Perhaps it was his role as one of the more prominent and early of computer scientists which reinforced Joseph Weizenbaum's ability to analyze thinking and action as well as he did, eventually leading him to become an outsider skeptic of the very science and technology he helped create. Or perhaps those habits, already established in him, led him to thinking so clearly about making machines mimic thoughts and actions.
Continuing on with his description of a fatal act of instrumental reasoning, in real life:
The second lesson is this. These men were able to give the counsel they gve because they were operating at an enormous psychological distance from the people who would be maimed and killed by the weapons systems that would result from the ideas they communicated to their sponsors. The lesson, therefore, is that the scientist and technologist must, by acts of will and of imagination, actively strive to reduce such psychological distances, to counter the forces that tend to remove him from the consequences of his actions. He must - it is as simple of this - think of what he is actually doing. He must lear to listen to his own inner voice. He must learn to say no.
This isn't true only of scientists and engineers, it is true of everyone. Those habits of removing yourself from the actual meaning of your words and acts, in real life, are endemic to the human species. I don't know if they are biologically part of our make up, what in this age of cyber-superstition is called our "hard wiring" but if so then it is something we need to fight against if we are to survive as a species and as decent individuals. I think that, in the nearly four decades since Weizenbaum analyzed this summer study group, showing how the processes of thinking learned from science could lead to good intentions turning to massive evil, we've gotten, if anything, far worse at honestly considering the full reality of our thinking.
I can almost guarantee you that if you listen to any of the major networks broadcasting news analysis this morning, even as I'm typing this out, you will be able to identify instrumental reasoning couching calls for far more direct violence and advocacy of terrible things by people regarded as being respectable. It will be in the form of government policy, in actions of world trade and economic institutions, even polices of the UN, advocated in impeccable English by people with degrees from prestigious universities and the most immaculate habits of body and dress but which will knowingly result in the misery and deaths of people, individuals and in their thousands and millions.
And they won't even be required to have motives as elevated as those who invented the electronic battlefield in 1966. They can maintain their status as insiders even if they are explicit in what will result by a mixture of the facade of respectability, credentials given to them by respected educational establishments and the guise of scientific impartiality and cool reason they present their horrific advocacy in. Making their proposed course of action or inaction seem to have the atavistic inevitability as consequences of the workings of the natural world often are the crucial part of selling depravity to even otherwise good people.
That is a habit of thinking that shows how making science into a religion can lead it to the same habits of fatalistic thinking as the old, fatalistic religions. Perhaps that is one of the reasons that so many of those who do turn science into a materialist religion are at odds with, especially, the monotheistic religions which have abandoned that fatalistic assumption for something less likely to produce evil, heightened personal responsibility for our acts and words.
Weizenbaum concludes his analysis of the summer study group:
Finally, it is the act itself that matters. When instrumental reason is is the sole guide to action, the acts it justifies are robbed of their inherent meanings and thus exist in an ethical vacuum. I recently heard an officer of a great university publicly defend an important policy decision he had made, on e that many of the university's students and faculty opposed on moral grounds, with the worlds: "We could have taken a oral stand, but what good would that have done?" But the good of a moral act inheres in the act itself. That is why an act can itself ennoble or corrupt the person who performs it. The victory of instrumental reason in our time has brought about the virtual disappearance of this insight and thus perforce the delegitimation of the very idea of nobility.
I am aware, of course, that hardly anyone who reads these lines will feel himself addressed by them - so deep has the conviction that we are all governed by anonymous forces beyond our control penetrated into the shared consciousness of our time. And accompanying this conviction is the debasement of the idea of civil courage.
It is a widely held but a grievously mistaken belief that civil courage finds exercise only in the context of world-shaking events. To the contrary, its most arduous exercise is often in those small contexts in which the challenge is to overcome the fears induced by the petty concerns over career, over our relationships to those who appear to have power over us, over whatever may disturb the tranquility of or mundane existence.
In the dozen or fifteen years that I have read the unedited words of many, many thousands of people who assume positions on the left than I'd ever have met and heard in real life before the internet, I've come to see look at the problems with the thinking that has caused the eclipse of liberalism and democracy in the United States, of what led to our exile, going on ten years longer than that Moses led the Hebrews on in The Book of Exodus.
I have concluded that, especially in those with some academic or professional standing to protect, this kind of thinking, these habits of thought are one of the most insidious and potent destroyers of what must be, at its foundations, a program of rigorous idealism and selfless action. This kind of impersonal, would-be scientific thinking can analyze away all of those things quite efficiently, leaving the neo-liberalism that is currently the preferred mode of coolitude in this present administration of our most nearly geek president. One whose presidency has been mostly a failure in terms of liberalism and which, I am sorry to say, seems to be being forced by events and its own desire to remain on as insiders to recapitulate the destruction of the liberal intentions of the administration in 1966.
It was The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. who pointed out that the country would never be able to achieve Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and his other great efforts in harnessing the law of the most powerful country on Earth to produce justice, a better life and a future if it became mired in the war in Viet Nam. The next nine years of that war, the destruction of Johnson's administration leading to the lying Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and the rest of his administration, who conspired to use the war to gain power marked the real end of that effort to continue the work of our last real liberal president, Franklin Roosevelt.
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