from "questioning technology: a critical anthology", eds. john zerzan and alice carnes, 1988:
[joseph weizenbaum, "computer power and human reason"]
During the times of trouble on American university campuses, one could often hear well-meaning speakers say that the unrest, at least on their campuses, was mainly caused by inadquate communication among the university's vaiours consitutencies, e.g., faculty, administration, students, staff. The "problem" was therefore seen as fundamentally a comunication, hence a technical, problem. It was therefore solvable by technical means, such as the establishment of vairous "hotlines" to, say, the president's or the provost's office. Perhaps there were communication difficulties; there usually are on most campuses. But this view of the "problem" - a view entirely consistent with Newell and Simon's view of "human problem solving" and with instrumental reasoning - actively hides, buries, the existence of real conflicts. It may be, for example, that students have genuine ethical, moral, and political interests that conflict with interests the university administration perceives itself to have, and that each consituency understands the other's interests very well. Then there is a genuine problem, not a communication difficulty, certainly not one that can be repaired by the technical expedient of hotlines, but instrumental reason covers each dilemma, however genuine, into a mere paradox that can then be unraveled by the application of logic, by calculation. All conflicting interests are replaced by the interests of technique alone. (24)
(...) This, like Philip Morrison's story, is a parable too. Its wider sigificance is that the corruption of the word "problem" has brought in its train the mystique of "problem solving", with catastrpohic effects on the whole world. When every problem on the international scene is seen by the "best and brightest" problem solvers as being a mere technical problem, wars like the Viet Nam war become truly inevitable. The recognition of genuinely conflicting but legitimate interests of coexisting societies - and such recognition is surely a precondition to conflict resolution or accommodation - is reendered impossible from the outset. Instead, the simplest criteria are used to detect differences, to search for means to reduce these differences, and finally to apply operators to "present objects" in ordder to transform them into "desired objects". It is, in fact, entirely reasonale, if "reason" means instrumental reason, to apply American military force,B-52's, napalm, and all the rest, to "communist-dominated" Viet Nam (clearly an "undesirable object") as the "operator" to transform it into a "desirable object", namely, a country serving Ameican interests. (25)
(...) [quoting from Horkeimer] According to the philosophy of the average modern intellectual, there is only one authority, namely, science, conceived as the classification of facts and the calculation of probabilities. The statement that justice and freedonm are better in themselves than injustice and oppression is scientifically unverifiable and useless. It has come to sound as meaningless in itself as would the statement that red is more beautiful than blue, or that an egg is better than milk. (25)