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The Future without a Past
This page intentionally left blank
The Future without a Past
The Humanities in a Technological Society

John Paul Russo

University of Missouri Press Columbia and London

Copyright © 2005 by
The Curators of the University of Missouri
University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201
Printed and bound in the United States of America
All rights reserved
5 4 3 2 1 09 08 07 06 05

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Russo, John Paul.

The future without a past : the humanities in a technological society / John Paul Russo.
p. cm.
Summary: “Argues that technological imperatives like rationalization, universalism,
monism, and autonomy have transformed the humanities and altered the relation between
humans and nature. Examines technology and its impact on education, historical memory, and
technological and literary values in criticism and theory, concluding with an analysis of
the fiction of Don DeLillo”—Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8262-1586-6 (alk. paper)
1. Humanities—Philosophy. 2. Technology and civilization. 3. Science and the
humanities. 4. Humanities—Study and teaching (Higher) 5. Learning and scholarship—
History. I. Title.
AZ103.R87 2005
001.3'01—dc22
2005002031

™This paper meets the requirements of the

American National Standard for Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Designer: Jennifer Cropp

Typesetter: Crane Composition, Inc.
Printer and Binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Typefaces: Minion, Dyadis
To Robert Casillo
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

I. The Future of the Humanities in a Technological Society 23

II. The Great Forgetting:

Library, Media Center, and Las Vegas 43

III. The Circle of Knowledge:

Science and the Humanistic Curriculum from Petrarch to Trilling 82

IV. Belief and Sincerity 120

V. The Tranquilized Poem:
The Crisis of the New Criticism 149

VI. The Disappearance of the Self:

Contemporary Theories of Autobiography 174

VII. Don DeLillo:

Ethnicity, Religion, and the Critique of Technology 211

Notes 243

Index 299
This page intentionally left blank
 Acknowledgments

The first essay was the Dean’s Lecture at Purdue University in 1998, and I
wish to thank Anthony Julian Tamburri for his invitation and hospitality; the
lecture was printed in Humanitas and subsequently translated into Spanish
and published in Valores en la Sociedad Industrial. Previous portions of this
work have also appeared in slightly different form in Da Ulisse a . . . : Il viag-
gio nelle terre d’oltremare, ed. Giorgetta Revelli; Modern Language Quarterly;
Texas Studies in Language and Literature; Letterature d’America; Culture a con-
tatto nelle Americhe, ed. Michele Bottalico and Rosa Maria Grillo; Dal romanzo
alle reti: Soggetti e territori della grande narrazione moderna, ed. Alberto Ab-
bruzzese and Isabella Pezzini; and Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society.
I owe a collective debt of gratitude to fellow panelists at the annual confer-
ences of the International Association for Science, Technology and Society:
Richard Stivers, Kim A. Goudreau, Willem H. Vanderburg, and James van der
Laan. W. Terrence Gordon’s studies of Marshall McLuhan and C. K. Ogden
were an inspiration. The staff of the University of Miami’s Otto G. Richter
Library and especially its Inter-Library Loan Department have been extraor-
dinarily helpful in support of my work.
I want to extend my thanks to those from whom I have profited in dis-
cussing the humanities and technological society: Alberto Abruzzese, Carol
Bonomo Albright, Massimo Bacigalupo, Casey Nelson Blake, Michele Bottal-
ico, Bruce Boucher, Andrea Carosso, Giuseppe Castorina, Russ Castronovo,
Terry N. Clark, David Cowart, Maria Vittoria D’Amico, Hans de Salas-del Valle,
Ian Duncan, Ferdinando Fasce, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Giovanna Franci,
Patrizia Fusella, Dana Gioia, Valeria Giordano, Iain Halliday, William Bruce

ix
 x Acknowledgments

Johnson, Elena Lamberti, Mario Maffi, Andrea Mariani, Ezequiel Morsella,

Franco Mulas, Gigliola Nocera, Frank Palmeri, Maria Parrino, David Perkins,
Giorgetta Revelli, Jeffrey Robbins, Perri Lee Roberts, Vincent Sherry, David
Simpson, Federico Siniscalco, Thomas Skipper, the Right Honourable Chris
Smith (MP), Gregory D. Sumner, Mihoko Suzuki, Arnaldo Testi, Lina Unali,
and David Walter.
For their penetrating observations on the issues raised in these pages, and
for their unfailing goodwill, I am grateful to Lorna C. Ferguson, Cristina Gior-
celli, and Richard Shiff. Conversations and correspondence over many years
with Giuseppe Sertoli helped shape the initial discussion and subsequently
broadened the scope of the investigation. My brother, J. Edward Russo, chal-
lenged my readings in science and technology and alerted me to new perspec-
tives and avenues of inquiry. Robert Ferguson contributed insightfully at every
stage of the project, besides lending his always generous encouragement. My
colleague Robert Casillo commented extensively on the manuscript and sharp-
ened its focus with his searching criticism and good judgment.
Thinking about the future leaves one particularly prone to error; there is no
shortage of false prophets; but the mistakes and misconceptions that remain
here are my own.
The Future without a Past
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

In 1831 John Stuart Mill declared that the Western world was entering an
age of transition without equal in historical memory. Paul Johnson’s Birth of
the Modern World contains a wealth of illustration from the period 1815–1830
showing some of the more immediate causes. A few decades afterward, Mat-
thew Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” (1867) portrayed the
mid-Victorian generation in terms of a stalled transition: “Wandering between
two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born.” Though writers and
thinkers in succeeding generations spoke of accelerated, disorienting change,
no one could specify when the pace would slacken and a new society would
achieve stability.1 For well over a century, with invention following invention,
it even seemed that the state of transition would be permanent. But in the last
decades of the twentieth century, in spite of all relativistic skepticism and ideo-
logical conflict, the transition that Mill had announced had reached its end.
Change will not cease, yet the future has taken shape. We now have students
raised and educated wholly within the hard shell of the technological environ-
ment, a generation for whom the great transition is finally over.
If one wants to know the future, Lord Bacon said, consult people in their twen-
ties. This generation, born in the mid-1980s, was reared not only under condi-
tions of mass culture, which had been true for at least the previous fifty years, but
also in the midst of a communications revolution and its decisive impact on all
fields of technology and globalization.“Today’s children are growing up in the com-
puter culture,” notes Sherry Turkle.“All the rest of us are at best its naturalized cit-
izens.”2 For many, the computer was their first big toy; for all, beginning with the
elementary grades, it served as the key educational influence—“a computer on

1
 2 The Future without a Past

every desk,” as former President Clinton liked to campaign. They played video
games, listened to Walkmans, and downloaded multimedia CDs; they watched
VCRs and DVDs; they browsed the Web and hyper-linked through cyberspace;
they acquired an arcane vocabulary and learned by interactivity simulations,
PowerPoint, CD-ROMs, and virtual communities. In the process, they became
thoroughly technicized.
Now their cell phones interrupt them constantly so that their experience is
broken into bits and pieces. E-mail, Net surfing, chat rooms, portable digital
devices, electronic bulletin boards, and instant messaging erode the bound-
aries of personal privacy, while issues of surveillance do not appear overly to
disturb them. Contemporary students are said to exhibit “decivilizing (or ‘re-
tribalizing’) processes, as indicated, for example, by major shifts in manners,
morals, dress”;3 they are unaware of the nineteenth-century bourgeois distinc-
tion between private and public space, which they cross indiscriminately. Be-
cause they grew up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they recall no time
when the Western way of life was seriously threatened. Their understanding of
history is minimal; its lessons present little of immediate usefulness in a society
that differs so markedly from any previous epoch. They view the past as strange,
confusing, tedious, and unnecessary. Mario Rigoni Stern talks of Italian stu-
dents for whom the First World War is “as distant as the moon.” Commenting
on the results of a survey of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old Britons, the
Guardian went out of its way to excuse them for not knowing who Winston
Churchill was—“maybe they do not need to know, in ‘a world of information
overload.’ ”4
In Reading at Risk, a survey conducted over the past twenty years, the Na-
tional Endowment for the Arts (NEA) found that literary reading “is fading as
a meaningful activity” among all groups; young adults, between age eighteen
and twenty-four years, registered the most dramatic loss: minus 28 percent
(since 1982). A drop of 10 percent is the equivalent of twenty million readers.
As Dana Gioia, chair of the NEA, commented on the “dire” findings, the de-
cline of literary reading correlates not only with the “massive shift” toward
electronic media but also with decreased civic and cultural participation.5 The
diminishing percentage of history and humanities majors starting in the 1960s
has been catastrophic. In 1984, one higher education study reported that “since
1970 the number of majors in English has fallen by 57 per cent, in philosophy
by 41 per cent, in history by 62 per cent, and in modern languages by 50 per
cent.” In 1995 “only about 9% of American college freshman declared them-
selves interested in Arts and Humanities majors.” 6 Nearly all students of the
present generation are convinced that the technological wonders of the mo-
ment and the immediate future offer them a felicity unparalleled by anything
in the past.
 Introduction 3

Educated to adapt to an ever impinging technological world—as seductive

and soothing as it can be importunate and violent—the current student gener-
ation has become accustomed to think within the framework of a technical
mentality, which enables them to find a linear path through the most compli-
cated digital designs and apparatuses with surpassing ease, almost as if they
were being entertained. The icon of the age is the person absorbed before a
computer screen, scanning its luminous surfaces, peering into window behind
window, interacting, customizing, constructing, working, playing. Hegel said,
“There is nothing behind the curtain other than that which is in front of it.”
The mind being what it is, inevitably the outside becomes the inside. Where
Marshall McLuhan wrote that technologies are “extensions of ourselves,” now
one inquires “to what extent we ourselves have become cyborgs, transgressive
mixtures of biology, technology, and code.”7 Analyzing image transmission
from the invention of photography in 1839, Peter Weibel describes the pre-
sent stage (the seventh) as one of telerobotics and “interactive,” “telematic cul-
ture”; eighth is the stage of “advanced sensory technologies”: “the development
of ‘brain-chips’ or ‘neuro-chips’ in order to bypass classic electronic surfaces
and link the brain as directly as possible to the digital realm.” What might this
hold in store? Brain waves picked up and read by an implant connected to a
wireless system? “Once a container, technology now becomes a component of
the body,” comments one artist. “As an instrument, technology fragmented and
de-personalized experience—as a component it has the potential to split the
species. It is no longer of any advantage either to remain ‘human’ or to evolve
as a species.” No longer advantageous to evolve because the process would take
far too long: technology speeds up evolution to accomplish in years what might
have taken eons. One is no longer fully human but a combination of the
human and the machine—a cyborg. And this is far from the wildest specula-
tion. “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world,” contends Donna Hara-
way. “It has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated
labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness”; it is “the illegitimate off-
spring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism.
But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.”8
In the past twenty years a stream of books (and e-books) and journals have
appeared with such titles as The Age of the Internet; The New Renaissance: Com-
puters and the Next Level of Civilization;9 Digital Age; Electronic Age; The Infor-
mation Age; The Computer Era; This Era of Microcomputers; The Rise of Network
Society; CyberSociety 2.0; Posthumanism; The New Technoculture; and The Age
of Spiritual Machines—titles that make the age of Aquarius and postmodern-
ism seem distinctly quaint and passé. Most writers salute the computer revolution
under the banners of freedom, democracy, consumer choice, and empowerment
from below, and with metaphors of exploration, religion, and communalism.
 4 The Future without a Past

“As we immerse ourselves ever more deeply in our own technologies; as the
boundaries between our technologies and ourselves continue to implode,”
Allucquère Rosanne Stone awaits the “high adventure” of the future. “For cen-
turies,” comments Hugh Kenner, “routines of trivial order-giving were prepar-
ing Western society for computerization: a list-comparing, paper-copying,
bill-collecting society which had already turned vast numbers of people into
machines when real machines began being invented to set them more or less
free.”10 Although it is true (as Lewis Mumford said) that people had to turn
themselves into machines before machines could dominate them, Kenner mis-
conceives the nature and historical evolution of technology by treating it
piecemeal in terms of labor-saving devices and by ignoring its totalizing sys-
temic power, subtlety, and pervasiveness. He thinks that more and more tech-
nology, at some point, miraculously liberates us from technology.
Recalling McLuhan’s global village, Howard Rheingold delights in the pros-
pect of overcoming alienation in The Virtual Community with its cozy subtitle,
Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Some writers have confused the feel-
ings aroused by technology with the awe inspired by the divine. In The Web of
Text and the Web of God, Alan C. Purves glamorizes an electronically mediated
theophany.11 (Don DeLillo’s Underworld [1997] concludes with an immanent
revelation in cyberspace.) One book carries a messianic title, Online Eden: Re-
inventing Humanity in the Technological Universe. Not everyone shares the en-
thusiasm, as shown by books like Trapped in the Net, Out of Control, Let Them
Eat Data, and The Robot’s Rebellion. Not that one should be unduly elated or
depressed: it is a fairly well-known constant that books on the future have a
terribly short shelf life.
Why focus on communications and technology in the 1980s as the critical
divide rather than the noisier political and social unrest of the 1960s? For many
reasons the “greater 1980s” are the decisive decade, the real break with the past.
According to Marvin Lister and the coauthors of New Media: A Critical Intro-
duction, economically, to enlarge the frame for the moment, the 1970s under-
went a deep worldwide recession, brought on by an oil crisis and ending in
weak economic growth, high unemployment, and high inflation. Daniel Bell’s
Coming of Post-Industrial Society appeared in 1973. Politically, traditional gov-
ernment responses (social welfare, entitlements, union protection) gave way
under the ideology of neoliberalism to policies of deregulation, monetarism,
and privatization that spread throughout the Western world in the 1980s and
’90s. Globalization took on new intensity as foreign investment in individual
economies went from 4 percent in the period 1981–1985 to 24 percent in the
years 1986–1990. The “replacement, in the West, of an industrial age of manu-
facturing by a ‘post-industrial’ information age” involved a “shift in employ-
 Introduction 5

ment, skill, investment and profit, in the production of material goods to ser-
vice and information ‘industries.’”12 Universities also underwent intensive cor-
poratization in the 1980s. On the international scene, this decade witnessed
the breakup of the Eastern bloc; the cold war ended, an enormous ice floe
melting away; and the Iranian Revolution (1979) brought Islamic fundamen-
talism to the forefront of attention in the West.
Within this setting, and linked to it in many ways, occurred the astonishing
advances in communications technologies that spread through many fields:
new techniques in recording—CD (1970); VCR (1971); cell phone (1973);13
CD-ROM (1978); Walkman (1980); new technologies in printing, storage, and
digital photography (1986); expansion of biogenetic engineering, video surgery,
magnetic resonance imaging (1977–1980), DNA fingerprinting (1984), and
gene therapy; home video games, high-definition digital television, wireless
cable systems; and the ubiquitous computer. “The 1980s marked the passage
from an era of large, centralized computer installations to a world in which
vast numbers of more inexpensive machines, distributed widely among users,
are tied to one another and to a shrinking number of specialized, centralized
computer resources.”14 If one needs dates, in 1982 Time announced not a per-
son, but a machine of the year: the personal computer. “In the decade since the
release of the first Web browser [1990], information technology has insinuated
itself into virtually every corner of higher education”—and almost every other
corner as well.15
Though many breakthroughs date from the 1960s and 1970s (the Internet
[1969], silicon chip [1971], and personal computer [1974]), only in the 1980s
did these innovations interact with one another to produce something much
vaster than the individual technologies on their own.16 The personal computer
began as a glorified typewriter, turned into a screen for receiving images, soon
served as a mail room, hosted chat-room encounters, opened a shopping mall,
and became an information service, business office, auction block, travel agent,
library catalog (not just for one’s own library but for thousands of others as
well), and so on. Likewise, the mobile phone meant that there was no place
where one could be out of reach—technology follows one everywhere if one
allows it to do so. As DeLillo writes in Underworld, a novel that captures the
spirit of the age, “everybody is everywhere at once.”17 By the rule of miniatur-
ization, video cell phones now do what the personal computers did ten years
ago and mainframes twenty years earlier. Globalization in political and eco-
nomic terms on the scale we are considering would have been inconceivable
without the communications revolution.
With their complex histories, the new media were not entirely new; televi-
sion, for example, had prepared the way for home-screen viewing. But to read
 6 The Future without a Past

Lister and his coauthors, there are strong reasons that new is the appropriate
modifier and not merely an ideological weapon or advertising tag for “social
progress as delivered by technology.” These media delivered new textual expe-
riences in both genre and entertainment such as computer games, hypertexts,
and special-effects cinema. They offered innovative ways of representing real-
ity such as virtual environments and screen-based interactive media. We are
not just seeing images; we are “immersed within images.” The present world of
visual media is one in which “images, still and moving, in print and on screens,
are layered so thick, are so intertextual, that a sense of what is real has become
problematic, buried under the thick sediment of its visual representations” (for
example, the average urban American, it is said, sees some three thousand ad-
vertisements each day). There were also “new relationships between subjects
(users and consumers) and media technologies” (voice-image transmission,
the Web, CD-ROMs, virtualities); “shifts in the personal and social experience
of time, space, and place (on both local and global scales)”; and new ways of
conceiving the biological body’s relation to technology with cyborgs, prosthe-
ses, and so on.18 These media ran on the same technological principles—least
effort, speed, miniaturization, digitization over analogue, interactivity, hyper-
textuality, virtuality—concepts that have come to dominate and will continue
to dominate, until the next era.
It may appear foolish to generalize over an epistemic shift when the greater
1980s are not so far behind. By Ortega y Gasset’s definition of an intellectual
generation as a mere fifteen years, the ’80s are scarcely one generation away. If
one adopts Fernand Braudel’s tripartite historical model of brief, medium, and
long duration, one could argue that the decade of the ’80s contains a brief
event (évenément): the communications revolution. This event occurs toward
the end of a fifty-year conjuncture: postwar economic and cultural globaliza-
tion. Beneath the conjuncture, however, lie the enormous, determinative, slow-
moving structures of longue durée: secularizing, rationalizing modernity, from
the late Renaissance to the present.19 The ’80s revolution constitutes an évené-
ment that is carved so deeply into the historical terrain that it has not only
forged a division between midlevel conjunctures but also produced a tectonic
shift in the underlying longue durée. Many historians of civilizations are pes-
simistic over the medium- or long-term future of the West.
In 1941, Pitirim Sorokin said that Western society was undergoing a “tragic”
disintegration of its “six-hundred-year-long Sensate day” (sensate meaning
materialist, sensual, relativist, narrowly particularistic, seeking immediate
gratification). “The night of a transitory period begins to loom before us and
the coming generations,” a “dies irae, dies illa of transition to a new Ideational
or Idealistic phase” (ideational meaning supersensory, mystical, ascetic, truths
 Introduction 7

of reason). In 1957, he reaffirmed his belief that the West was in its “darkest
hour . . . with its nightmares, gigantic destruction, and heartrending horrors.”
Arnold Toynbee wrote that the Third Italistic Age of Western civilization ended
in 1875, with a twilight period through 1945. These are remarkably accurate
figures, given that humanistic education was fading by 1914. (Compare travel
writing before and after the First World War.) For him, civilizations decline
mainly from internal causes and an inability to respond to challenges, internal
and external. Western civilization was suffering a “spiritual breakdown” from
the extremes of sensate culture (he might have prophesied ’60s culture), a time
of troubles, though there was a possibility of renewal.20
Carroll Quigley employed an economistic model of core-periphery rela-
tions, instruments of expansion (good), institutionalization (wasteful), and
periodic expansion-stagnation cycles. He determined that Western civilization
is in “profound crisis,” not yet resolved into a fourth age of expansion or fallen
into another age of conflict, an uncertainty expressed in one of his books,
Tragedy and Hope. Like Toynbee, Quigley examined the issues from all sides; so
vast is the amount of data to marshal and digest, so many and independent are
the variables, that a slight emphasis in one place can have enormous conse-
quences in another. But there is a difference between indecisive and undecided.
The communications revolution, making capitalism more efficient, could be
the economic instrument needed to propel the fourth expansion age. Quigley
(who died in 1977) concluded his last lectures on a dark note. He condemned
the destruction of community and the family by state power; the “commercial-
ization of all human relationships”; the “technological acceleration” of weaponry,
communications, and transportation; and the “dualism of almost totalitarian
imperial power and an amorphous mass culture of atomized individuals.”
“And if a civilization crashes, it deserves to.”21
Other historians have reached similar conclusions. For Matthew Melko, ad-
vanced technology means more specialization and less time for persons “to de-
velop their total capacities” and hence less possibility for “new creative phases.”
If a “giant world technology” emerging from the West were to falter, “it would
bring a world civilization down with it, and the results could be so prolonged
and frightful that nuclear destruction would seem like social euthanasia.”
Stephen K. Sanderson predicts that the “Capitalist-Sensate” culture of the West
will survive for “a few more decades.” “When solutions are finally attempted,
they will come too late. . . . It does not have to happen, but it will happen.” “It”
is either a nuclear holocaust, as suggested by W. Warren Wagar in A Short His-
tory of the Future (1992), or economic, demographic, and ecological disaster.
“We are on the brink of a great historical shift,” Sanderson comments dryly.
“Not enough people are paying attention.”22
 8 The Future without a Past

The points of view of these civilizationist historians allow for a certain dis-
tance and objectivity on the present generation. Some, known by the Swiftian
term endists, specialize in the pathology of culture. Yet the most pessimistic
among them do not think that Western civilization is vanishing overnight,
whereas the optimists or meliorists (admittedly few and far between) believe
that the major world systems are moving toward a low-cost, polycultural,
quadrilingual, conciliatory, global technocracy that will take another hundred
years or so to establish itself—low-cost because interest in ethnicity and any
specific culture will lack genuine intellectual or emotional investment.23
But whatever the time scale, a deep chasm has been crossed between the
1980s and the present day. There is a phenomenology as well as a history of
technology. Having lived on both sides of the epistemic period shift, one notes
the alterations in consciousness and physical life so much more acutely than if
one had lived wholly on one or the other side—the generation now coming to
its maturity has not felt this dislocation. Western civilization is evolving on
grounds other than its own, or on one highly specialized version of its own, the
technological, and it will soon cease resembling itself.
Any explanation, however speculative, of the deeper forces that govern the
period shift since the 1980s should take into account at least three current
views: first, technological determinism, which maintains that the technologi-
cal system is grinding the world together; second, the clash of civilizations
that maintains antithetically that there are cultural forces that are driving the
world apart; and a third view, which embraces a combination of factors, some
technological, others not. It is perhaps too strong to call the second and third
positions antideterminist—there are degrees of determinism from hard to
soft24—but both positions leave scope for human intention, freedom, and ra-
tional calculation.
From the appearance of The Technological Society in 1954 Jacques Ellul has
been associated with hard technological determinism. His central thesis is
premised on the fact that we have undergone a transformation—not only in
Western culture but in nearly every other one as well—through technological
characteristics such as rationalization, speed, universalism, monism, and self-
augmentation. Technology is not a mere neutral, ad hoc instrument, but a sub-
stantive force that permeates every aspect of our lives, from politics, economics,
management, psychology, and medicine to food, education, sports, travel, and
leisure. To emphasize this notion of totality, Ellul employs the word technique
(la technique: the ensemble of means, procedures, and above all the technical
mentality) rather than technology or the machines and specific practices per se.
“The machine could not integrate itself into nineteenth-century society; tech-
nique integrated it. Old houses that were not suited to the workers were torn
down; and the new world technique required was built in their place.”25
 Introduction 9

In earlier periods technical advances were added to human culture gradu-

ally and in piecemeal fashion, to the extent that technical products and values
could be humanized and assimilated. Now the technological system has be-
come overwhelming, runaway, and autonomous; far from being humanized in
the process of assimilation, it has had the effect of eroding human values or
technologizing them. Propaganda, too, is a technique, along with one of its
most lethal forms, advertising. Nor can education be counted upon to oppose
propaganda, because education, which in Ellul’s view has become a means of
technological adaptation, is propaganda for the technological system. Oddly
enough, the more education people have, the more they render themselves sus-
ceptible to propaganda and advertising—intellectuals most of all. As Ellul
states with Cartesian verve, technique “clarifies, arranges, and rationalizes; it
does in the domain of the abstract what the machine did in the domain of
labor. It is efficient and brings efficiency to everything.” Intrinsic and norma-
tive, the technological phenomenon “shapes the total way of life.”26 Our pow-
ers to intervene are approaching nil.
Similar to Ellul, Marshall McLuhan takes a “plenary approach to technol-
ogy” in which the whole is vaster than, and qualitatively different from, the
sum of its parts. “When the globe becomes a single electronic computer” be-
gins a typical sentence (in 1960!). Ellulian too is his belief that the technologi-
cal interface between ourselves and nature has thickened to such a degree that
we live increasingly within a technological, not a natural, world and that we
derive normative values from the relentlessly self-aggrandizing imperatives of
the technological system. “The new media are not bridges between man and
nature; they are nature.” McLuhan furthers an understanding of the period
shift in his treatment of the communications media as paradigmatic of tech-
nology itself and as the dominant agents of change. Not simply the press or
television, the media in his expanded sense of the term are all “go-betweens” or
“in-betweens,” that is, “extensions of man” such as speech, clothing, the shoe
and car (extensions of the foot), money, gunpowder, and so on. His famous tag,
the medium is the message, indicates that the means of communication, though
often invisible, are ultimately more important than any “message” (content, in-
formation) could possibly be in determining the milieu.27 His further spin, the
medium is the massage, implies that technology insinuates itself into every as-
pect of our lives, either by force, by seduction, or by tacit consent; the massage
is “the shaping, the twisting, the bending of the whole human environment by
technology . . . a violent process, like all new technologies, often revolting, as
well as revolutionary.”28 A violent massage captures the oxymoronic nature of
the condition.
A second view on the shaping of the global scene is Samuel P. Huntington’s
clash of civilizations, which has enjoyed great notoriety since it was first proposed
 10 The Future without a Past

in Foreign Affairs in 1993. Huntington argues that religious, ethnic, linguistic,

and cultural values and other supranational factors now weigh—and have
weighed for several decades—more heavily as historical determinants than na-
tionalism, economics, class, or technology. Though still powerful, nation-states
are no longer the shaping forces they were in the period 1800–1960; instead,
the seven or eight greater civilizations (Western, Chinese, Islamic, Hindu,
Slavic-Orthodox, and others) are the real players in the historical drama. As
the world grows smaller through travel, communications, business, and other
cultural pressures, these civilizations come into increased conflict, revealing
geopolitical fault lines with vivid precision. Relatively speaking, the West has
declined with the emergence of a multipolar, multicivilizational world order.
“The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western
identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal
and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western so-
cieties.” Huntington’s preference for multiculturalism on the global scale re-
quires at least a minimal standard of accepted values, “not only in order to
restrict the clash of civilizations but also in order to strengthen civilized behav-
iour generally.”29 Of particular interest to theorists of civilization, Huntington
also notes that the West was stronger relative to the other civilizations at the
beginning of the twentieth century than at the end of it. He expresses from the
political center or just right of center what Jacques Ellul in The Betrayal of
the West advances from the left of center. Events of the past decade seem to
have lent some credence to the Huntington thesis.
Soft technological determinism is the third explanatory view. With only
slight exaggeration it may be said that hard determinists are all alike, but soft
determinists are soft after their own fashion. Some are so soft that they occa-
sionally say things that are virtually antideterminist. Others seek a middle
ground, dangerous because they can collect fire from both extremes. For all
soft determinists, however powerful are technology and communications in
the shape of things to come, these are second-level factors compared to cul-
ture, ideology, politics, or religion. In this view, the main problems with hard
technological determinism are its monocausality, reductiveness, and insuffi-
cient embeddedness in the social and political framework.
In his Autonomous Technology: Technics-Out-of-Control as a Theme in Po-
litical Thought, Langdon Winner, one of Ellul’s foremost interpreters, might
seem to have aligned himself with a reductionist hard determinism. “We do
not use technologies as much as live them,” he comments. “Complex technolo-
gies are tools without handles or, at least, handles of extremely remote access.”
But Winner does not yield up the middle ground of choice and personal inter-
vention, calling technology “a political phenomenon.” “It is somnambulism
 Introduction 11

(rather than determinism) that characterizes technological politics—on the

left, right, and center equally.” Perhaps, as Merritt Roe Smith notes, technology
for Winner is not out of control so much as are the contemporary theories that
thematize “technology-out-of-control.” Still, Winner’s soft approach to tech-
nological determinism is not completely convincing, as when he pleads that
“we should try to imagine and seek to build technical regimes compatible with
freedom, social justice, and other key political ends.” The very idea of a regime
implies an incompatibility with freedom. Winner believes that political debate
requires an informed, democratic society that grants the “claims of technical
expertise.” But one questions how to educate a vast, global society on techno-
logical choices, especially when the very means to reach and educate society
must of necessity be technological. Nonetheless, Winner concludes “on a hope-
ful note.”30
For Peter C. Perdue, technology is one of the future’s constraints. In his
“flexible equilibrium” model the “interrelationship of all the elements, rather
than any single one, determines the whole.” Human freedom, which “includes
the recognition of necessity,” is one element; another is “humility.” And we
must fend off “despair.”31 Lynn White Jr., a single-factor hard determinist in his
early works, eventually included medieval Christianity as a factor in the tech-
nological progress of the High Middle Ages.
A soft determinist, Albert Borgmann admires modern technology for bring-
ing forth “the most complex and the most imposing creations in human his-
tory,” and if one thinks solely in terms of material achievement (flying through
the rings of Saturn), one cannot deny it. The modern history of technology has
been characterized by the availability of more and more devices, gadgets, and
commodities, “instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy.” Once these devices
were miniaturized and their machinery concealed, their relation to production
and nature became virtually invisible. Now a commodity makes “no demands
on our skill, strength, or attention.” A hundred years ago, it took considerable
work to withstand winter—by chopping trees, splitting and hauling wood, and
making the fire (Borgmann lives in Montana). Heating can be a “focal thing”
(the word focus is Latin for hearth); it once centered the efforts of a whole fam-
ily; today we raise the thermostat. Technological expansion has consisted in
whittling away focal things and substituting commodities to the point where
“nature in its pristine state now consists of islands in an ocean of technology.”
Though Borgmann does not want to return to a pretechnological world, he
believes that if we rely less on gadgets and devices and more on focal things
and practices, we can “challenge the rule of technology” with a new philosophy
of living; we can “prune back the excesses of technology and restrict it to a sup-
porting role.” Technology will be “a way of proceeding that we follow at certain
 12 The Future without a Past

times and up to a point.” Reinstated, focal things should not be seen as mere
coping mechanisms; they are a means to fullness of being; their end is embod-
ied in their very means. His examples betray a homespun world distant from
modern urban lifestyles and the thin but immensely powerful electronic cul-
ture: instead of eating a TV dinner, the careful preparation of an elaborate
meal; gardening; hiking in the wilderness; running so that one can better ap-
preciate sports on television. “The technological environment heightens rather
than denies the radiance of genuine focal things” because we recognize the dis-
parity between them. In Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology
he recommends miniutopias where we have “citizen-based decision making,
communal celebrations, and a vital connection with the table and the Word
through daily shared meals and the discipline of reading.”32 In every American
is a bit of Brook Farm.
Ellul has also defended himself against the charge of hard determinism.
Even in his early work, which never denies freedom of choice, he was not
nearly so hard as his numerous critics had supposed. In the preface to The
Technological Society, whose original title is Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle
(Technique or the wager of the century), he said that humanity made a deci-
sion and bet on technology in the twentieth century. Technology had won the
bet and proceeded to beat the house.33 Yet Ellul always believed that we have
cards to play—reason, will, and choice. Even with propaganda and advertising,
resistance is possible: “propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins.”34
Toward the end of his life he wrote that “with the new developments in com-
puter science (informatique) and everything organized around it, we have new
alternatives, different ways to organize society” that were not present in the
postwar period.35 Whether his expectations from the computer revolution are
misplaced remains to be seen. In his theological writings, as impressive as his
books on technology with which they are interrelated, Ellul proposes an ethics of
restraint: human beings should “agree not to do everything they are able to do”:

Nevertheless, there is no more project, nor value, nor reason, nor divine law
to oppose technology from the outside. It is thus necessary to examine tech-
nology from the inside and to recognize the impossibility of living with it,
indeed of just living, if one does not practice an ethics of nonpower. . . .
[W]e must search systematically and willingly for nonpower, which of
course does not mean accepting impotence.36

Ellul, then, may be numbered among the soft determinists: “There are few pos-
sibilities, but one should never lose hope.”37
Perhaps the most insightful of the soft determinists are Romano Guardini
 Introduction 13

and Lewis Mumford. From both a philosophical and historical perspective, the
Catholic theologian and critic Guardini expresses the strongest hope for the
future, though it comes through full awareness of loss and tragedy. Influenced
by German romantic philosophy, he had grown up before 1914 and lived though
a twilight era. In a beautiful early work, Letters from Lake Como: Explorations in
Technology and the Human Race (1927), the halcyon landscape of the Italian
lakes forms the backdrop for meditations on preindustrial and industrial soci-
eties. In contrast to the German city in which he was teaching at the time, the
region surrounding Lake Como was marked by human interventions and im-
bued with traditional social values, yet nature still remained norm-giving and
in possession of itself. The sentiment of Virgilian piety spread in concentric
circles from the home to the town and into the natural universe. The inhabi-
tants had found a harmonious balance between themselves and nature, which
was founded on a sense of self-limitation and fostered urbanity and civic com-
munity. “Here nature can pass over smoothly into culture. There is nothing
alien or antithetical to culture that must wither away if this humanity, this ur-
banitas, this art of living is to come into being.”38
Such an integration between people and nature took centuries to establish.
In one valley, however, he came upon a large boxlike, smoking factory, and
“everything fell apart.” Then the motorboats began taking over the lake with
their speed, noise, and smell, and a new road for automobiles changed the nat-
ural contours of the landscape, organizing everything around it. Modernity,
which in northern Europe had already broken the continuity between the nat-
ural and the human, was doing the same around Lake Como. People were
being uprooted from their own natural contexts and ultimately from their own
human essence. “There is no feeling for what is organically possible or tolera-
ble in any living sense. No sense of natural proportions determines the ap-
proach. . . . Machines are an iron formula that directs the material to the
desired end.”39
This was a startling turnaround from the romantic period; Guardini located
the shift in northern Europe between 1830 and 1870. In the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries technology remained largely under the command of
a nontechnical mentality. Beginning with the arms race and World War I, and
in the decades leading up to and including World War II, however, “the man
motivated by technology broke into the field of history and took possession.”
Guardini could find no historical parallels for such domination, not even in
the great hydraulic civilizations of the Near East. Individuals who had derived
a sense of vitality from the natural world and interacted with it on a plane of
parity were now surrounded by machines from which they were existentially
divided. “Man today distrusts nature.”40
 14 The Future without a Past

In The End of the Modern World, written after World War II, Guardini en-
dures a time of “final crisis,” the “ominous spectacle of a human nature wither-
ing beneath the destructive hand of modernity.” The choice is either to master
the technological world or to cease being human, and if humanity does not
make the choice, it would be made for it. A wide historical gulf separated his
generation from the opposite bank, that is, the future. Previous ages in Western
history—the classical, the medieval, and the post-Renaissance or modern—
were related to one another in both real and symbolic terms; they followed one
another organically. That historical development had come to an end. What
for Guardini characterizes the coming age is its disassociation from the past,
even its repudiation. Individuals no longer feel as if they belong to nature, or
take their lessons from nature, or could establish a relation to it, except in
highly artificial ways and always abetted by the very technological means that
they hope to reduce, if not escape. Their sense of autonomy that expanded in
the bourgeois epoch and penetrated through a large part of the population,
larger than at any previous time in the history of the West, has diminished in a
tightly regulated society. Above all, the technological system is slowly reshaping
the forms of human consciousness. Norms now derive from technology: the
mass is “fashioned according to the law of standardization, a law dictated by
the functional nature of the machine”; “the most highly developed individuals
of the mass, its elite, are not merely conscious of the influence of the machine;
they deliberately imitate it, building its standards and rhythms into their own
ethos.” The impositions and distortions wrought by the technological system
have resulted in a “ ‘non-cultural culture,’ ” a “ ‘non-natural nature,’ ” and a
“ ‘non-human’ man.”41
Yet Guardini also acknowledges that technological society has increased
personal and public freedom—not only from something (from hunger, pov-
erty, ignorance, and drudgery) but also for something, on a higher plane of
aspiration and moral significance. Technology, which could be used for the
well-being of the human race, is being used for power and is changing the very
nature of human nature. “Man as a human being is far less rooted and fixed
within his own essence than is commonly accepted. And the terrible dangers
grow day by day.” Would the challenge of moral freedom be accepted? Guar-
dini expresses a profound and simple faith in human nature, in the masses.
Not the masses directed by a cadre of intellectuals, or governed by a wealthy
elite, or courted by one of Burckhardt’s terrible simplifiers: he has faith in the
masses themselves. Although Guardini presents the bleakest vision of the end
of the modern world, his Christianity prevents him from yielding to the sins of
despair and pride. “We need stronger, more considered, more human technol-
ogy”; “the emergence of a new, free, strong, and well-formed humanity is
 Introduction 15

needed, one that would be a match for these forces.”42 In this way Guardini af-
firms his deep faith in the future.
Espousing a similar romantic organicism, though otherwise from a differ-
ent intellectual tradition, Lewis Mumford was an early, if not uncritical, appre-
ciator of the technological revolution. Yet after World War II he came to
deplore the all-powerful effects of what he calls “megatechnics.” The impact of
technology and communications on mass society had been a nightmare: “Dis-
order, blight, dingy mediocrity, screaming neon-lighted vulgarity are spread-
ing everywhere, producing, as I said, an empty life, filled with false vitality,
expressed in occasional outbreaks of violence and lust, either in brutal action
or in more frequent fantasy.” The Myth of the Machine (volume 1, Technics and
Human Development; volume 2, The Pentagon of Power; published 1966–1970)
presents the strongest critique of the technological system produced by the
English-speaking world since Ruskin on industrial Britain. “The bottom has
dropped out of our life. . . . [T]he human institutions and moral convictions
that have taken thousands of years to achieve even a minimal efficacy have dis-
appeared before our eyes: so completely that the next generation will scarcely
believe they ever existed.” Like Guardini, Mumford never denies the positive
value of technology, if it could only be controlled properly. He therefore urges
that we abandon the “myth of the machine” (technology as all powerful and
making all things possible) and that we adopt new myths, a “life economy,” and
an “organic ideology.” One must begin with an “inner change”: extricate one-
self from the “power system” and assert one’s “primacy as a person in quiet acts
of mental or physical withdrawal, in gestures of non-conformity, in absten-
tions, restrictions, inhibitions,” thereby liberating the self from “the domain of
the pentagon of power.”43 Though he eschews politics, leaving specific plans to
be worked out by others, and though he lacks Guardini’s messianic faith in the
masses, he has a liberal’s conviction that individual reason can find solutions to
the most intransigent problems and that the community can be restored to
health. Others share this conviction.
At the end of After Virtue (1981), with its “chillingly pessimistic” view of late
modernity, Alasdair MacIntyre draws a parallel between the decline of the
Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries and the present time. Drawing
analogies between historical epochs is dangerous, yet the final act in the long
Roman drama has exerted a lasting fascination over Western culture and pro-
vided its interpreters with a standard of comparison and a warning. Then, ac-
cording to MacIntyre, persons of goodwill gave up identifying morality and
civility with the continuation of the Roman state, as they had for centuries, and
substituted new forms of community “so that both morality and civility might
survive the coming dark ages of barbarism and darkness.”44 We are in a similar
 16 The Future without a Past

position, thinks MacIntyre, with the benefit of having the Roman historical ex-
ample as well as the additional centuries of moral thought and experience be-
tween them and ourselves. Johan Galtung, Tore Heiestad, and Erik Rudeng
note parallels between the decline of Rome and the contemporary West:

increased rejection of the dominant cosmology and lifestyle, as expressed in

the contemporary West, for instance, by increasing interest in Eastern reli-
gion and mysticism, as well as by increased interest in parapsychology, as-
trology, and occultist traditions; increasing anomie, as expressed by increases
in crime and other deviance, drug use, alcoholism, and mental disorder; alien-
ation, as expressed in such things as the increasing loss of confidence in gov-
ernments and politicians; the promotion of “leisurism” as a new lifestyle;
increasing social fragmentation; and ecological breakdown.

To this recital of woe Stephen K. Sanderson adds the “decline in the Protestant
ethic” as well as in “a sense of pride in workmanship” and “a major decline in
the quality of education.” Carroll Quigley also compares the end of the Roman
Empire with the present time when “all signs [point] to our violent, irrever-
sible, devastating destruction.” But there is hope: “When Rome fell, the Chris-
tian answer was, ‘Create our own communities.’ ”45
So that morality and civility might survive: for MacIntyre, modernity is
plagued by the weakened sense of the self, the choice among pleasure or utility
or a narrow sense of self-fulfillment over the virtues (wisdom, justice, forti-
tude, honesty, courage, prudence, and so on), and the loss of civitas. His “pro-
visional conclusion” stipulates a retrieval of the moral tradition, a recapturing
of the classical virtues, and an attempt to reinstall Aristotle’s notion of the
good life as an end, with pleasure as a by-product of achieving that end. “What
matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within
which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the
new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues
was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without
grounds for hope. . . . We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—
doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” One should emphasize that “very dif-
ferent”: however critical of contemporary moral relativism, like Max Weber
and Michael Polanyi, MacIntyre does not romanticize the past. In his nonnos-
talgic view he wants a “modern conception that could endorse the ‘progressive’
social movements.” For him, the past is an active engagement with tradition
that can stand outside the present, to be observed and gleaned in a critical
fashion. Specifically, the virtues may be seen tested and proved in moments
of historical and social stress. “An adequate sense of tradition manifests itself
 Introduction 17

in a grasp of those future possibilities which the past has made available to the
present.”46
Hope, despair, humility, imagination, freedom, possibility, dialogue: the
language of these writers aims at keeping open a space for human intention
that hard determinism might close off. In their social agenda, the legacy of re-
ligious thought is either manifest or is filtered through ethical humanism.
Whatever separates Guardini, Ellul, Winner, Mumford, Borgmann, and Mac-
Intyre in their analysis of the crisis (MacIntyre scarcely alludes to technology),
they agree that there can be self-mastery, reasoned face-to-face encounters, hu-
mane values, a sense of limit, and small communities of like-minded individu-
als seeking solutions.
Nicola Chiaromonte, the friend of Camus and Malraux and a member of
the New York politics circle, portrays such a group in his memoir of exile. Hav-
ing fled Italy in 1934 and Paris in 1940, he found intellectual solidarity among
fellow refugees in Toulouse: “enough for company, enough to feel among friends,
but not so many that one would feel, in spite of their numbers and in their
midst, alone.”47 His ideal “heretics” must subscribe neither to technocratic ma-
terialism, collectivist fads, nor self-interest masquerading as humanitarianism,
and “must detach themselves without shouting or riots, indeed, in silence and
secrecy; not alone but in groups, in real ‘societies’ that will create as far as is
possible a life that is independent and wise, not utopian or phalansterian.”
These individuals must work at their craft, whatever it may be, “according to
the standards of the craft itself, standards that in themselves are the simplest
and strictest of moral principles and, by their very nature, cut out deception
and prevarication, charlatanism and the love of power and possession.” This is
not detachment from politics “in the real sense of the word”; it is a means of
rebuilding the model.48 Yet, in secular terms, the virtues of patience and hope
may feel like a waiting game, with little spiritual satisfaction and much on-
going frustration.
Now, after having crossed the gulf separating us from the past, we look back
to the opposite shore on which Guardini and Mumford stood a half century
ago. Next, we turn away from this Lethean verge and project ourselves into the
unfolding vistas of the new epoch: mall culture, suburbs into exurbs, less ur-
banity; greater longevity and health-care delivery systems; the full-house at-
mosphere of the modern world (in Ortega’s phrase) with the fear of being lost
in the mass balanced by a fear of not being lost in it; one environmental crisis
after another; propaganda succeeding effortlessly because (as Ellul says) it “is
being used for amusement”; the media and publicity everywhere affirming our
cultural imperatives, and corporate logos instead of living symbols; world
megaevents seen by two to three billion people; and big cities that draw vast
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