Living in the Labyrinth of Technology (review)

Reviewed by David Koukal Living in the Labyrinth of Technology. By Willem H. Vanderburg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Pp. xv+539. $35.95. History has shown that oftentimes technology creates as many problems as it solves. In Living in the Labyrinth of Technology, Willem Vanderburg attempts to delve deeply into this history, and his inquiry is highly ambitious in its breadth and scope. Vanderburg begins by delineating three "megaprojects." The first was the transforming of immediate experience into a symbolic universe endowed with language. A second created societies that mediated the relationship between human groups and nature. On Vanderburg's account we are in the midst of a new epoch, whereby the creation and use of a universal science has given rise to humanity's third megaproject. It is with this third epoch that Vanderburg is most concerned. His book is divided into three parts, each of which corresponds to a distinct phase of development in this megaproject. Part 1 outlines a period of industrialization in the West that ran roughly from 1750 to 1930 and fundamentally altered humanity's relationship to the Earth and traditional cultural values. Part 2 illustrates how developmental barriers generated by the industrial phase were overcome through the surrender of local knowledge in favor of a single universal technology. This period occurred in the West between the 1930s and 1970s and gave rise to mass societies, emerging environmental crises, and growing concerns over potential resource limits. Part 3 brings us to the present and documents the alarming degree to which culture-based "connectedness" has become wholly subordinated to the pragmatic and quasi-mechanical extension and enhancement of a purely technical approach to the world, which shapes every dimension of human experience. Most ominous to Vanderburg is the prospect of a fourth phase of this megaproject, where bio- and nanotechnology have already begun to reshape our biological connectedness to the world at the most elemental level. Vanderburg's argument rests heavily on this notion of "connectedness": [End Page 814] whereas once individuals, societies, and the biosphere were able to integrate interrelated sets of meanings and values through intertwined connections based in biology, technology, and especially culture, in the present epoch, which comprises the ever-encroaching demands of the technological imperative, we no longer understand the world as we did when human life was more strongly connected to it through culture. In short, "culture" is implicitly Vanderburg's baseline for judging the degree to which the meaning of human life has been distorted by our increasingly technological approach to the world. Unfortunately, he never adequately clarifies this notoriously ambiguous term, and his notion of connectedness, especially as it pertains to culture, remains vague throughout the text. These ambiguities seriously undermine the author's argument. This problem could have been addressed by a robust theory of meaning, especially as it pertains to science in general and technology in particular. Vanderburg himself seems aware of this when he periodically complains that there is no "science of the sciences" that will allow for a comprehensive interpretation of how the various sciences constitute meaning for the larger world. For an engineer who so obviously appreciates what the humanistic disciplines can bring to his field of inquiry, it is surprising that Vanderburg seems unaware of a rich literature in phenomenological philosophy that offers just such a science. To name only two relevant scholars: the whole of Edmund Husserl's work elucidates a rich theory of meaning of the relationship between the positive sciences and the lived world; and, more recently, Albert Borgmann's Heidegger-inspired work on technology and culture could have deeply supplemented Vanderburg's analysis. Although this reviewer found Living in the Labyrinth of Technology philosophically wanting, it will still be of interest to historians of technology as an extension of Jacques Ellul's classic work, The Technological Society (1954), in which Ellul analyzes the "phenomenon of technique" whereby human life has been reduced to just one node in "the ensemble of means." Given the...

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