The Traditions of Technology *

Abstract

Modern technology is a particular form of traditional technology with about 300 years of history behind it. It has become the dominant tradition by marginalizing the other traditions of technology in the West and in the rest of the world. In this marginalization, important roles have been played by the ideology of Englightenment, by the Industrial Revolution, and nineteenth and twentieth century colonialism. They have blurred the difference between science and technology, underwritten the mechanomorphic world-image and promoted the concept of a value-free, ethically unrestrained technology seeking omnipotence and omniscience on behalf of man. However, the present crises of technological consciousness has brought to the fore alternative traditions of technology, not as ethnotechnologies from which a universal, secular, modern technology can draw lessons, but as competing philosophies of universality which can provide correctives to the alienating, exploitative, and dehumanizing role of modern science and technology. For this, an alternative ideology of science as well as a new legitimacy for the traditional technosystems and their cultural environments is necessary. Such a legitimacy will have to be based on a different set of values relating to the man-nature and man-man relationships and a deeper understanding of the politics of technology in its cross-national and cross-cultural contexts.