Treasures

Education, the mails, social work, transportation, and even civil engineering have followed this evolution. At first, new knowledge is applied to the solution of a clearly stated problem and scientific measuring sticks are applied to account for the new efficiency. But at a second point, the progress demonstrated in a previous achievement is used as a rationale for the exploitation of society as a whole in the service of a value which is determined and constantly revised by an element of society, by one of its self-certifying professional élites.

People have a native capacity for healing, consoling, moving, learning, building their houses, and burying their dead. Each of these capacities meets a need. The means for the satisfaction of these needs are abundant so long as they depend primarily on what people can do for themselves, with only marginal dependence on commodities. These activities have use-value without having been given exchange-value. Their exercise at the service of man is not considered labor.

These basic satisfactions become scarce when the social environment is transformed in such a manner that basic needs can no longer be met by abundant competence. The establishment of radical monopoly happens when people give up their native ability to do what they can do for themselves and for each other, in exchange for something “better” that can be done for them only by a major tool.

When ends become subservient to the tools chosen for their sake, the user first feels frustration and finally either abstains from their use or goes mad.

Growth has become addictive. Like heroin addiction, the habit distorts basic value judgments. Addicts of any kind are willing to pay increasing amounts for declining satisfactions. They have become tolerant to escalating marginal disutility. They are blind to deeper frustration because they are absorbed in playing for always mounting stakes. Minds accustomed to thinking that transportation ought to provide speedy motion rather than reduction of the time and effort spent moving are boggled by this contrary hypothesis.

“The scientific man has above all things to strive at self-elimination in his judgements,” wrote Karl Pearson in 1892. Of the many scientists I know, only a very few would disagree with that statement. Yet it must be acknowledged that it urges man to strive to become a disembodied intelligence, to himself become an instrument, a machine. So far has man’s initially so innocent liaison with prostheses and pointer readings brought him. And upon a culture so fashioned burst the computer.

Power is nothing if it is not the power to choose. Instrumental reasoning can make decisions, but there is all the difference between deciding and choosing.

Horkeimer, long before computers became a fetish and gave concrete form to the eclipse of reason, gave us the needed perspective:

“Justice, equality, happiness, tolerance, all the concepts that ... were in preceding centuries supposed to be inherent in or sanctioned by reason, have lost their intellectual roots. They are still aims and ends, but there is no rational agency authorized to appraise and link them to an objective reality. Endorsed by venerable historical documents, they may still enjoy a certain prestige, and some are contained in the supreme law of the greatest countries. Nevertheless, they lack any confirmation by reason in its modern sense. Who can say that any one of these ideals is more closely related to truth than its opposite? According to the philosophy of the average modern intellectual, there is only one authority, namely, science, conceived as the classification of facts and the calculation of probabilities. The statement that justice and freedom are better in themselves than injustice and oppression is scientifically unverifiable and useless. It has come to sound as meaningless in itself as would the statement that red is more beautiful than blue, or that an egg is better than milk.” [M. Horkeimer, Eclipse of Reason, 1947]

It may be that social services such as welfare could have been administered by humans exercising human judgment if the dispensing of such services were organized around decentralized, indigenous population groupings, such as neighborhoods and natural regions. But the computer was used to automate the administration of social services and to centralize it along established political lines. If the computer had not facilitated the perpetuation and “improvement” of existing welfare distribution systems — hence of their philosophical rationales — perhaps someone might have thought of eliminating much of the need for welfare by, for example, introducing negative income tax. The very erection of an enormously large and complex computer based welfare administration apparatus, however, created an interest in its maintenance and therefore in the perpetuation of the welfare system itself. And such interests soon become substantial barriers to innovation even if good reasons to innovate later accumulate. In other words, many of the problems of growth and complexity that pressed insistently and irresistibly for response during the postwar decades could have served as incentives for social and political innovation. An enormous acceleration of social invention, had it begun then, would now seem to us as natural a consequence of man’s predicament in that time as does the flood of technological invention and innovation that was actually stimulated.

It is a widely held but a grievously mistaken belief that civil courage finds exercise only in the context of world-shaking events. To the contrary, its most arduous exercise is often in those small contexts in which the challenge is to overcome the fears induced by petty concerns over career, over our relationships to those who appear to have power over us, over whatever may disturb the tranquil- ity of our mundane existence.

If this book is to be seen as advocating anything, then let it be a call to this simple kind of courage.

In many schools today, the phrase “computer-aided instruction” means making the computer teach the child. One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.

By deliberately learning to imitate mechanical thinking, the learner becomes able to articulate what mechanical thinking is and what it is not. The exercise can lead to greater confidence about the ability to choose a cognitive style that suits the problem. Analysis of “mechanical thinking” and how it is different from other kinds and practice with problem analysis can result in a new degree of intellectual sophistication. By providing a very concrete, down-to-earth model of a particular style of thinking, work with the computer can make it easier to understand that there is such a thing as a “style of thinking.” And giving children the opportunity to choose one style or another provides an opportunity to develop the skill necessary to choose between styles. Thus instead of inducing mechanical thinking, contact with computers could turn out to be the best conceivable antidote to it. And for me what is most important in this is that through these experiences these children would be serving their apprenticeships as epistemologists, that is to say learning to think articulately about thinking.

Juggling and writing an essay seem to have little in common if one looks at the product. But the processes of learning both skills have much in common. By creating an intellectual environment in which the emphasis is on process we give people with different skills and interests something to talk about. By developing expressive languages for talking about process and by recasting old knowledge in these new languages we can hope to make transparent the barriers separating disciplines. In the schools math is math and history is history and juggling is outside the intellectual pale. Time will tell whether schools can adapt themselves. What is more important is understanding the recasting of knowledge into new forms.

A child (and, indeed, perhaps most adults) lives in a world in which everything is only partially understood: well enough perhaps, but never completely. For many, understanding the Turtle’s action so completely that there is nothing more to say about it is a rare, possibly unique, experience. For some it is an exhilarating one: We can see this by the children’s eagerness to explain what they have understood. For all it is a better model of the crispness of analytic knowledge than most people ever encounter.