On his book Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason
Cover Interview of December 18, 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.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
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.