diversionary reading. One day, in what must have been early August, I had grabbed the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books before leaving my apartment—and when I picked it up after lunch, there, right on the front cover, was the announcement of a special supplement that had something to do with technology. I skimmed it quickly, and snapped wide awake: here was the reading selection I had been searching for! “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals” did not quite explain what technological determinism meant as a theory of history, but it was most decidedly not about the Middle Ages; indeed, it was extremely relevant because it was about The War, “defense intellectuals,” and the social impact of very contemporary technology.

The author was someone named John McDermott, who appeared to be a rather newly minted public intellectual. The biographical squib on the table-of-contents page referred to him as “a former editor of Viet-Report, an organizer for the New University Conference . . . [who] will join the Cambridge Institute and MIT in the fall.”2 Although he was not a historian of technology (and apparently never became one), McDermott’s article had a considerable impact on our field. Because his piece has been anthologized many, many times I suspect that I am not alone in recalling “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals” as intellectually foundational; indeed, since I delivered the oral version of this essay in 2007, several colleagues my age or maybe a bit younger have confessed to being similarly inspired.

* * *

McDermott was clearly a Marxist. Although neither he nor the editors of TNYRB had felt it necessary to use the usually forbidden “M” word, his theoretical stance was broadcast both in his title and in his opening lines: “If religion was formerly the opiate of the masses,” he wrote, “then surely technology is the opiate of the educated public today, or at least of its favorite authors.” What McDermott had written appeared to be a review of The Fourth Annual Report of the Harvard Program on Technology and Society (about which, more below), but it was much longer than most articles in TNYRB because, in addition to reviewing a book, McDermott was articulating an entirely new perspective on modern technology—and, along the way, pillorying not only the Vietnam War, but also the new technologies with which it was being prosecuted, the scientists and engineers who had developed those technologies, and the defense intellectuals who had encouraged their efforts. This new perspective was nothing more nor less than a new dialectic for the twentieth century, replacing, but also building on, the dialectic that Marx had proposed for the nineteenth.

The Vietnam War was being fought, McDermott argued, with technologies that were so advanced and so complicated that ordinary soldiers could not understand them. These military technologies were akin to contemporary consumer technologies in having been developed by scientists and engineers in the employ of big corporations—and these corporations, of course, also had contracts with the overweening federal government. According to McDermott, all of the people in charge of producing these technologies—the managers of those companies and the managers of the government and the technoscientific experts in their employ—had formed a new, twentieth-century elite class, a class which both developed and celebrated advanced technology. This new class, of course, also used advanced technology, just as the predecessor elites of the nineteenth century had tried to do, in order to squelch democracy, to oppress workers, to drown the humanities, to destroy craftsmanship, and to suppress individual creativity.

The nineteenth-century elites had not, however, completely succeeded in controlling the masses, McDermott went on to say, because early industrial technologies had had countervailing, libratory characteristics. Some early industrial technologies, he argued, had actually facilitated the spread of a democratic ethos by extending literacy (the printing press) and, by enlarging the cultural horizons of a larger segment of the population (roads, postal systems, railroads, radios), had thereby both demystified the rule of the religious and governing classes and, simultaneously, provided the means of resistance to that rule. “Social skills and experiences which underlay the monopoly of the upper classes over the processes of law and government were spreading to important segments of the lower orders of society,” McDermott wrote.

For carrying on trade, managing a commercial—not a subsistence— farm, participating in a vestry or workingmen’s guild, or working in an up-to-date manufactory or business, unlike the relatively narrow existence of the medieval serf or artisan, were experiences which contributed to what I would call the social rationality of the lower orders (p. 12).

Unfortunately, according to McDermott, the post–World War II elites were succeeding where their nineteenth-century predecessors had failed. This new elite class did not own the means of production, but it was, in a crucial sense, an even more elite elite because it understood how to produce the now-very-much-more-complicated means of production, knowledge which the owners of the means did not have. To put the matter another way, this new elite was an intellectual elite, rather than a capitalist one. Because of this, McDermott believed, its impact on society was more destructive of humane values than what had come before; because knowledge rather than ownership was its means of control, this new elite had taken over even the not-for-profit sector of society, particularly the universities.

Thus, unlike Marx, McDermott was a technological pessimist. He understood the social effects of the new technology as completely, rather than only partially, oppressive.

The social organization of the new technology, by systematically denying to the general population experiences which are analogous to those of its higher management, contributes very heavily to the growth of social irrationality in our society. . . .

The normal life of men and women in the lower and, I think, middle levels of American society now seems cut off from those experiences in which near social means and distant social ends are balanced and rebalanced, adjusted and readjusted. But it is from such widespread experience with effective balancing and adjusting that social rationality derives. To the degree that it is lacking, social irrationality becomes the norm, and social paranoia a recurring phenomenon (p. 12).

This social irrationality, McDermott went on to argue, means that even those who are now rebelling against the social order have no sensible program for transforming it, no realistic social program with which to combat the central control that the new elites have established. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century rebels had had Marxian socialism—a realistic, rational scientific socialism. The new rebels, despite being better educated than their predecessors, were protesting, yes, but after that they were just turning on and tuning out. As a result, according to McDermott, they were entering “battle under extremely vague symbolic banners,” and unless they wised up about technology, they were, he feared, doomed to fail.

Thus, in McDermott’s view, and despite the title of his long essay, technology was not just the opiate of the intellectuals; it was the opiate of just about everyone in late-twentieth-century society. The new priestly class— scientists and engineers, professors in the universities and senior managers in the government and the corporations—were celebrating the wonders of consumer technology, he argued, in order to obscure the evils that were being wrought in the name of progress, just as the old priestly classes had used religion to obscure the evils being wrought by the bourgeoisie in the name of social order. Humanists and social-scientific intellectuals were being taken in by this con game, and so, he asserted, were “the lower orders.” McDermott believed that everyone in late-twentieth-century America was falling for the comforts of consumer technology in the same way that Marx had believed that everyone had once fallen for the comforts of religion.

* * *

I thought my students would love McDermott’s long essay, because he was furious, as they were, about Vietnam, and angry, as they were, about obscurantist faculty members who taught courses on irrelevant subjects. Unfortunately, I turned out to be wrong; my students hated this particular reading. Every time I taught the piece (and I was so enamored of it that I kept trying to use it, semester after semester) I felt as if I was pulling teeth. Sometimes I brushed off the students’ negative reactions as class-based: Many of them were first-generation college students, probably unable to shake off the parental hope that they would become members of precisely the managerial elite that McDermott found so appalling. Other times I told myself that their dislike was evidence that McDermott was right, that these newly affluent youngsters were so addicted to their cars and television sets that they could not, would not, see the extent to which they and their parents were being duped.

Both the passage of time and the growth of our discipline have now convinced me that my students were right and I was wrong. Forty years after the awful summer of 1969, I now see that McDermott’s essay had three fundamental and related problems. The first is that it is empirically empty; there is only one technological system discussed in detail in its twenty-seven pages, and that discussion occupies only a few paragraphs. To put the matter in an Edisonian way: McDermott’s essay is 99 percent ideology and only 1 percent evidence. The second problem is that this example is not nearly as generalizable as McDermott thought it was. The third problem— and the one that my students may have found particularly galling—is that McDermott’s technological pessimism is profoundly snobbish.

The single example on which McDermott built his comprehensive assault on high technology was a computer being used, for the first time, in the Vietnam War. “Intelligence data is gathered from all kinds of sources,” McDermott wrote,

. . . and fed into a computer complex located . . . in Bien Hoa. From this data and using mathematical models developed for the purpose, the computer then assigns probabilities to a range of potential targets, probabilities which represent the likelihood that the latter contain enemy forces or supplies. . . . Again using models developed for the purpose, the computer divides pre-programmed levels of bombardment among those potential targets which have the highest probability of containing actual targets. Following the raids, data provided by further reconnaissance is fed into the computer and conclusions are drawn (usually optimistic ones) on the effectiveness of the raids. This estimate of effectiveness then becomes part of the data governing current and future operations, and so on. (pp. 6–7)

From the point of view of the designers, McDermott argued, this system is very rational, because it doesn’t waste American lives or matériel. Yet there are, he went on to say, two points of view from which it is very irrational: the point of view of the Vietnamese peasants whose lives and livelihoods may be destroyed—and also the point of view of the American servicemen who have no way of understanding the system and are therefore alienated from it. Because they do not understand how this system works, servicemen cannot understand why it is failing. Needing to explain what is happening on their battlefields they invent entirely outrageous explanations for this failure; they cease to pay attention to the real world and become socially irrational, turning on and tuning out.

Even though McDermott believed that the characteristics and social effects of this computer were identical to the characteristics and social effects of all advanced technologies, my students must have sensed that both his conclusion (about alienation) and his convictions (about the generalizability of the example and about the social irrationality that it generates) were incorrect. The students, after all, had brothers and friends and cousins serving in Vietnam and they probably understood (as I did not) that alienation from the computer systems that determined bombing patterns was the least of the problems facing the servicemen and -women in that conflict. In addition, my students’ lives were also embedded in technological systems that they did not regard as in the least bit irrational and from which they did not feel the least bit alienated: the cars that got them back and forth to school, for example, the television sets that brought entertainment to their living quarters, the air conditioners that relieved the oppressive heat of summer, and, maybe best of all, the transistor radios that allowed them to bring their music with them to the beach.

From their perspective, McDermott provided no take-home message about technology that resonated in any way, shape, or form with their own experience of technology or with their own technological praxis. On top of this, my students probably noticed that McDermott was much more exercised about “[p]rofessionals who seek self-realization through creative and autonomous behavior without regard to the defined goals, needs, and channels of their respective departments” than he was about people like themselves and their parents, whom McDermott consistently referred to as “members of the lower orders.”

* * *

Interestingly enough, two of these problems—a lack of both concrete and generalizable examples—also plagued the book that had originally occasioned McDermott’s critique. In 1964, the IBM Corporation had given Harvard University several million dollars in order to establish, for ten years, the Harvard University Program on Technology and Society. Emmanuel Mesthene had been appointed as director of the program, and in 1968 he had written and published its Fourth Annual Report, not just for IBM, but for distribution (free) to the general public.3 Mesthene had a Ph.D. in philosophy and had taught for a while at several liberal arts colleges (at one of which, apparently, he had had John McDermott as a student). At some point, Mesthene had become a policy analyst, first as an employee of the RAND Corporation and then at OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. As a result, to use McDermott’s terminology, he had become a member of the scientific-managerial intellectual elite.

At Harvard, Mesthene proceeded to hire several young scholars with various kinds of disciplinary training, and he asked them to explore the relationship between specific technologies and society. The academic goal was, in a sense, to do for the modern world what Lynn White jr. had done for the medieval. In a political sense, the goal was to also develop “action plans” that would ameliorate the social problems that so many people believed technological change to be creating.

In his first report, written two years after the program began operating and published in Technology and Culture, Mesthene confessed that “The Study Group is currently learning to talk.” “An example of the process,” he went on,

. . . is our effort to understand the specific ways in which technological changes and social changes affect each other. We found the standard literature on each too self-contained to be illuminating of the relationship, and most current discussions of the interaction too impressionistic and lacking in conceptual rigor to serve as useful starting points.4

In the next few years, Mesthene and his colleagues published a fair number of research reports (which were most notable for their very extensive bibliographies), but, with one exception, they never improved very much on his original critique of the existing literature: that is to say, they failed to produce either a concrete example of a technology producing a social change or a concrete action plan with which to mitigate the “bad” social effects of a technology, while preserving the “good” ones.5 The Fourth Report, the one that McDermott was reviewing, was a summary of some of those research reports, with a few pages of generalizations from Mesthene by way of introduction. Mesthene subsequently attempted to say a bit more in a short book that he published with Harvard University Press, Technological Change: Its Impact on Man and Society (1970), and the final report of the project, Harvard University Program on Technology and Society, 1964–1972 (1972).

Most of the reviewers of Mesthene’s books and pamphlets found them vacant. Kenneth Boulding, writing in Science, referred to Technological Change as an extended essay (indeed, it was only seventy-five very small pages). “It has the judicious, rather lofty quality of Emerson’s essays, and at the end of it one has the same slight feeling of emptiness.”6 George Basalla, writing in the same journal three years later, called the summary volume an example of “bland and sterile philosophizing.”7 IBM apparently agreed; unhappy with the lack of results, it pulled its funding for the project two years early.

John McDermott’s critique was different. He specifically disapproved of the fact that none of the project research was focused on military technology. But he was also generally unhappy with Mesthene’s frequent assertions that if scientists and engineers were better educated about society they would be able to build technologies that had no negative social effects, or no negative effects that could not be regulated away. As he made repeatedly clear in “The Opiate of the Intellectuals,” McDermott was a Marxist pessimist. He thought that the negative effects of technology were simultaneously inevitable and overwhelming: inevitably negative because of the nature of capitalism, overwhelmingly negative because all attempts to regulate technology were bound to fail unless capitalism was overthrown— and this was unlikely to happen, given what he thought were the inadequacies of his fellow revolutionaries.

Given that their characterizations of technology were so different, it is ironic that both Mesthene and McDermott thought of the entities called “technology” and “society” as unitary abstractions, equally simple and straightforwardly understandable. “Failure of society to respond to the opportunities created by technological change means that much actual or potential technology lies fallow, that is, is not used at all or is not used to its full capacity,” Mesthene wrote in 1970, leaving the reader to wonder how a whole society manages to respond to an opportunity and then how anyone could possibly know when a technology is being wasted.8 “Technology creates its own politics,” McDermott had written a year earlier, “[and the point] of advanced systems is to minimize the incidence of personal or social behavior which is erratic or otherwise not easily classified,” leaving the reader to wonder how an electric power system or a railroad network could possibly lead to a reduction in anarchic behavior. That there might be different kinds of technologies, each of which had different kinds of social effects, or that different elements of society might be affected in different ways by various kinds of technologies seems not to have occurred to either of these two commentators.

* * *

McDermott’s essay stimulated my generation of historians of technology because of both its Marxism and its pessimism, most especially his conviction that the contemporary authoritarianism that we found so repellent was actually built into our technologies and might therefore be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to eradicate. In a sense, “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals” was a paradigm-shifting work; it replaced optimism-based history of technology with pessimism-based history of technology— and, precisely because it was so lacking in good examples, it opened new doors for research, created new questions to be answered. Ironically (or maybe dialectically would be a better word), as we walked through those doors and set about answering those questions, we also developed a much more subtle, and much less unitary, understanding of both “technology” and “society.” And as we increased the level of evidence, we also decreased the level of ideology because we built up, I believe, a more sophisticated understanding of what it means to label a technology either “good” or “bad.”

Consider, for example, Merritt Roe Smith’s classic 1977 study, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change. Taking up McDermott’s challenge, Smith examined the social impact of a military technology, but by contrasting the introduction of interchangeable-parts arms manufacture in two different armories, Springfield and Harpers Ferry, Smith demonstrated that the same technology can have very different effects, depending on the social character of workplaces. Somewhat routinized but nonetheless skilled jobs were created in the North, but unroutinized skilled jobs were eliminated in the South. Smith also reminded us that while we might join McDermott in yearning nostalgically for some aspects of early-nineteenth-century artisanal culture—devotion to craftsmanship and a respect for the regular alteration of work and leisure—we are perfectly delighted to have put others far behind us: nepotism, violence, feudalistic corruption, and racism. Pace McDermott, technologies, and the cultures in which they are embedded, can be both libratory and authoritarian, both good and bad at the same time.

Similarly, by closely examining yet another military technology, David Mindell has shown us, in War, Technology, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor (2000), that a single technological system, an ironclad warship, can debase one set of cultural values, military heroism, for one set of people, the men who served onboard, while at the same time enhancing the same set of values for another set of people, the civilians who celebrated its victory. And Janet Abbate has taught us, in Inventing the Internet (1999), that a complex technological system developed to enhance military command and control can—again, pace McDermott—radically decentralize mass communications when adapted by civilians. Contrary to McDermott’s thesis about the relationship between experts in and the owners of advanced technology regimes, Thomas Parke Hughes has taught us, in Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society (1983), that technological and managerial elites are themselves often at the mercy of non-technologically minded investors as well as elected and appointed politicians.

As historians of technology learned to complicate the relationship between technology and society we also learned to temper our pessimism, or at least I did. In the autumn of 1969, stimulated by McDermott (and bored with the subject of my dissertation), I decided to try my hand at a research project that would be both modern (that is, subsequent to industrialization) and relevant to some contemporary social difficulty. After reading a bit about the development of commuter railroads (I had, by that time, moved from Manhattan to Long Island, in order to be closer to my job), I changed my mind about a topic and decided to focus on technologies and social changes with which I was more intimately involved: the technologies of housework, and the rise of second-generation feminism. I set out, in other words, to provide an evidentiary base for what was then received (technological determinist) wisdom, namely that the rise of advanced household technologies had left educated housewives discontented because there was little meaningful work left for them to do inside of homes.

The very first file folder that I opened when I started research about household technology was labeled, therefore, “Resistors,” because I was sure—following McDermott (and E. P. Thompson)—that domestic artisans—women who made butter and cheese, who baked their own bread and canned their own vegetables—would have resisted industrial technology in the same way that English weavers and some American armorers once had, by resisting its incursion into their working lives. My forays into the primary sources about housework were, however, full of surprises. The vast majority of American women, I discovered, were perfectly delighted to have motors ease the drudgery of household labor, and many, especially those who had not been affluent as children, welcomed the improvements in living standards that accompanied what advertisers liked to call the “modernization” of American homes. My “Resistors” file remained very, very thin; by the time what I had originally conceived as a very short project finally reached its end ten years later, there were only three index cards in that file. All of them were about very rich women who had resisted the electrification of their homes because they were unwilling to modernize their servants out of jobs while simultaneously being rich enough to be able to continue to live luxuriously without refrigerators, fans, electric lights, or electric coffeepots.

Thus, by the time I wrote More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (1983), I had come to understand that neither the technological pessimists nor the technological optimists were subtle enough in their analyses, which is part of the reason why the subtitle of the book contains the word irony. I had also come to understand that technologies were different from each other—that washing machines are not like assembly lines; that work processes were different from each other; that household work is not like factory work; and that people are different from each other: that women, for example, are socialized differently from men. To put the matter more concretely, I had started to deconstruct the entities “technology” and “society” that both McDermott and Mesthene had thought unitary—and I had ended up discovering that my original hypothesis was almost the opposite of the truth. I had also stopped being a left academic snob.

My most recent research project, summarized in Heredity and Hope: The Case for Genetic Screening (2008) is an exploration of a very different set of technological systems—the ones that screen adults and babies for the mutations that result in genetic diseases—but it has led me along very similar paths to very similar conclusions. My original hypothesis was that genetic screening had been foisted on the public for nefarious (read “eugenic”) reasons; this hypothesis was completely reversed during the course of the investigation. I discovered, to my surprise, that the physician-scientists who undertook the research and then developed the technologies did so in the interests of and under pressure from their own patients. I also discovered that the vast majority of pregnant women were in favor of genetic screening, even when the downsides were carefully explained to them. Were all these women victims of false consciousness (as I once thought industrializing housewives were), or did they understand something about their own interests that I, sitting in my well-appointed ivory tower, had somehow missed? It took ten years of research in primary sources derived from many different kinds of people playing many different kinds of roles in the drama of genetic screening before I finally realized that, once again, snobbism had led me astray: The social meanings of these new technologies were more complicated than my ideology (still Marxist-pessimist) had led me to suspect.

* * *

Ironically, had I kept reading The New York Review of Books attentively into the late autumn of 1969, I might have encountered an answer to John McDermott. And, had I known then what I know now, I might have appreciated the answer enough to save myself from some of those false starts. In the 20 November issue, the noted poet, memoirist, and social critic Paul Goodman published an essay entitled “Can Technology Be Humane?” This was, as far as I could tell, the only response to “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals” that TNYRB ever published. Goodman’s text was wordfor-word identical to the first chapter of his then-forthcoming book, New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative, but the fact that either he or an editor regarded it as a positive response to McDermott’s negative is revealed by its title; in the book version the essay is called “Sciences and Professions,” not “Can Technology Be Humane?”9

Goodman was born in 1911, making him several decades older than McDermott. He was one of the so-called New York intellectuals, a writer of novels, poetry, and essays; he became famous after the publication, in 1960, of a work of social criticism, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System. Although he described himself as an anarchist, members of McDermott’s generation might well have thought of him as Old Left; his essays had appeared regularly in such journals as Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, and, of course, The New York Review of Books.10 New Reformation, his twenty-sixth and last book, was intended as a commentary (often personal and impassioned) on the youth movement of the late 1960s, from which, as the subtitle, Notes of a Neolithic Conservative, is meant to suggest, he felt more than a little estranged.11

“Can Technology Be Humane?” begins with a student protest in which McDermott might have been involved and that he certainly would have championed.

On March 4, 1969, there was a “work stoppage” and teach-in initiated by dissenting professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed at thirty other major universities and technical schools across the country, against misdirected scientific research and the abuse of scientific technology. . . . I want to consider this event in a broader context than the professors did, as part of a religious crisis. An attack on the American scientific establishment is an attack on the worldwide system of belief. I think we are on the eve of a new Reformation, and no institution or status will go unaffected.12

Although Goodman could understand the dismay of these dissenters, he thought that their attack was focused on the wrong target. Yes, he went on to say, it is absolutely true that too much money is being funneled through universities to support the wrong kind of research on the wrong kind of subjects. And yes, it is absolutely true that that money could be better spent on projects that would more directly benefit individuals, particularly those who are poor and hungry. But, Goodman continued, science and technology are not to blame; the blame lies with social institutions through which they are currently being funded and developed.

Science and technology are not thoroughly and irrevocably evil, as so many young people seemed to think, because they have additional and countervailing characteristics, redeeming social graces which the young rebels seem to be forgetting. “For three hundred years,” Goodman admonished the dissenters, “science and scientific technology had an unblemished and justified reputation as a wonderful adventure, pouring out practical benefits and liberating spirit from the errors and superstitions of traditional faith.”13 We ought to be rebuilding them, he continued, not destroying them, socially reconstructing them rather than eliminating them. Yes, he concluded, science and technology can be humane; they were in the past and, even if they are not in the present, they can be in the future.

Had I been attracted to this argument, I might have obtained a copy of Goodman’s book—and there, in its second chapter, would have found a counterexample to McDermott’s target calculating computer, an example of what Goodman meant by those complimentary phrases, “wonderful adventure,” “practical benefits,” and “liberating spirit.” “I am writing this chapter in July, 1969,” he begins chapter 2 of New Reformation,

when the two men have just walked on the Moon, and five hundred million televiewers have watched it. Surely this is mankind being great at several of our best things, exploring the unknown, making ingenious contraptions, cooperating with a will to do it, drawing on the accumulation of culture and history, whether we think of the equations of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, or of the roving Polynesians, Vikings, Columbus, and Magellan. And we have satisfied our lust to see at a distance: the pictures a second later were as sensational as the voyage.

People do beat all!14

The “wonderful adventure” is, of course, the risky exploration of the unknown; the “practical benefit” is that five hundred million people were able to experience it, not just those who participated, and not just those who could subsequently read a report about it; the “liberating spirit” is the dual inspirations that led to and resulted from this effort to “reach for the stars.”

Much as he approved both of the space program and of the television coverage, Goodman found some things to criticize: the program, because of the secrecy that surrounded it and the nationalism that had initiated it; television in general, because of the gullibility its visual components induced in its audiences. But unlike McDermott, he did not think of either space capsules or television sets as monolithic: they had, in his view, several different moral valences, several different social effects, some good, some bad, some humane, some inhumane. All these effects, he argued, were inseparable from the technology itself, and so the good had to be taken with the bad and if the good were good enough—which in these cases he thought they were—then accepted. One of the features of the space program that bothered him was that success required teamwork and therefore individual creativity had to be suppressed. But, he argued, “[t]he collectivity is inherent in the enterprise, and that is acceptable since the purpose is not stupid and the people are not coerced.”15 Thus, Goodman’s optimism countered McDermott’s pessimism as being too monolithic. At the same time, and perhaps unknowingly, Goodman also countered Mesthene’s faith in the possibilities of technocratic regulation as being too simplistic, as not understanding both that technologies have inherent social characteristics and that they can have many different social effects simultaneously.

Technology, in Goodman’s vision of it, was, thus, neither good nor bad nor neutral. The solution to our current dissatisfactions, he argued, was not to ditch the good because of the bad, but to change the social institutions through which new technologies were being constructed, so that, in the future, the good might outweigh the bad, by being built in from the outset, by having good social effects as the goal rather than as the spinoff.

I would not be surprised to discover that Goodman had been corresponding with Mel Kranzberg, because his solution to the problems of the day could well have come from one of the founding documents of SHOT. “. . . [T]echnology,” Goodman wrote, “is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science. It aims at prudent goods for the commonweal, to provide efficient means for these goods.” At present, he went on to say, “It has no principles of its own,” but is merely treated as a “bastard” subject half in the theoretical sciences and half in the vocational schools. “To remedy this . . . technology must have its proper place on the faculty as a learned profession important in modern society, along with medicine, law, the humanities, and natural philosophy, learning from them and having something to teach them.”16

What Goodman advocated, then, was precisely what the founders of SHOT had in mind and what so many members of subsequent generations have sought to achieve: a body of humanistically inspired, evidence-based scholarship, which treats technology as both morally and socially multifaceted—so that the young can make changes, if they want to, that are, to borrow a concept from McDermott, both technologically and socially rational.

Looking back, I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea if we resurrected all these texts—McDermott’s, Mesthene’s, and Goodman’s—as a way of demonstrating how far our field has come in the intervening four decades. Looking forward, I confess that if I were asked to choose just one of them to exemplify my hopes for the future of our discipline, it would surely be the first two chapters of Goodman’s New Reformation: by all means, in the future as in the past, let ideology inspire research, as long as, in the end, evidence trumps ideology.

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1. I cannot resist a comment on sociotechnological systems here. I kept typing “strictures” as I was drafting this essay, and Word kept substituting a “u” for an “i”: structures instead of strictures. After being corrected for the third time by some programmer’s dictionary, I decided to honor that person by leaving in what she or he thought I ought to be saying.

2. The piece appeared in the issue of 31 July 1969, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 1–27. It can be accessed online at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/11253 (accessed 6 November 2009), but I recommend reading it in its original form or on microfilm, because the advertisements of its time provide crucial historical context. McDermott subsequently wrote The Crisis in the Working Class and Some Arguments for a New Labor Movement (Boston, 1980), and he taught labor studies at SUNY-Old Westbury for many years.

3. [Harvard] Program on Technology and Society: Fourth Annual Report. Actually, it was a pamphlet of ninety-six pages, self-published (1967–68) by the Harvard Program on Technology and Society.

4. Emmanuel G. Mesthene, “An Experiment in Understanding: The Harvard Program Two Years After,” Technology and Culture 7 (October 1966): 479–80.

5. The exception is Renée C. Fox and Judith P. Swazey, The Courage to Fail: A Social View of Organ Transplants and Dialysis (Chicago, 1974). Fox, a medical sociologist, and Swazey, a historian, met under the aegis of the Harvard project, where they began what has turned out to be several decades of fruitful collaboration.

6. Kenneth E. Boulding, “Tools on a Grand Scale,” Science 168 (19 June 1970): 1442.

7. George Basalla, “Addressing a Central Problem,” Science 180 (11 May 1973): 584.

8. Emmanuel G. Mesthene, Technological Change: Its Impact on Man and Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 35.

9. Paul Goodman, New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (New York, 1970), 3–23, and “Can Technology be Humane?” TNYRB 13, no. 9 (20 November 1969).

10. A partial bibliography and a biography can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Goodman_(writer) (accessed 6 November 2009).

11. See chapter 3 of New Reformation for Goodman’s discussion of this estrange-
ment.

12. Goodman, “Can Technology Be Humane?”; Goodman, New Reformation, 3.

13. Goodman, “Can Technology Be Humane?”; Goodman, New Reformation, 6.

14. Goodman, New Reformation, 24.

15. Ibid., 30–31.

16. Goodman, “Can Technology Be Humane?”; Goodman, New Reformation, 7–8.

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Dr. Cowan is Janice and Julian Bers Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. This essay is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0623056, SHOT 50th Anniversary Workshop, Washington, D.C.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.