We sent a draft of our article to quite a few people in the antinuclear movement, asking them for comments. This was revealing. Quite a number of them said they agreed with our conclusions but disagreed with certain parts of our analysis — but each person had a different disagreement with the analysis.
When we wrote the paper, we imagined that the analysis and the conclusions were logically linked together. But the responses suggested something else, namely that the same strategy could be justified by a range of different analyses. It almost seemed that the analysis didn’t matter all that much: the key thing was the strategy.
We wrote our paper in the usual fashion, putting the analysis first and then using the analysis as a means of assessing strategy. Yet if readers disagreed with the analysis, the risk was that they wouldn’t persevere to the section on strategy.
This experience got me thinking about the connection between theory and practice. Our discussion of theories of the state, capitalism, patriarchy and so forth was presented in simple terms, without much elaboration, and in close connection with a practical analysis of the development of nuclear power. If our down-to-earth discussion of theory was contentious for activists, what about the jargon-filled treatments in scholarly books and journals? I knew the answer to that question. They are almost totally irrelevant for activists. Most sophisticated theory is too complex, too qualified and too remote from applications to be of much practical use. The only exceptions are when there is a simple version.
Theories of technology
Many people used to think that technology is always a good thing. The development of nuclear weapons undermined that view. On the other hand, a few people think technology is generally bad, but this view is hard to justify when thinking of hoes or hearing aids.
The most common view is that technology is neutral and so can be used for good or bad. This is called the use-abuse model. The idea is that technology can be
Social analysts who focus on technology rejected all these ideas long ago. In university classes where I work, we spend lots of time explaining why technology is not neutral and why technological determinism is wrong. Currently, a favourite view among scholars in the field is constructivism. In this model, technologies are the outcome of diverse social processes, including world views, prior technologies, organisational structures, social class, etc. There is no inevitability. Neutrality is an irrelevant concept. Instead, individual technologies have to be studied in the context of the circumstances in which they are conceived, developed, opposed, altered, instituted and superseded.
There are some highly sophisticated analyses of technology available. But there is a big problem. The more sophisticated theories don’t provide a simple way of thinking about technology. Admittedly, some scholars can become accustomed to thinking in terms of actor-networks in which people, platypuses and paint brushes are all equivalent “actors” in an undifferentiated struggle to get their way. But this seems suited mainly for scholarly analyses, not for practical dealings with technology.
I’m almost inclined to advocate simplistic ways of thinking about technology. Rather than neutral technology, I prefer the idea of biased technology. Some technologies, such as cluster bombs, are biased towards bad uses; others, such as straw hats and solar hot water collectors, are biased towards benign uses.
In addition, it may not matter all that much what general theories of technology people espouse, since what counts is their response. In spite of the prevalent belief in technological determinism, there have been major campaigns against technologies such as nuclear weapons, supersonic transport aircraft and pesticides. If people really believed that technologies couldn’t be stopped, why would they bother campaigning against or for them? If they really believed that technologies are neutral, why would they care whether electricity is produced by wind, coal, hydro or nuclear power? For most activists, scholarly theories of technology are unknown and irrelevant, for better or worse I’m not sure. I do think that theories of technology are more relevant when they were grounded in readily understandable and practical ideas.
Conclusion
These examples suggest a number of points.
Sometimes a wrong idea can be more useful than a correct idea. A wrong idea sometimes can be a good way of pursuing the truth.
Sometimes getting the theory right doesn’t really matter for practice. Rather than being the basis for practice, a theory may just be used to justify practice.
Some simple ideas are useful for producing a good society, but many of them are irrelevant or harmful.
Many intellectuals do not take kindly to these points. Whenever I’ve suggested that it doesn’t really matter all that much whether theory is right, I’ve encountered all sorts of objections. “Surely it’s better to base practice on a theory that is logically consistent, coherent and complete. It only makes sense that an improved analysis will lead to improved practice.”
I’m not convinced. Just because a theory is self-consistent, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean it is more useful for activists than a self-contradictory one. That’s because knowledge is always incomplete. Forcing a theory to be consistent may eliminate insights and dynamism. From the point of view of some future improved theory, “consistency” may just mean forcing the theory into a straitjacket based on an ill-considered assumption.
This doesn’t mean that inconsistency is better. It means that getting the theory right is not the first priority, but simply one thing to do among others. Of equal or greater importance is promoting ideas that are relevant to practice and that can be simply understood.
There are plenty of simple ideas around, and lots of them are used to prop up sexism, racism, poverty and the like. In order to challenge simple ideas used for oppressive purposes, it’s valuable to promote simple ideas that encourage human ideals. But this is not an easy task.
It is one thing to come up with a simple idea that is an improvement over what’s available. But promoting it is a different story. There are stacks of people in advertising, for example, who devote their careers to developing
