Technology, customs, ethics, morality, and economics (Comment)

Technology, customs, ethics, morality, and economics

     Technologies change our values. Every new technology changes the range, and some the type, of choices we can make. New choices raise new ethical and moral questions. Customs yield and bend to new technologies.

     The printing press cheapened books. The industrial revolution needed and expanded literacy. That created a market for fiction, which in turn prompted the adaptation of the romance to the more literal tastes of the new reading classes. Hence the novel, which presents the old tropes as imitations of real life. As more and more people took up reading, they began to translate the ideals of the romantic novel (derived from courtly love) into actual behaviour. Jane Austen’s books crystallised the new genre. They adumbrated the tension between the practicalities of money and social status on the one hand, and the desires of the heart and mind on the other. She showed that while money and status could provide creature comforts, they could also destroy the soul.
     In the new marriage ethic, it wasn’t enough for people to enjoy the same social status and similar wealth; they should also be compatible in intellect, interests, and above all in passion. Every one of her books contrasts the ideal marriages of people whose primary bond is mutual attraction and common interests, and those whose primary bond is money and respectability. Her imitators simplified and spread the message. Their sentimentality made their books more popular, and the concept of marriage began to change.  It  was always primarily a commercial and social transaction, but now people began to talk as if it were a personal contract. Once people begin to talk about a social convention of polite pretense as if it referred to reality, the convention sooner or later becomes a social fact.

     The bicycle accelerated the changes. Middle class courtship customs became more personal when couples could escape the oversight of a chaperone just by cycling away. Where family approval had been imposed (and often desired), now young people began to choose their own partners. The shift from marriage as a social obligation to marriage as a personal choice accelerated even more when the car became cheap enough for most families to own one. The car prompted the invention of the motel, which could make a profit for the owner even when it was small. Motels provided cheap temporary accommodation for families touring the country, and for couples wanting affordable privacy for sex. What later was noticed as the sexual revolution was well under way, in fact nearly complete, by the time Reader’s Digest reprinted hand-wringing discussions of the End of Civilisation As We Know It in the 1960s.
     Examine any technology, and you’ll find social and economic change that raises ethical quandaries. Most of these changes aren’t recognised until long after they’ve taken hold. People resist the necessary shifts in values. The young, who’ve grown up with the new techno-economic landscape, often find themselves at odds with their parents and grandparents, which causes a good deal of pain on both sides. This is especially true when values are confused with their expression, as in courtesies and fashions. We need to be polite to each other, for politeness is the casual daily acknowledgement of each person’s dignity and value as a fellow human. But any particular form of politeness, any particular etiquette, is more a matter of fashion than of deep conviction, or even superficial necessity.
 

     But some values are deeply ingrained. Technology may make revaluations necessary, but that doesn’t mean they’ll happen. Mechanised production has made workers into tools, mere flesh-and-blood extensions of the machines they operate. As machines become more complex and subtle, workers lose economic value. They become more valuable as consumers than as producers. But our economic values are still attached to notions developed in the several thousand years of scarcity that have marked civilisation. Our economic choices haven’t caught up with that new reality. Worse, sacred texts enshrine the old economy. That makes people reluctant to even think about what an economy of abundance implies, let alone examine economic judgments masquerading as moral ones. In our economy, the truly lazy man is rare, and precious. The mere producer is a dime a dozen. 2013-07-18