The American
response to the current crisis illustrates well the degree to
which technocracy has replaced Christianity as our favorite religion.
Most Americans only profess Christianity, but increasingly -
and in a deeply fundamentalist manner - they practice technocracy,
relying unquestioningly upon the systems that make it work.
Almost without
exception, the reaction centers on technocratic solutions of
security, warfare, propaganda, and surveillance. At every level
- academic, media, and government - such issues are considered
stripped of moral, philosophical, ethical, historical, or anthropological
content. One need look no further than your own TV screen to
observe this. The "experts" on the network news and
talk shows are invariably those of technocratic skill rather
than those who have demonstrated wisdom, foresight, or human
understanding. They exemplify a quality that John Ruskin called
"intricate bestiality."
These experts,
like so many American leaders of the day in virtually every field,
are products, propagandists, and servants of technocratic systems
that are not only amoral but are designed to keep out anyone
and anything that might question their validity, value, or decency.
The closed nature
of these systems is fostered not just by the rules of the professions.
It starts at colleges and universities that purport to be citadels
of free thought but which, in fact, are now mainly technical
schools indoctrinating pupils into a closed logical loop not
unlike that self-justify religious fundamentalists and brutal
cops.
Once graduated
from Yale Tech or the Georgetown School of Technology they move
into fields such as law, media, and politics largely immune to
any ideas or challenges alien to the closed logic of their systems.
The results have
become increasingly absurd. The Hillary Clinton health plan,
the mania for standardized testing, and the war against drugs
are just a few examples of what can happen in a society in which
honest analysis, moral considerations, and natural skepticism
are not encouraged or, in many cases, even allowed. This closed
loop is maintained by the servility of institutions such as the
media and universities that control the rhetoric of the time
and limit the range of, and participants in, discussion.
Eric Fromm called
the technocrat homo mechanicus, "attracted to all that is
mechanical and inclined against all that is alive." It is
an apt description of American leadership today. We have now
reached the point where not even NPR or the New York Times can
find much time to consider how we can hope to get along with
one billion Muslims absent endemic air power and extinct democracy.
Unlike your average
American politician, journalist, or academic, Osama bin Laden
understood this. The assaults have been pinpointed - with almost
satiric precision - against the very icons of America's supposed
technological superiority. This is not only war, it is ridicule.
Yet because the technocratic mind can't escape its rigid curriculum,
the only way we know how to respond is with a further demonstration
of our supposed technological superiority.
We now have about
a century's experience with the technocratic fetish. One of the
main intellectual spirits was Frederick Winslow Taylor, who sought
to improve production through "scientific management"
of workers, including time and motion studies as well as performance-based
pay. Taylor not only had a huge impact on American industrialists
such as Henry Ford, but he was part of the inspiration for the
Harvard Business School and its case study approach. Peter Drucker
ranks Taylor with Darwin and Freud as the top thinkers of modernity.
Ford he dismisses as just someone who knew how to use Taylor's
principles.
Not long after
this death in 1915, Taylor's ideas found their way to Nazi Germany.
The concentration camp has been described as an extreme example
of Taylorism at work. Richard Rubenstein, writing in "The
Cunning of History," notes that "I.G. Farben's decision
to locate at Auschwitz was based upon the very same criteria
by which contemporary multinational corporations relocate their
plants in utter indifference to the social consequences of such
moves." Among those enthralled with Taylorism was Albert
Speer. John Ralston Saul credits the efficiency expert's ideas
with helping Germany hold out against superior Allied forces
later in the war.
But Taylor had
other fans as well, including Lenin, who learned about Taylorism
while in exile. He returned to Russia determined to "Taylorize
Communism." Saul writes: "The First Five Year Plan
was written largely by American Taylorists and directly or indirectly
they built some two-thirds of Soviet industry. The collapse of
the Soviet Union was thus in many ways the collapse of Scientific
Management."
And the ironies
continued: "The Russian government immediately hired a Harvard
professor of economics, Dr. Jefrey Sachs, to help them out of
the crisis. His methods - filled with complete abstract systems
- were strangely reminiscent of Taylor's . . . These brilliant
financial and structural reforms lacked only one element: a recognition
that several hundred million people live in Russia, that they
must east every day. Or at least every second day."
The same is true
of one billion Muslims. Sooner or later we will have to face
up to the fact that technocratic solutions to our current crisis
will only make matters worse. We will then have to ask what is
the right, sensible, moral, and practical thing to do - not according
to the sort of closed technocratic rules that created the Final
Solution but according to a warehouse of common sense and common
decency that has been placed in dead storage by America's myopic
elite. And then we may be both safe and human again.
