Technopoly (12 page)

Eichmann, it must also be noted, was an expert. And expertise is a second important technical means by which Technopoly strives furiously to control information. There have, of course, always been experts, even in tool-using cultures. The pyramids, Roman roads, the Strasbourg Cathedral, could hardly have been built without experts. But the expert in Technopoly has two characteristics that distinguish him or her from experts of the past. First, Technopoly’s experts tend to be ignorant about any matter not directly related to their specialized area. The average psychotherapist, for example, barely has even superficial knowledge of literature, philosophy, social history, art, religion, and biology, and is not expected to have such knowledge. Second, like bureaucracy itself (with which an expert may or may not be connected), Technopoly’s experts claim dominion not only over technical matters but also over social, psychological, and moral affairs. In the United States, we have experts in how to raise children, how to educate them, how to be lovable, how to make love, how to influence people, how to make friends. There is no
aspect of human relations that has not been technicalized and therefore relegated to the control of experts.

These special characteristics of the expert arose as a result of three factors. First, the growth of bureaucracies, which, in effect, produced the world’s first entirely mechanistic specialists and thereby gave credence and prestige to the specialist-as-ignoramus. Second, the weakening of traditional social institutions, which led ordinary people to lose confidence in the value of tradition. Third, and underlying everything else, the torrent of information which made it impossible for anyone to possess more than a tiny fraction of the sum total of human knowledge. As a college undergraduate, I was told by an enthusiastic professor of German literature that Goethe was the last person who knew everything. I assume she meant, by this astounding remark, less to deify Goethe than to suggest that by the year of his death, 1832, it was no longer possible for even the most brilliant mind to comprehend, let alone integrate, what was known.

The role of the expert is to concentrate on one field of knowledge, sift through all that is available, eliminate that which has no bearing on a problem, and use what is left to assist in solving a problem. This process works fairly well in situations where only a technical solution is required and there is no conflict with human purposes—for example, in space rocketry or the construction of a sewer system. It works less well in situations where technical requirements may conflict with human purposes, as in medicine or architecture. And it is disastrous when applied to situations that cannot be solved by technical means and where efficiency is usually irrelevant, such as in education, law, family life, and problems of personal maladjustment. I assume I do not need to convince the reader that there are no experts—there can be no experts—in child-rearing and lovemaking and friend-making. All of this is a figment of the Technopolist’s imagination, made plausible by the use of technical
machinery, without which the expert would be totally disarmed and exposed as an intruder and an ignoramus.

Technical machinery is essential to both the bureaucrat and the expert, and may be regarded as a third mechanism of information control. I do not have in mind such “hard” technologies as the computer—which must, in any case, be treated separately, since it embodies all that Technopoly stands for. I have in mind “softer” technologies such as IQ tests, SATs, standardized forms, taxonomies, and opinion polls. Some of these I discuss in detail in chapter eight, “Invisible Technologies,” but I mention them here because their role in reducing the types and quantity of information admitted to a system often goes unnoticed, and therefore their role in redefining traditional concepts also goes unnoticed.
There is, for example, no test that can measure a person’s intelligence
. Intelligence is a general term used to denote one’s capacity to solve real-life problems in a variety of novel contexts. It is acknowledged by everyone except experts that each person varies greatly in such capacities, from consistently effective to consistently ineffective, depending on the kinds of problems requiring solution. If, however, we are made to believe that a test can reveal precisely the quantity of intelligence a person has, then, for all institutional purposes, a score on a test becomes his or her intelligence. The test transforms an abstract and multifaceted meaning into a technical and exact term that leaves out everything of importance. One might even say that an intelligence test is a tale told by an expert, signifying nothing. Nonetheless, the expert relies on our believing in the reality of technical machinery, which means we will reify the answers generated by the machinery. We come to believe that our score is our intelligence, or our capacity for creativity or love or pain. We come to believe that the results of opinion polls
are
what people believe, as if our beliefs can be encapsulated in such sentences as “I approve” and “I disapprove.”

When Catholic priests use wine, wafers, and incantations to embody spiritual ideas, they acknowledge the mystery and the metaphor being used. But experts of Technopoly acknowledge no such overtones or nuances when they use forms, standardized tests, polls, and other machinery to give technical reality to ideas about intelligence, creativity, sensitivity, emotional imbalance, social deviance, or political opinion. They would have us believe that technology can plainly reveal the true nature of some human condition or belief because the score, statistic, or taxonomy has given it technical form.

There is no denying that the technicalization of terms and problems is a serious form of information control. Institutions can make decisions on the basis of scores and statistics, and there certainly may be occasions where there is no reasonable alternative. But unless such decisions are made with profound skepticism—that is, acknowledged as being made for administrative convenience—they are delusionary. In Technopoly, the delusion is sanctified by our granting inordinate prestige to experts who are armed with sophisticated technical machinery. Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin “social deviance,” which is a statistical concept, and they call evil “psychopathology,” which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts.

As the power of traditional social institutions to organize
perceptions and judgment declines, bureaucracies, expertise, and technical machinery become the principal means by which Technopoly hopes to control information and thereby provide itself with intelligibility and order. The rest of this book tells the story of why this cannot work, and of the pain and stupidity that are the consequences.

A few years ago, an enterprising company made available a machine called H
AGOTH
, of which it might be said, this was Technopoly’s most ambitious hour. The machine cost $1,500, the bargain of the century, for it was able to reveal to its owner whether someone talking on the telephone was telling the truth. It did this by measuring the “stress content” of a human voice as indicated by its oscillations. You connected H
AGOTH
to your telephone and, in the course of conversation, asked your caller some key question, such as “Where did you go last Saturday night?” H
AGOTH
had sixteen lights—eight green and eight red—and when the caller replied, H
AGOTH
went to work. Red lights went on when there was much stress in the voice, green lights when there was little. As an advertisement for H
AGOTH
said, “Green indicates no stress, hence truthfulness.” In other words, according to H
AGOTH
, it is not possible to speak the truth in a quivering voice or to lie in a steady one—an idea that would doubtless amuse Richard Nixon. At the very least, we must say that H
AGOTH’S
definition of truthfulness was peculiar, but so precise and exquisitely
technical as to command any bureaucrat’s admiration. The same may be said of the definition of intelligence as expressed in a standard-brand intelligence test. In fact an intelligence test works exactly like H
AGOTH
. Y
OU
connect a pencil to the fingers of a young person and address some key questions to him or her; from the replies a computer can calculate exactly how much intelligence exists in the young person’s brain.
¹

H
AGOTH
has mercifully disappeared from the market for what reason I do not know. Perhaps it was sexist or culturally biased or, worse, could not measure oscillations accurately enough. When it comes to machinery, what Technopoly insists upon most is accuracy. The idea embedded in the machine is largely ignored, no matter how peculiar.

Though H
AGOTH
has disappeared, its idea survives—for example, in the machines called “lie detectors.” In America, these are taken very seriously by police officers, lawyers, and corporate executives who ever more frequently insist that their employees be subjected to lie-detector tests. As for intelligence tests, they not only survive but flourish, and have been supplemented by vocational aptitude tests, creativity tests, mental-health tests, sexual-attraction tests, and even marital-compatibility tests. One would think that two people who have lived together for a number of years would have noticed for themselves whether they get along or not. But in Technopoly, these subjective forms of knowledge have no official status, and must be confirmed by tests administered by experts. Individual judgments, after all, are notoriously unreliable, filled with ambiguity and plagued by doubt, as Frederick W. Taylor warned. Tests and machines are not. Philosophers may agonize over the questions “What is truth?” “What is intelligence?” “What is the good life?” But in Technopoly there is no need for such intellectual struggle. Machines eliminate complexity, doubt, and ambiguity. They work swiftly, they are standardized, and they provide us with numbers that you can see and calculate with.
They tell us that when eight green lights go on someone is speaking the truth. That is all there is to it. They tell us that a score of 136 means more brains than a score of 104. This is Technopoly’s version of magic.

What is significant about magic is that it directs our attention to the wrong place. And by doing so, evokes in us a sense of wonder rather than understanding. In Technopoly, we are surrounded by the wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to ignore the ideas embedded in them. Which means we become blind to the ideological meaning of our technologies. In this chapter and the next, I should like to provide examples of how technology directs us to construe the world.

In considering here the ideological biases of medical technology, let us begin with a few relevant facts. Although the U.S. and England have equivalent life-expectancy rates, American doctors perform six times as many cardiac bypass operations per capita as English doctors do. American doctors perform more diagnostic tests than doctors do in France, Germany, or England. An American woman has two to three times the chance of having a hysterectomy as her counterpart in Europe; 60 percent of the hysterectomies performed in America are done on women under the age of forty-four. American doctors do more prostate surgery per capita than do doctors anywhere in Europe, and the United States leads the industrialized world in the rate of cesarean-section operations—50 to 200 percent higher than in most other countries. When American doctors decide to forgo surgery in favor of treatment by drugs, they give higher dosages than doctors elsewhere. They prescribe about twice as many antibiotics as do doctors in the United Kingdom and commonly prescribe antibiotics when bacteria are likely to be present, whereas European doctors tend to prescribe antibiotics only if they know that the infection is caused by bacteria
and
is also serious.
²
American doctors use far more X-rays per patient than do doctors in other countries. In one
review of the extent of X-ray use, a radiologist discovered cases in which fifty to one hundred X-rays had been taken of a single patient when five would have been sufficient. Other surveys have shown that, for almost one-third of the patients, the X-ray could have been omitted or deferred on the basis of available clinical data.
³

The rest of this chapter could easily be filled with similar statistics and findings. Perhaps American medical practice is best summarized by the following warning, given by Dr. David E. Rogers in a presidential address to the Association of American Physicians:

None of this is surprising to anyone familiar with American medicine, which is notorious for its characteristic “aggressiveness.” The question is, why? There are three interrelated reasons, all relevant to the imposition of machinery. The first has to do with the American character, which I have previously discussed as being so congenial to the sovereignty of technology. In
Medicine and Culture
, Lynn Payer describes it in the following way: