It has become commonplace to suggest every definition of the human, no matter how loose or how broad, exists primarily to exclude its opposite.

We can only maintain our technologies corrupt us if we have some relatively fixed sense of who we would be without them.īut, particularly in the rarefied atmosphere of universities, the concept of human nature has been decidedly unfashionable (indeed all but forbidden) for nearly half a century. King argues one crucial reason for the decline of the techno-critical tradition is its tendency to rely on the concept of human nature. Why, then, have full-throated critiques of technology become so scarce at the exact moment when they might seem most pertinent? Where have all the Luddites gone? Thus, once-towering philosophers of technology-figures like Lewis Mumford, who was already warning in the 1950s that unrestricted technological expansion threatened the durability of both the human and the natural worlds, and Neil Postman, who in the 1980s described modern society as a 'technopoly' in which human behavior is thoroughly governed and regulated by machines-hardly receive any attention at all.Īnd the more 'techno-critical' elements of those who are studied widely (notably the ubiquitous Hannah Arendt) are quickly glossed over or pushed to the margins. Instead, what King calls 'the techno-critical tradition,' or a tradition of thinkers who view technological modernity as fundamentally damaging and foreboding, has more or less disappeared. And there are at least some indications a significant number of people are becoming aware of the mess we're in.īut as Richard King notes in his sweeping and ambitious Here Be Monsters, our philosophical or intellectual responses to technology have not really kept pace with events. The reality of human-created climate change has, in recent years, perhaps begun to cure this condition. Writing in the midst of the 20th-century nuclear arms race, he suggested an unquestioning faith in science and progress prevents us from seeing the technological catastrophe spreading out all around us.

The human condition by hannah arendt