On his book Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason
Cover Interview of December 17, 2017
Lastly
Our first child was born in the early 1970s during an
upsurge in feminist demands for more humane obstetric procedures. The admission
of partners to labor and delivery rooms was the most important reform resulting
from this agitation. We were among the first lucky ones to enjoy this new
dispensation. This is where I discovered the theme of this book. The
astonishing experience of admission to the process of birth, in violation of
long-standing medical tradition, got me thinking about how arbitrary are many
of the rules and regulations we take for rational.
This was not the only time I was reminded of the social
influences on what are ostensibly purely rational procedures. I worked with a
medical research foundation and a research institute that created the first
online education program. These experiences confirmed my belief that the “rational
society” is no technocratic utopia, but the scene on which social forces
confront each other. There are many opportunities today in this period of
political turmoil over environmentalism to measure the limits of rationality as
a social form.
Technosystem provides a theoretical framework for an
insight that comes to us in fragments from time to time. It aims to defend citizen
agency against the frequent unjustified ideological appeals to rationality that
characterize our political life. This is ultimately what I hope Technosystem
can communicate to its readers.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Lastly
Our first child was born in the early 1970s during an upsurge in feminist demands for more humane obstetric procedures. The admission of partners to labor and delivery rooms was the most important reform resulting from this agitation. We were among the first lucky ones to enjoy this new dispensation. This is where I discovered the theme of this book. The astonishing experience of admission to the process of birth, in violation of long-standing medical tradition, got me thinking about how arbitrary are many of the rules and regulations we take for rational.
This was not the only time I was reminded of the social influences on what are ostensibly purely rational procedures. I worked with a medical research foundation and a research institute that created the first online education program. These experiences confirmed my belief that the “rational society” is no technocratic utopia, but the scene on which social forces confront each other. There are many opportunities today in this period of political turmoil over environmentalism to measure the limits of rationality as a social form.
Technosystem provides a theoretical framework for an insight that comes to us in fragments from time to time. It aims to defend citizen agency against the frequent unjustified ideological appeals to rationality that characterize our political life. This is ultimately what I hope Technosystem can communicate to its readers.