English-Speaking Justice

From the Book

“During this century western civilization has speeded its world-wide influence through the universal acceptance of its technology. The very platitudinous nature of this statement may hide the novelty which is spoken in it. The word ‘technology’ is new, and its unique bringing together of ‘techne’ and ‘logos’ shows that what is common around the world is this novel interpenetration of the arts and sciences. As in all marriages, this new union of making and knowing has changed both parties, so that when we speak ‘technology’ we are speaking a new activity which western Europeans brought into the world, and which has given them their universalizing and homogenizing influence. Kant’s dictum that ‘the mind makes the object’ were the words of blessing spoken at that wedding of knowing and production, and should be remembered when we contemplate what is common throughout the world.

The first task of thought in our era is to think what that technology is: to think it in its determining power over our politics and sexuality, our music and education. Moreover we are called to think that technological civilization in relation to the eternal fire which flames forth in the Gospels and blazes even in the presence of that determining power.

We English-speakers have a particular call to contemplate this civilization. We have been the chief practical influence in taking technology around the world. Russians and Chinese have often communicated with each other in the language of a small island off the west coast of Europe. Bismarck said that the chief fact of nineteenth century politics was that the Americans spoke English. To assert this practical influence does not imply the absurd suggestion that technological civilization is mainly a product of the English-speaking world. Names such as Heisenberg and Einstein remind us that the crowning intellectual achievement of modernity was not accomplished by English-speakers. Descartes and Rousseau, Kant and Nietzsche, remind us that those who have thought most comprehensively about modernity have often not been English-speaking. Nevertheless, in theory and practice we English-speakers have universalized technological civilization; we have recently established its most highly explicit presence in North America. In the very fullness of this presence we are called to think what we are.

As a small part of this multiform task, I intend in these Wood lectures to start from one fact of our situation: the close relation that there has been between the development of technology and political liberalism. By thinking about that relation, I hope to throw light on the nature of both, our liberalism and technology.

From Part I