Technology and Justice

Louise Rehak was a lawyer in Toronto.

In his preface to this collection of essays exploring the profound effects of modern technology on our ways of perceiving and feeling, Grant says, “I have tried to show why we should think of this (technological) account of knowledge as a fate and not something which in our freedom we can control.”

He goes on to observe, in effect, that most readers will probably ignore most of this exploration because “people don’t really care what you think,” but anticipates opposition to the final two essays, written in collaboration with his wife, on the very practical questions of abortion and euthanasia.

Indeed, many readers will object, feeling that in these two essays he has ultimately refused to accept his own message of our fatedness to “progress,” of the essentially relativistic and mathematical logic of modern society, in his attempt to insist on moral absolutes beyond that technology. Feminists, in particular, will consider the abortion essay yet another contribution to the old art of repression by sanctification.

But itis an eloquent contribution. Grant calls us to the awareness of the costs of our modern gains: not merely the pollution of the earth, sea, and air, but also the capture of our very minds and spirits, by the “homogenizing” rationalizing, de-moralizing “neutrality” of technology. However, he is not casual about the benefits of technology. He speaks of the pioneers, “moved by the faith that the mastery of nature would lead to the overcoming of hunger and labour, disease and war.”

If we are fated, as Grant suggests, to lives which have been unimaginably altered by technology, huge questions remain. It may yet be that when he has succeeded in generalizing the matters he deals with in the more academically-oriented first essays of this volume, that he will help us to grasp and grapple with those questions.