Technological Civilization: Part III

Monday

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Review of Parts I and II

In Part I we began to examine the institutional structure of civilization, following a schema that I have elsewhere developed and have applied to spacefaring (cf. Indifferently Spacefaring Civilizations), to science (Science in a Scientific Civilization), and virtual worlds (cf. Virtual Optimization as a Civilizational Imperative), such that a civilization is an economic infrastructure joined to an intellectual superstructure by a central project. According to this schema, a properly technological civilization is a civilization that takes technology as its central project. However, this is not how “technological civilization” is most commonly used, so to try to get at what people actually mean when they invoke “technological civilization” it is necessary to dig a bit deeper.

In Part II we began to examine some of the developmental characteristics of technological civilization, introducing the ideas of the prehistory of technology, Darwin’s thesis on the origin of civilization, Gibbon’s thesis on the continuity of technology, and what archaeologists call a “horizon.” We arrived at a provisional characterization of technological civilization such that a technological civilization represents the horizon of industrialized technologies of the industrial revolution. This, however, is inadequate because circular: if we cannot say what industrialized technologies are, and do not explicitly differentiate industrialized technologies from other technologies (including the technologies that preceded the industrial revolution), this characterization of technological civilization is empty.

Second Thoughts on Technological Civilization

Since posting Part II I have done a lot of reading and a lot of thinking about the theoretical problems posed by technological civilization, and this effort has yielded me considerable clarification, but it has also taken me in a direction that is a bit different from how I planned to develop the concept of technological civilization when I started this series. The way I intended to develop the concept was not especially elegant (and I knew this to be the case, hence the amount of time I spent trying to clarify my conception), whereas now I have a fairly simple and straight-forward way to characterize technological civilization within the model of civilization I have already developed.

As I previously argued, a properly technological civilization is a civilization that takes technology as its central project. But technology precedes human civilization and is pervasive in human experience, so what exactly is meant by a civilization taking technology as its central project? Does this mean that some particular technology is the central project of a civilization, or some class of technologies, presumably related to each other by some common properties, or does it mean all technologies, i.e., technology as an end to itself, is to be the central project of a technological civilization? This latter conception would yield a civilization of engineers, which is entirely possible, but it is also unsatisfying because what distinguishes technology is its utility, so that making technology an end in itself would mean taking a means to an end as an end in itself. A civilization so constituted would be likely to drift and not maintain a strong sense of direction, ultimately issuing in failure.

I will, then, continue to refer to a properly technological civilization as one that takes technology as its central project, and I will allow that such a civilization is at least possible, whether or not it has been instantiated on Earth. There is, however, another way in which a civilization can be a technological civilization, but for an exposition of this we must return to one the sources of my definition of civilization, which is the Marxian distinction between economic infrastructure and ideological superstructure (which latter I have preferred to call the intellectual superstructure).

American anthropologist Robert Redfield made a distinction between the technical order and the moral order.

The Marxian Distinction and a Redfieldian Distinction

Marx made his infrastructure/superstructure distinction explicit in only a couple of passages of which I am aware, but the distinction is pervasively present throughout Marx’s writings. Here is the first of the two passages from Marx in which the distinction is made explicit:

“In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.”

Karl Marx, A Contribution to The Critique of Political Economy, translated from the Second German Edition by N. I. Stone, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1911, Author’s Preface, pp. 11-12.

Here is the second such passage of which I am aware:

“Civil society embraces the whole material intercourse of individuals within a definite stage of the development of productive forces. It embraces the whole commercial and industrial life of a given stage and, insofar, transcends the State and the nation, though, on the other hand again, it must assert itself in its foreign relations as nationality, and inwardly must organise itself as State. The word ‘civil society’ (burgerliche Gesellschaft) emerged in the eighteenth century, when property relationships had already extricated themselves from the ancient and medieval communal society. Civil society as such only develops with the bourgeoisie; the social organisation evolving directly out of production and commerce, which in all ages forms the basis of the State and of the rest of the idealistic superstructure, has, however, always been designated by the same name.”

Karl Marx, The German Ideology

Since Marx’s writings are rather long-winded and not very clear, I won’t try to quote any long passages in which the distinction is implicit but not made as explicit as in the above passages. If the reader would like to penetrate more deeply into this, there is a voluminous amount of Marx scholarship, as well as the writings of Marx himself, with which you can engage.

I have been using this Marxian terminology for lack of anything better, and also because I found the distinction made explicit in Marx before I found it elsewhere. The idea implicit in the distinction, however, is fairly common, and indeed I myself wrote a couple of blog posts some years ago, The Civilization of the Hand and The Civilization of the Mind, which implicitly makes the same distinction: the civilization of the hand is the economic infrastructure while the civilization of the mind is the intellectual infrastructure.

More recently I have come across a similar distinction in the writings of the American anthropologist Robert Redfield, who makes a distinction between the technical order and the moral order. Here is Redfield’s distinction:

“Technical order and moral order name two contrasting aspects of all human societies. The phrases stand for two distinguishable ways in which the activities of men are co-ordinated. As used by C. H. Cooley and R. E. Park, ‘the moral order’ refers to the organization of human sentiments into judgments as to what is right… The technical order is that order which results from mutual usefulness, from deliberate coercion, or from the mere utilization of the same means.”

Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and its Transformations, Ithaca, New York: Great Seal Books, 1953, pp. 20-21

Redfield’s exposition of this distinction goes on for several pages, so that the above quotation is only partly representative of his full exposition. The reader is urged to read Redfield’s book in its entirety in order to get a good sense of how he uses these terms (if not the whole book, at least read the first chapter, “Human Society before the Urban Revolution,” implicitly referencing V. Gordon Childe on the urban revolution).

While Redfield’s distinction is not precisely the same as Marx’s distinction, the two at least partially coincide, and I will therefore occasionally adopt Redfield’s terminology of the technical order and the moral order to indicate the same distinction in the institutional structure of civilization that I have heretofore identified as the economic infrastructure and the intellectual superstructure.

Our old friend Karl Marx continues to haunt us — and to influence us.

The Marxian Thesis

In my presentation at the 2015 Icarus Interstellar Starship Congress, “What kind of civilizations build starships?” I discussed the Marxian distinction outlined above and noted that Marx maintained that the economic infrastructure determines the intellectual superstructure. However, this is only one possible implementation of the distinction that Marx set up, and I noted in my talk that there might be civilizations in which the intellectual superstructure determined the economic infrastructure, and still other civilizations in which there was a mutual causality operating in both directions.

Now I realize that Marx, in theorizing the new industrial civilization to which he was witness, was unwittingly characterizing technological civilization and applying the structures that he saw in the civilization of the industrial revolution to all human societies, which I take to be an illicit extrapolation. With this in mind I am going to distinguish the Marxian Thesis on Civilization—or, more briefly, the Marxian Thesis—as the thesis that infrastructure determines superstructure. In Redfield’s language, this becomes the thesis that the technical order determines the moral order.

It is the Marxian Theses that distinguishes another form of technological civilization in addition to properly technological civilization. That is to say, I will identify as a technological civilization simpliciter (and in contradistinction to a properly technological civilization) those civilizations that exemplify the Marxian Thesis, in which the moral order is determined by the technical order. And, I think, if we dig into this more deeply we will find that this usage accords with casual usage of “technological civilization” in a way that properly technological civilizations do not precisely accord with popular usage.

Jacob Burckhardt, Swiss historian

The Burckhardtian Thesis

The Marxian Thesis immediately implies the complementary thesis, which I will call the Burckhardtian Thesis on Civilization, or, more briefly, the Burckhardtian Thesis, named after the famous Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. While Burckhardt did not address the above distinction in his writings (Burckhardt’s most famous book is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy), he did write a book called Force and Freedom: An Interpretation of History, in which he identified the “three powers” that shape human society as being the state, religion, and culture. Culture, moreover, Burckhardt wrote:

“…is the sum of all that has spontaneously arisen for the advancement of material life and as an expression of spiritual and moral life—all social intercourse, technologies, arts, literature and sciences.”

Jacob Burckhardt, Force and Freedom, New York: Meridian Books, 1955, pp. 95-96

Friedrich Rapp wrote that Burckhardt’s book Force and Freedom…

“…demonstrates that a competent world history can be written with virtually no reference to technology. For him, the historical process is determined by the interaction of three factors: the state, religion, and culture.”

Friedrich Rapp, Analytical Philosophy of Technology, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing, 1981, p. 30.

This is close enough to making the technical order derivative of the moral order that I will use Burckhardt’s name to identify the Burckhardtian Thesis in contrast to the Marxian Thesis. (Careful scholars of Burckhardt — who are not likely to read my blog — may object to my usage here, but I am only invoking Burckhardt symbolically, and not making any claim about the argument of his works.)

Redfield implicitly acknowledges the Burckhardtian thesis to hold for pre-modern societies:

“In folk societies the moral order predominates over the technical order. It is not possible, however, simply to reverse this statement and declare that in civilizations the technical order predominates over the moral. In civilization the technical order certainly becomes great. But we cannot truthfully say that in civilization the moral order becomes small. There are ways in civilization in which the moral order takes on new greatness. In civilization the relations between the two orders are varying and complex.”

Ibid., p. 24

This passage is perhaps more representative of Redfield than that which I quoted above. Redfield here makes an implicit distinction between folk societies and civilizations, attributing the moral order’s predominance over the technical order to folk society and implicitly denying it to civilization, but he also allows that civilizations may take varying forms, so I don’t take this passage to outright contradiction the interpretation I am here giving to Redfield’s distinction. Redfield’s special object of study, especially in his early years of anthropological fieldwork, was folk society, and many of the societies he identifies as such I would identify as the hinterlands of agricultural civilizations. (I will go into this in more detail in a future post.)

The remaining possibility, that the technical order and the moral order mutually influence each other, I will for lack of a better name at present call the Interaction Thesis on Civilization (though if I can find something like an exposition of this idea already set down, I will rename the Interaction Thesis). The null case, which is the fourth permutation, is when neither the technical order determines the moral order nor the moral order determines the technical order. In this case, there is, according to my definition, no civilization.

Note the resemblance of this way of thinking about civilization to my elaboration some years ago of the Platonic theory of being (cf. Extrapolating Plato’s Definition of Being). Plato held that the definition of being is the power to affect or be affected. I have observed that this idea has four permutations:

1) the power to affect without being affected

2) the power to be affected without the power to affect

3) the power both to affect and be affected by, and

4) the null case, which is to be neither affected nor to affect

I take the null case to coincide with non-being, in the same way that I take a social context in which the technical order neither affects or is affected by the moral order, and vice versa, which is a case of non-civilization, i.e., the non-being of civilization. This adds an ontological dimension to the idea of civilization that goes beyond that which I discussed in The Being of Civilization.

ca. 1940s, USA — Computer operators program ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer, by adjusting rows of switches. — Image by © CORBIS

Two Fundamental Kinds of Civilization

Because of the distinctive institutional structure of civilization that follows from my model, the particular direction of development that a civilization takes can take on an added significance when this developmental direction coincides with some structural feature of civilization. Thus technological civilization (other than properly technological civilization) involves the technical order in a way that makes the technical order — already a feature of civilization — dominant. The contrary case is that of a civilization that involves the moral order in a way that makes the moral order — again, already a feature of civilization — dominant. Roughly, this describes civilization prior to the industrial revolution.

Following this line of reasoning, there are two primary types of civilization: the spiritual and the technical. This fundamental division follows from the institutional structure of civilization. The primarily spiritual form of civilization (in which the moral order largely determines the technical order) dominated from the earliest emergence of civilization up to the industrial revolution. The primarily technological form of civilization (in which the technical order determines the moral order), while with many intimations in earlier history, only decisively emerged with the industrial revolution. Thus technological civilization is a relatively recent phenomenon, and has far less of an historical record than primarily spiritual civilizations, which have, in some cases, histories measurable in the thousands of years.

The technical and spiritual forms of civilization may be conceived as idealized endpoints of a continuum, along which most civilizations can be located, either closer to the technical end or closer to the spiritual end. Those civilizations that embody the Interaction Thesis would be located near the middle of this continuum, being equally constituted by the moral order and the technical order. But if such a continuum be denied, civilizations that embody the Interaction Thesis may constitute a third fundamental kind of civilization.

There also may be a third primary type of civilization that corresponds to a structural alignment with the central project, but since my model of civilization already assumes that both the technical order and the moral order will be aligned with the central project, this doesn’t seem to point to another distinctive kind of civilization. However, I have not yet fully thought this through, and I may yet be able to delineate a third fundamental form of civilization. This remains an open area of research in the theory of civilization, and I will continue to question my formulations relative to this problem until I am satisfied I have achieved sufficient clarity on the matter.

Looking Ahead to Part IV

Having adopted this new perspective on technological civilization that I have outlined above, which I consider to be a significant clarification, I will go back through the notes of what I had planned to say about technological civilization prior to this clarification and attempt to reformulate what can be reformulated, and toss out that which is no longer relevant or helpful in coming to an understanding of what is distinctive about technological civilization.

My plan is to penetrate more deeply (and more systematically) into the development of technological civilization, building on the discussion I started in Part II, but now extending it in the light of the concept of technological civilization given here in Part III. In order to do this, further distinctions and elaborations to my model of civilization will be necessary, so there is more theory of civilization to come, using the particular example of technological civilization as a springboard for the exposition of concepts of civilization more generally applicable not only to technological civilization, but also to non-technological civilizations.

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