RE: The Information War

[Brian McAndrews]

Hi Karen,
Here is portion of an interview with David Noble:

David Noble Biography: David Noble is Professor of History at York University in Toronto, and, recently, the Hixon/Riggs Visiting Professor at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. His has taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Drexel University, and was a curator of modern technology at the Smithsonian Institution. His books include The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention; America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism; Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation; A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science; and Progress Without People: New Technology, Unemployment, and the Message of Resistance.

This interview was published in the "Wild Duck Review.com"


Let's turn to the orthodoxies you've identified in A World Without Women, and The Religion of Technology. Will you describe the social struggle for "divine knowledge," the spiritual belief in state-of-the-art technology?
Yes. There's a profound faith that whatever the immediate sacrifices, there will be ultimate deliverance. This is a religious faith. I'm rooting it in the Christian tradition, where science and technology are means of transcendence. In my book, Progress Without People, published in the early 1990s, I tried to understand the roots of why people didn't resist more. I traced it back to what I call the "ideology of progress," which is going back to the late 18th and beginning of the 19th century. It's a history of anti-Luddism, past and present. We carry an ideology that we can't stand in the way of progress, which is an idea rooted in an expectation of the future at the expense of the present.

All of which is rooted in a flight from the "human condition" toward salvation?
Right, the human condition is to be gotten away from. Our eyes are elsewhere and the real prize is not here. In The Religion of Technology, I root it in the mythology of the divinity of man-that Adam was divine-half-angel, immortal, omniscient-before the fall, before Eve. Eden before Eve is the model, the patriarchal model. Eve, as woman, was the pollutant to everything that once was right. Human beings were mortal gods, as Bacon put it. The Christian idea of a recovery of that perfection symbolized by Christ and the resurrection of Christ is the dominant myth of our culture. So, the idea that we could, by whatever means- through devotion, grace, asceticism, renunciation of the flesh in the world- recover what is our real birthright, our angelic birthright, and overcome all these impediments of mortality, is a mythology that runs very, very deep in our culture. I'm arguing that science and technology became a means about a thousand years ago, ideologically speaking, toward that recovery of divine man. Therefore, whatever the costs to the planet or to our existence today, the real end is beyond all of this, away from the earth.

Will you describe the influence of Christianity, of this kind of thinking, on NASA?
I was sitting in the NASA archives in Washington, reading a lot of the stuff that is in The Religion of Technology, and I got really spooked by the overwhelmingly evangelical, otherworldly aspect of our space program-that we are leaving the earth, that we are going into heaven where we belong! We also look at artificial intelligence as a transcendence of the flesh toward a disembodied perfection, and court the idea of transferring our divine selves, or the divine part of our mortal selves, to an enduring, silicon based medium.

Still embracing Descarte's split of mind from body.
Yes. Embracing the idea that our mind is the God in us and the body is just debris. The first part of The Religion of Technology is the thousand-year history of these ideas, and the second part of the book is the contemporary world acting it out. If the book succeeds, it's showing that it's still the same thing today-nuclear weapons and Armageddon.
However, I must say the most potent and scary stuff is what's happening today in genetic engineering. Jeremy Rifkin writes about it in his new book, The Biotech Century. Recently, I received a brochure for a conference at UCLA on the engineering of the human germline: sperm and egg. Not long ago, while I was writing The Religion of Technology, the germline was a moral firewall in biogenetic engineering. They were playing around with somatic gene therapy, which would change the genetic endowment of the individual patient but not for the progeny. Once you start messing around with germ cells, you're changing the genetic line, which is the eugenic dream come true. Tampering with germ cells was the firewall everyone agreed we could never cross. Yet, here we are two years later, with James Watson, French Anderson, and Leroy Hood-a lot of the people I talk about in my book-sitting up on the panel at UCLA with House ethicists saying these things straight out, and I'll quote from the brochure: "This talk examines the techniques used to engineer genetic changes in various organisms and considers their technical potential for refinement into tools for safe, reliable germ line engineering in humans. The potential scope of human germ line manipulations in coming generations is also considered." And then, "Germline engineering may enable us to obtain the benefits of a century of genetic science. We now have the capacity to develop techniques to reliably and safely introduce DNA constructs into germinal cells and could begin to conceive and design genetic therapies to ward off diseases and improve the quality of human life." It's here.
Now, how do you alert people-the public- to these dangers, and how will people see them for what they are? I write my book, or Jeremy writes his book, or Andy Kimbrell writes The Human Body Shop. People are sounding alarms, but there's the prevailing mythology that however dangerous this all looks, it's still a recovery of the human birthright to participate in Creation. The believed story is that Adam participated in Creation and had knowledge of Creation, natural knowledge, not moral knowledge, and was immortal. Here we have much of this all wrapped up into one with biotechnology and the technologies changing education. We can become immortal, our minds can live forever! We can essentially reconstruct Creation-Jeremy calls it the "Second Genesis"-and create our progeny in our image, just as God created Adam in his image, directly.
Incidentally, when I give talks on this now, I carry with me a tape by Richard Seed, the guy from Chicago who, last January, announced that he was going to proceed with human cloning. If you listen to what Seed is saying explicitly-and he sounds like God on this NPR interview-he says it is the destiny of human beings to become one with God, that we were created in the image of God. Genetic engineering and human cloning are the first serious steps in becoming one with God. He says it just like that, straight out.
This country is the most powerfully religious country on earth. By far. No other country has the numbers like we do here, nor the power to impose those beliefs as we do. The U.S. was, afterall, the repository of the radical reformation. So, here we go! That it's happening here is really no surprise. I think that, consciously or not, we subscribe to this mythology as a culture so powerfully that a criticism of it is seen as irreverent, as a heresy, which makes any serious, rational, ethical discussion about it all next to impossible.

What of countering it all by considering education as the process for understanding self in relation to the human and non-human "condition" as a wild process toward wisdom?
Yes. There needs to be a wildness or, say, an unpredictability in education. That is, you're talking about an interaction between people that, if it's authentic, can't be packaged. Also, the effects are mutual. The teacher is as transformed by it as the student. The grading process and the programming of instruction is an anathema in education; I've always believed that. I wrote an attack on grading when I was a graduate student and I've never wavered from that. I like the word wild in relation to education.
In my classes, students have to be lulled away from their anxiety about producing, and lulled into the idea that we're getting together, maybe we're reading something in common and discussing it, but that's it! Socrates didn't give grades, from what we know; he had dialogues with people and that was it! I like the impulse. We are so out of it, given the content of education today, and it's just getting worse and worse. When I announced I was no longer using a syllabus, to avoid the commoditization of my work, there was simply no documentary evidence that my course ever happened and it upsets everything, everybody. A lot of people can't handle this idea of education. They can't function outside of its institution. We're then talking about livelihoods, job security, and people get very nervous because universities won't tolerate much. After I gave 270 A's at York University, some of the executive committee wrote a letter to my department chairman and to me demanding an explanation. You know, I just told them to fuck off-politely-and haven't heard from them again, but it's in my file. I don't care about my file, but a lot of people do, especially people who don't have any job security at all. I have tenure at York and until they get rid of that-but, who knows?
I was on a panel once at the University of Iowa on the commercialization of the university and research. It must have been six or seven years ago. The place was packed and I was being baited. I was on the panel with the general council for the University of Chicago and administrators, so it wasn't necessarily a friendly crowd. Someone asked me, "What do you think is the aim of a university?" I had my wits about me and just said, "Self-knowledge." The place came to a standstill-there was no rejoinder. I saw people looking at each other saying, "What did he say?" And that was the end of the discussion! No one challenged it, which is very interesting. Self-knowledge is really still the high ground and it's unassailable. You can't say, "What do you mean self-knowledge?" It's unassailable. So, maybe, there's a lesson in that.
But, when I talk to my students: "Self-knowledge, thanks a lot, but how do I get this job?" I have to say, students here and everywhere just don't feel they have the luxury to indulge it because they're dead if they do. But, let's face it, what's going on now is not education. When you try and get some education going people say it's subversive-Socrates was tried and condemned, let us remember, for corrupting the youth of Athens and for religious heresy!

It's mindboggling when the real conditions, the real terms of vitality, sanity, all the things we're longing for emotionally, physically and psychologically are already present. It's a failure to pick up the obvious.
Yes, but the challenge is that people don't experience their existence in that way. I was just reading a review of an Iranian film about a guy who's driving his truck around trying to pick up someone who would bury him after he kills himself. He picks up a few people and he doesn't tell them what he wants them for. He just offers them some money as they drive, explains that he's going to end his life and just wants a decent burial. They get into a discussion about the purpose of life, the meaning of life, and whether it's worth living or not. A passenger, a laborer, asks, "Could you really imagine never tasting a cherry again?" It's called "A Taste of Cherries." It's the same sort of thing! No, we live in a culture that is a milieu of distraction from attention to what's before us.

Much of the value of your recent "Digital Diploma Mills" Conference at Harvey Mudd College, is attention to the fact we're accepting Life first as an economic transaction when we accept education as an economic transaction. The social and ecological consequences to such a worldview are nothing less than what I call a "participatory totalitarianism."
Yes. You were talking about presence and this idea of the obvious. There is no question in my mind. The power of ordinary people and the humanity of ordinary people is something I firmly believe in. Whenever I'm talking with economists, we're talking about people trying to "maximize their advantage," and all that. So, I say, "Well, I was riding my bicycle to work and this guy in an eighteen wheeler stopped to let me go by-explain that."


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* Brian McAndrews, Practicum Coordinator *
* Faculty of Education, Queen's University *
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