We Love Technology Even as It Harms Us
Psychologists call it cognitive dissonance: the anxiety caused by holding opposite beliefs at the same time.
Ours is a society that deeply believes in the beauty and benevolence of technology, and regards it as the essential foundation for success and happiness. Yet, we know that technology has dangerous downsides, unintended consequences, accidents and misuses; and the more powerful and complex the technology, the more threatening the downsides.
The $125-million Mars Climate Orbiter was 60 miles off course and either crashed or went zooming uncontrolled into space because a bunch of high-paid scientists confused feet with meters and pounds with kilograms, an unimaginable schoolboy error. However, when the plutonium-laden Cassini spacecraft raced toward Earth in August to make a slingshot orbit that would send it on to Saturn, no one except a few of the usual Chicken Littles seemed to worry that the slightest miscalculation could send it plunging back to the Earth.
The workers in a Japanese nuclear fuel plant set off a deadly chain reaction that sent high doses of radiation outside the plant because they were mixing seven times more uranium than they should have been. And yet we have seven similar facilities in this country and more than 100 nuclear power plants operating, and we remain secure in the belief that nothing like that could ever happen here (though in fact there were six critical accidents in U.S. processing plants in their first 20 years) and a repetition of Three Mile Island has been made impossible.
We finally realize, when the disaster is almost upon us, that computer chips that don’t recognize the four digits of the number 2000 are likely to cause immense and potentially life-threatening upheavals unless specialists somehow make them “Y2K compliant.” Yet we have no difficulty in believing that the same kinds of people who caused the problem are capable of solving it, and that corrections complex enough to cost several trillion dollars are certain to go without a hitch.
To put the problem starkly, we know that the sophisticated technologies developed in just the past few decades--chemical, mechanical, biological, digital, nuclear--have created a multifold environmental crisis that includes a depleted ozone layer, global-warming, pollution, deforestation, overfishing and species extinctions--enough to lead 1,600 world scientists to sign the 1992 Union of Concerned Scientists’ warning that present rates of degradation will leave the planet “irretrievably mutilated.” Yet not one of the technological processes that have led to this crisis has been forsaken, and indeed they tend rather to become more rapid, more extensive and more powerful, and presumably more destructive.
Of course, we have escaped the most disastrous of the feared calamities, and predictions of immediate collapse have all so far turned out to have been exaggerated. It is also true that the scientific establishment might soon be able to find techno-fix solutions to the assorted crises, although the history of modern science is not rich with technological solutions that do not contain additional problems.
There is, however, one particular difficulty that living with cognitive dissonance entails. It is the psychological and ultimately social strain of living with contradictory concepts. Surely much of the sense of unease and uncertainty in industrial societies everywhere, and the resulting individual and collective dysfunctions, is a result of having our deep faith in the wonders of technology and the virtues of science challenged by our increasing doubts about where it all is leading and at what price. The icons of our culture and the prelates of our politics keep telling us that this faith is justified with each new miracle drug or altered gene or faster computer, and yet, as Saint Augustine knew so well, faith is not always easy to maintain, particularly in the face of evidence that encourages skepticism.
Is it not this that explains the bizarre overreaction to the Y2K problem? Despite the reassurances by the people we acknowledge as experts, and the logical awareness that most of the billions of computer chips in the world do not have a four-digit problem or recognize dates in the first place, many people are deeply worried about what will happen on Jan. 1.
Perhaps the deeper truth here is that a society resting on polar opposites must become in some way schizophrenic, unable to trust either of its world views or forced to live in an unstable transition from one to another, until its self-comprehension eventually disintegrates. It then ceases to have any coherent beliefs, any way of understanding phenomena around it, and retreats to delusion and lethargy and numbness--and, in time, to madness.
My guess is that we are well along the way in that process.
