tions of biotechnological solutions to what earlier would havernbeen understood as purely human and moral situations. At anyrnrate, we have left behind critics like Ortega and his mass-manrnor the more pertinent Bergson, who perceived in technologicalrnman the sclerosis of the elan vital, the ossification of thernspirit’s potentialities. The last word among technology’s criticsrnbelongs to Jacques Ellul, for whom technology is like sin: therncollective automaton’s rebellion against God. Even Marxists—rnthat is, later disciples such as Lukacs, the early Kolakowski,rnAdam Schaff—distanced themselves from the scientific andrntechnological paradise, preferring to speak of a “Marxist humanism”rnin which the cruder aspects of the praxis would notrnentirely extinguish the light of a spiritual culture.rnBut it is not spirit alone that is at stake. In its essence, technologyrnis a method of organizing aspects of life and thenrnorganizations, until a totality is reached in which organizationrnis self-perpetuating. The perpetuum mobile is the ultimaterndream behind every machine and every technologue. At thisrnpoint error is eliminated, and with it the human being who errs.rnWe note here the sharpening of the affinity between technologyrnand ideology, both of which propose hermetically closedrnsystems and super-systems that remove as superfluous an independentrninner life. Society is no longer Plato’s man writrnlarge, history ceases to be an indefinite number of crossroadsrnwhere freedom and imagination meet in unplanned combinations.rnThe features of the machine are copied in society: uniformityrnin production, homogeneity, predictability. The lastrnword of technology is simultaneity, since time, too, is mechanized:rnhistory moves according to planned portions of time;rnLIBERAL ARTSrnCOSTLY SENSITIVITYrnWhen a woman in Santa Ana, California, admitted to a marriagerncounselor that she had never really been sexually attractedrnto her husband, it proved to be a costly admission. Arguingrnthat his wife’s hidden feelings constituted fraud, andrnthat he would never have married her if he had known howsherntruly felt, her husband, Ronald Askew, sued his ex-wifernand was awarded $242,000 in damages last April. Accordingrnto the L.A. Times, Bonnie Askew claimed “the only reason Irndid not tell him was because I didn’t want to hurt his malernego.”rntime for all men must become the same.rnThis is the final significance of technology: the precalculatedrnsimultaneity of human awareness. If this sounds like jargon,rnlet us rather say that consciousness is reordered as a clock:rnall men are aware of the same thing at the same time. Why isrnthis technologically or ideologically desirable? Because it guaranteesrntransparence, that is the abolition of individuality andrnpcrsonhood. This is approximately what A. Gchlen had inrnmind when he wrote that “the future no longer holds anyrnprospect of a resurgence of mythical consciousness, since thernindustrial culture now conquering the globe is rationalisticrnthrough and through.” In the years when Gehlen wrote this,rnMarshall McLuhan had his intuitive phrase about the worldrnas an “electronic village,” in other words the rise of the collectivityrnto consciousness through technology. Simultaneity,rntransparence.rnThe final phase of technology calls forth the planetary participationrnof all mankind in receiving information and makingrndecisions, so that each becomes transparent to all. JiargenrnHabermas has built on this insight a whole social epistemology,rntechnology’s final refinement and philosophical crowning.rnThe content of Habermas’s “social rationalization” is the intercommunicationrnof all members of planetary society. Itrnwould be naive to suppose that with such a step technology isrnstill only a neutral instrument; in fact, it acquires an ideologicalrndimension. The chefde file of the Frankfurt School discardsrnany further philosophical speculation when he writes thatrntruth is a (social) language game, offering us a practical grasprnof the worid, a substitute for reasoning with abstract concepts.rn”Truth” is then the linguistic perspective of social communication,rnthe only valid espousal of reality, itself social. The conditiornsine qua non is then technology, which permits immediaternawareness and offers the monopoly of initiating andrnprogramming intercommunication to a social scientific elite.rnIt would be wrong, however, to assume that such an elite isrnby necessity the top echelon of a totalitarian party, a nomenklatura.rnTechnology has its own set of postulates, independentrnof the regime in which it functions. Writuig of the fusion of arnregime-neutral technology with industrial megaproduction,rnIngmar Granstedt observes that such a combination cannot bernreversed or dismantled because our collective fascination withrnproductive power has reached ideological dimensions—althoughrnwe are aware of our increasing impotence as personsrnwithin the system. In other words, socialism versus capitalismrnis not here an issue; from the point of view of technology, theyrndo not represent positive or negative signs.rnThe critics mentioned above seem to feed the ideological dimensionsrnof technology when they conclude that technologyrnis an end-situation, inscribed in mankind’s fate as an apocalypse.rnBut Granstedt himself speaks in L’impasse industriellern(1980) of the finitude of our mental capacitv as it clashes withrnthe superpower of modern and foreseeable industrial equipment.rnThis is also the view of F. Hayek, K. Popper, and others.rnMcLuhan’s and Habermas’s global intercommunication mayrnnot be possible for the same reasons that huge empires collapse.rnThe increasingly interdependent structures (or structures ofrnstructures) are so refined at their points of junction that thernprobability of failure and dysfunction becomes overwhelming.rnThis seems to be true of industry, but also of statecraft, indeedrnof civilizations. The law that governs the finality of technologyrnmay itself be subsumed to another, more general law: the lawrnof degeneracy and exhaustion. crn28/CHRONICLESrnrnrn