'THE CASTLES IN THE AIR'

“How do you suppose to name our city?

I’ve got it! Listen – CLOUDCUKOOLAND

Imagination’s happy home,

Where Theogenes builds castles in the air”

·      Aristaphanese, The Birds

“To have one basis for life and one for science is a priori a lie”

·      Marx, 1844 Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts

What has happened to the ‘dream’ of the abolition of intellectual elites and of participatory democracy as the offspring of technological progress envisioned by the likes of John Dewey?  Isn’t it the time to finally de-throne the prophets of the techno-scientific society and the presuppositions of an ‘automatic’ age? We learned where the ‘technically sweet pursuit of nuclear science’ a la Oppenheimer has lead the to and not just with regard to his fate under McCarthy-ism but the whole genre of scientists in the first half of the 20^th century. Once the first ‘Big Bomb’ was exploded, it became obvious that they, the scientists, were last to be the consulted about its use. The myth of neutrality, therefore, turned out to have served a political concept. But when are we going to reach a universal ‘consensus’ that it isn’t just ‘Hitler’s science’ or North Korea’s or Pakistani Quadeer Khan’s science, but sciences as such that has gone to the ‘devil’?

It is one of the most peculiar characteristics of our time in which no deformity is ever vanished. Thus at a climatic stage in the technological ‘conquest’ of nature, old forms belonging to previous epochs of human development live side by side with the moderns. Hunger and obesity, Malaria and AIDS, poverty and affluence continually co-exist, however unevenly distributes among different individuals. We, therefore, suffer not only from the present but also from the past! – ‘The dead clutches onto the living.’ What seems astonishing is that even prosperity and the absence of hard physical labor among certain segments of the population, has not generated health, happiness or freedom. The life ‘leisure’ conceived as the opposite of ‘toil’ has led to depression, inactivity and alienation. We are, therefore, oppressed by underdevelopment as well as the technological ‘over-development.’ There is a primitive character to the modern age – perpetuating the most ancient – the domination of man by man through the instrumentality of the machine!

Developed as such instrumentality, the earlier era’s project of technology’s concrete purpose has amounted to a sheer abstraction. What began as an abstract concept, ‘machine at the service of human progress’, has been transformed into ‘its progress.’ The ‘slaves of men’, as Oscar Wilde had dreamed, turned out to enslave men. But the tendency to regard ‘men’ as ‘semi-idiots’ or ‘dummies’ relative to the ‘mind’ of the machine, while latent from its very beginning now appears to have achieved total dominance. It is now apparent that ‘the republic of science’ has crowned the ‘smart’ machine.

No longer content with a subsidiary role as the ‘application’ of science, technology is now behaving as it is ‘self-caused’ and possesses ‘a mind of its own.’ It has seemingly ceased to be bound by any ‘external’ aim. Its end has become the pure self-development of technology itself. The illusion of ‘technicity,’ as an independent ‘deity,’ has even been likened, by some, to the myth of the ‘Prometheus Unbound’! But one must be fully true to the legend and ask: If that ancient Titan stole fire from heavens and introduced it to ‘man’, if he sacrificed for humanity by getting chained to Caucasus with vultures constantly gnawing at his liver, what has this so-called ‘Modern Prometheus’ offered mankind? Humanity – subjugated as ‘instrument vocale’ – is now on the threshold of ultimate self-instrumentation in the creation of bio-technological life forms that may very well have the potential to threaten the survival of the human species. Given the fact that under Capitalism, life itself is but a mere means of living, and in lieu of the experience of the atomic bomb, should we not pause a moment longer to ponder the ramifications of this new venture? Is this, then, the next frontier in Scientific Utopia?