Modern technology must submit to ethics

NEW DELHI: The report on Luddites as enemies of automation (The Statesman, July 12-13) raises a vital question of modern civilization. I shudder to think what will happen to man when the whole of his life is computerized and his mind is set at rest by artificial intelligence.

Perhaps there is some meaning in the ancient Greek myth immortalized by Aeschylus which punishes Prometheus for bringing fire to man. The meaning remains even when fire is so essential for man.

When the Industrial Revolution be-an in England in the first half of the 18th century there was anxiety in the English mind about human future. Oliver Goldsmith wrote in his long poem The Deserted Village (1770): "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey / Where wealth accumulates and men decay."

Early in the following century William Wordsworth said in a poem published in 1807 that "The world is too much with us; late and soon". In the next century many regretted that our scientists at all made the atom bomb.

Fatality seems to lurk behind all our endeavor to add to our facilities. Even Bertrand Russell who favored advances in science and technology wrote in his Common Sense and Nuclear Warfare (1959) that "the spread of power without wisdom is utterly terrifying, and I cannot much blame those whom it reduces to despair."

Let us admit that our scientists and technologists financially supported by government and big business, are doing nothing to alleviate large masses of people living in an abject plight due to poverty and ignorance.

The benefits of our technological revolution will never reach them. Who can blame them if they say that the upper classes of our society are in the grip of a Faustian lust for power which can only weaken humanity's moral fibre. Let us not acquire a power which we cannot share with the poor and the downtrodden of human society and they constitute its majority.

The Statesman's report on the Luddites mentions Ned Lud, a legendary figure revered as the inaugurator of the radical movement against automation. The first Luddites were the workmen of Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire who rose against the Framework Bill introduced by the Earl of Liverpool on Feb. 27 1812.

The Bill enjoined capital punishment for the Luddites who came together to destroy the improved weaving machinery which had thrown innumerable weavers out of employment.

This occasioned Byron's first speech in the House of Lords in which he said about the rioters who were breaking the new machinery: "You may call the people mob; but do not forget that a mob often speaks the sentiment of the people." He asked, "Setting aside the palpable injustice of the Bill, are there not enough capital punishment in your statutes?"

In the peroration of his speech Byron, at 24, said: "Suppose a man is dragged into court to be tried for the new offense by the new law; still there are two things wanting to convict and condemn him; and these are in my opinion-twelve butchers for a jury and a Jeffrey for a judge."

Perhaps his speech was a bit too rhetorical but there was a ring of sincerity in the eloquence. Lord Holland congratulated him on the floor of the House. Lord Grenville remarked that "the construction of some of his periods were very like Burke's". Byron was serious about the whole question of automation which harmed the poor weavers.

In a letter to Thomas Moore dated Dec. 24, 1816 he mentioned the Luddites on the Lutherans of politics. And British historians have decried the injustice of denying the workmen the right to protest. GM Trevelyan calls it in his English Social History (1942) "liberty for the masters and repression for the men".

What must we think of the Luddites today in the context of the latest phase of the world's "technological revolution?" I think we should keep alive the image of Ned Lud as a salutary question mark on that revolution.

We must not do whatever we are capable of doing. Our technological genius must submit to ethics. There is a saying in Sanskrit sarvam ataynntam garhitam (too much of everything is ruinous). There must not be any check on science. Let us understand more and more the nature of the universe.

But let us not devise any instrument we are able to devise. Our 15th and 16th century Renaissance contemplated a new humanity and the 18th century European Enlightenment too summoned man to create a new world. But at the beginning of the 21st century we are witnessing a decline of humanity which began in the second half of the last century.

Let us think of England. Is there today a Russell to raise a great voice? Is there a poet like TS Eliot? Macaulay once said that as civilization advances poetry almost necessarily declines.

Sorokin gave us a solace by saying what Benoy Sarkar explained by quoting the words of an English poet, "If winter comes can spring be far behind?" But we seem to be passing through an unending winter, a spiritual winter and a moral winter. We seem to be living in a heartless world cultivating only its head.

I am not a social scientist and I have no motion of the possibilities of science in serving human need. But we who are concerned about the fate of man but do not know enough of human history in all its aspects may turn to thinkers who share our concern and have a command of the human situation.

Readers could acquaint themselves with the ideas of FA Hayek presented in his The Counter Revolution in Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason (1955). Hayek affirms in this work that "many of the troubles of our time may be due to a misreading of the lesson which the conquest of nature and technology has for the ordering of our social affairs".

Perhaps the whole problem is that we are not aware that we are ailing. We have our dissatisfactions and disappointments but we are not ready to relate them to some fundamental deficiency in our social system. We have a sense of an advancing civilization.

But is that civilization improving our material and moral condition? In the long history of human civilization every great age appears to be at once a fulfillment and a crisis. Ancient Athens represented a great civilization: its people executed Socrates.

In India a subject nation attained independence; its saintly leader was killed at his prayer meeting. And a survey of the world as a whole would show that it is a world drowned in its abounding evil.

What is being done to reduce that evil? Nothing.

The situation is even worse than that. We do not seem to have any sense of responsibility about that evil. Goldsmith, Wordsworth and Byron were not happy about what was understood as progress.

Renunciation should be the key-word in any proposal for an improvement in the human situation. Our scientists and technologists must know how to renounce and when to renounce. Let there be no check on the acquisition of knowledge. But there must be a check on the use of that knowledge.

It was a disastrous mistake to make the atom bomb and use it in 1945. Let us not think of conquering the universe; of violating the sanctities of the sky by throwing into it the dirt of our technological experiments. The protest against machine is essentially a protest against the depravity of our mind. Let us know everything that we can: let us not do everything that we can do.

The Statesman / Asia News Network