Action into Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Technology by Barry Cooper

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 711 story reminds us that giant enterprise continued to play a significant, in this case predominant, role in the business of science. Somewhat contrary to expectation, perhaps, AT&T, Hughes, and other big corpo­ rate laboratories did most ofthe pioneering work and then licensed their technology to the smaller companies that actually brought the first lasers to market. Bromberg characterizes this relationship as symbiotic rather than parasitic, as a corporate division of labor where small firms concentrated on risky commercial technologies while bigger ones put their resources into systems design, often for military applications. Here again Bromberg stresses interconnection as one key to understanding the workings of the postwar American research establishment. At the center of that establishment, as Bromberg fully recognizes, was the military, the largest postwar patron of the physical sciences. Defense agencies paid for most of the early laser research in university, corporate, and government laboratories and also served as what Brom­ berg calls “matchmakers” between scientists and the institutions in which they worked. Consequendy, defense priorities left their mark on the laser (as they did on so many postwar technologies) long after civilian markets began to surpass military ones. Because she chose not to seek a security clearance, Bromberg does not explore the “black” side of laser history, leaving that vital but still largely classified aspect of the story to Robert Seidel, the project’s former research historian, who has pub­ lished separate articles on the laser in the military context. Only an ill-advised epilogue by three members of the project’s advisory committee (themselves practicing laser scientists or engineers) intrudes on an otherwise excellent narrative. Their brief survey of present and projected laser applications adds litde beyond some statis­ tical details and undercuts Bromberg’s own provocative conclusions by refocusing attention on the device rather than on what it reveals about the changing character of postwar American science and technology. Future historians of the laser will undoubtedly amplify Bromberg’s account, perhaps addressing popular attitudes and expectations more than she has. The evidence Bromberg has uncovered and the insights she has reached establish a solid foundation for future study. Stuart W. Leslie Dr. Leslie teaches the history of technology at Johns Hopkins University and published The Cold War and American Science: The Military-lndustnal-Academu: Complex at MIT and Stanford with Columbia University Press. Action into Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Technology. By Barry Cooper. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Pp. xvi + 291; notes, index. $34.95. Barry Cooper has written an abstract and densely argued book on how modern technological society has altered our consciousness of 712 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE the world, nature, political society, and God. The audience for Action into Nature is clearly philosophers. Historians of technology coming to this book will be faced with a great deal of philosophical terminology and jargon such as bracketing, noetic reason, metanoia, and pneumopathological , along with a host of Greek terms, most of which are never clearly defined. If one wades through this philosophical ver­ biage, one discovers that Cooper is arguing that many of the evils of the modern world, particularly its vulgarity, are the result of how the ideas associated with technology have penetrated human conscious­ ness and affected the political order. This approach is not new. Writers such as Thomas Carlyle, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Ellul have all investigated the way in which technology affects not only the world but, more important, the way in which we view the world. Cooper draws on and elaborates on the work of all of these scholars, but he places particular emphasis on the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin. The book’s main argument can be briefly summarized. The novel nature of technology, particularly recent developments in genetic engineering and computers, has radically enhanced the human capability for action. This new capacity has in turn drastically altered the human condition by reversing the premodern relationship in which the life of the mind (vita contemplativa) was superior to the life of work (vita activa). This reversal has led to important consequences: nature is stripped of spirituality; a “modern worldlessness” is...