Abstract
Technical Fouls: Democratic Dilemmas and Technological Change
By John Kurt Jacobsen
Westview Press, 2000
196 pages; $21.00
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, The Modern Prometheus, was published in 1818, at the dawn of British industrialization and the specialization of the sciences. While Luddites protested the mechanization of the workplace, Newtonians consolidated the disciplines of modern physics and chemistry. Technology and science seemed to be leading society toward an exhilarating but frightening precipice. Victor Frankenstein's reduction of life to a laboratory experiment was Shelley's early warning that we could create either a miracle or a monster.
John Kurt Jacobsen's Technical Fouls is a contemporary reminder of that warning. Jacobsen, a research associate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago, critiques the role of politics, money, and entrenched interests in determining science policy in the United States. Using case studies on automation, advanced weaponry, genetic manipulation, and ecological disaster as the basis of his critique, Jacobsen argues that the direction technology takes is not fixed, but transformable. What awaits us in the future, he argues, depends on whether science policy-making can be opened to democratic scrutiny.
According to Jacobsen, science and technology are not value-neutral. They are shaped by political and economic considerations that are embedded in technologies themselves. They have a “social history” complete with class interests, economic agendas, and elite values. Jacobsen strives to reveal the societal forces that control the direction of science.
In his case study on military technology, Jacobsen takes the reader on a journey that begins with bows and arrows and ends with smart bombs, demonstrating how decisions concerning military funding are largely made by a self-policing force composed of entrenched military and corporate elites.
For example, in describing the strategic “window of opportunity” that the Soviet Union was alleged to have in the late 1950s, Jacobsen writes that while U.S. officials were quick to point out U.S. military superiority to the Soviets, they told the public quite a different story. He quotes a former Strategic Air Command (sac) officer as saying that his job was to help “conceal from the American people, particularly our own sac crews, the almost certain knowledge that the Soviets still had neither operational intercontinental bombers or missiles.”
Jacobsen argues that continued increases in military spending, which are virtually guaranteed because of corporate and military support, have become a hindrance to prosperity and security. Only by subjecting spending decisions to a more open, democratic process can money be diverted to social needs.
His discussion of military technology also emphasizes attempts by military and political elites to “distance” themselves from any moral responsibility for their creations. One element of this is the evolution of weapons that kill at safe distances. According to Jacobsen, the advent of guided missiles, smart bombs, and proximity fuses not only served to help soldiers overcome their “stubborn reluctance to kill” when face to face with their adversaries, it also enabled policymakers to distance themselves from the violence and mayhem produced by these weapons.
Further reinforcing this distancing is what Jacobsen terms the “Calley syndrome”–the creation of “complex chains of command in civilian and military organizations [that result] in a contrived confusion, and absolution, of responsibility by central authorities.”
The history of eugenics–selective breeding to improve the human species–clearly demonstrates the social history of science. Jacobsen recounts the early efforts of English scientists–in particular, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, who coined the term eugenics in 1883, and his protege Karl Pearson–to direct the process and progress of human evolution.
The author shows that although eugenics first appeared in England and is usually associated with Nazi Germany, it has an extensive history in the United States. Charles Davenport, a Harvard zoologist and the first director of the Station for Experimental Evolution (established in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in 1904), was the most influential proponent of negative eugenics in the United States. Davenport's work armed racist policy-makers like Harry H. Laughlin–who helped pass the highly restrictive U.S. Immigration Act of 1924–with stacks of scientific graphs, charts, and statistics.
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was also influenced by the work of eugenicists. During the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell, Superintendent, Holmes said that if a family could be proven to have “three generations of imbeciles”–in this case, Carrie Buck, her mother, and her infant daughter–then forced sterilization could be legally performed. The case, which Jacobsen does not mention in his book, produced one of Holmes's more infamous quotations: “It is better for the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”
Who an imbecile is, of course, is open to interpretation. From Galton to Pearson to Laughlin, quality human stock was associated with the middle class–especially intellectuals, scientists, and white Protestants.
But early proponents of eugenics cannot simply be written off as bad scientists. Galton pioneered the mathematical study of heredity; Pearson fostered the quantitative, statistical study of evolution; and Davenport used the work of these scientists to demonstrate the hereditary characteristics of hair and skin color. To political actors such as Holmes–perhaps the epitome of rationality in 1920s America–the work of these eugenicists was science at its best. The point, according to Jacobsen, is that scientists–and the politicians who use their findings–are no more and no less racist than anyone else.
Today, according to Jacobsen, eugenics has come back “in a suitably subtle form under nicer names.” Eugenicists found answers in blood, says Jacobsen, but today's biological determinists find deceptively similar answers in our genes. But various claims for identifying a “manic depressive gene,” genes for schizophrenia or alcoholism, or the “gay gene” have each been retracted or never fully corroborated.
Further, says Jacobsen, the values we attach to certain characteristics cannot be scientifically determined. We all want normal children, he writes, but “what is normal is determined by the values of the social circle, not by a gene map.” Modern genetic engineers, the author concludes, follow a methodology of reduction-ism that is valuable as a research tool but dangerous when applied to the complexity of the social world.
Jacobsen's neo-Marxist approach to his subject matter can be limiting, and he tends to conflate science and technology–two very different issues. He also equates the historical development of science and technology with the direction given them by government policy. But policy is not the only force driving scientific and technological advance.
The author also fails to take into account broader social realities that can determine the direction of science policy. For example, the eugenics movement in the United States made strides largely at state and county fairs, in local “Fitter Family” organizations, and in provincial doctors' offices. It is conceivable that had it been opened to a more democratic process, an even more aggressive eugenics movement would have resulted. Values, prejudices, and agendas that are not economic or political, but social, cultural, and intellectual also deserve examination.
Victor Frankenstein's hubris was not that he created life, but that he failed to take responsibility for his actions, and thus felt no social or moral obligation for his creation. Technical Fouls offers the same moral in a modern context.
“Don't worry about wasting my time—a parasite is never busy.”
