From myth to logos, a round trip?

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Xavier Massó

The United States, in the 1990s. A hot sweltering summer day in an unair-conditioned classroom at the NY University. Someone comments that the thermometer reads 36ºC and a student exclaims “36 degrees, no wonder it’s so hot!”

The 1960s in Spain, on a dam construction site. A newly hired worker is tasked with monitoring the pressure of a valve: he’s told that as long as the needle on the gauge stays in the green zone, everything is fine, but if it moves towards the red zone, he must then press the alarm button; that’s all. Shortly afterwards, a compression motor explodes due to overpressure and the chief engineer runs to the guard’s cabin, who’s enjoying while smoking a cigarette. The engineer scolds him for not paying attention to his duty, but the guard replays he’s doing so and points his finger at the pressure gauge. The engineer turns pale: the needle was still in the green zone, yes: the worker had stuck a nail on the the indicator to prevent it from moving to the red area.

The first case is an anecdote told by Neil Postman in Tecnopoly. The surrender of culture to technology (1993), an excellent and premonitory essay on the effects of technology on culture. The second is an old Spanish joke. On the one hand, we have a university student who we assume is aware of the technological universe of the last decade of the 20th century and fully integrated into it. On the other, we have an unskilled worker from Franco’s underdeveloped Spain in the 1960s, probabily a former peasant who had never attended school, hired to perform a task with no previous qualification required: to watch whether the needle of the dial reaches the red-colored area and, if so, to press an alarm button.

Although they come from absolutly opposed perspectives, Postman’s student and the watchman in the joke they share the same metonymy that leads to a magical idea of technology. In the case of the student, the explanation for so much heat is due to the thermometer. As Postman points out, it seems that if thermometers would behave well, we’d feel well. He certainly does not try to alter the device, he cannot, nor to put it inside a refrigerator. But this doesn’t means him to be gnoseologically quite far above the worker, because if he does so, the thermometer would then be out of range and he won’t be able to know whether it is hot or not: the thermometer is his only valuable reference. He won’t know if it is hot or not unless he reads it in the thermometer. Nature is out of the field.

In the case of the worker, he is someone whose existence will have passed until then entirely within nature. He’s surely able to predict what the weather is going to be like tomorrow by the shape of the clouds or by the height of the flight of rooks, but he is completely alien to technology. For him, putting a stick on the valve indicator is just like blocking the irrigation channel with a hoe. He’ll of course never say that it is hot because the thermometer indicates 36 degrees – perhaps he does not even know what a thermometer is – but he may end up believing in the power of such a device since he’s working with technology while being completely alien to it, as soon as he associates its effects with the analogy of the weather and the flight of rooks. An association of ideas that derives from the very ancient origins of homeopathic magic.

Let us say that the student’s problem is that he is “denatured” to the extent that, as Postman suggests, nature is outside his conceptual scope since it is nothing more than something subordinate and generated by the technological device to whom he depends and that determines he’s way to understand reality; but this does not free him from incurring as well in magical thinking. In his case, he has transferred certaninity to the device, rather than knowledge and principles that made it possible.

The worker’s problem is that he has not been schooled at all, but he can be trained to simply realize he must abstain from any other activity than observing the pressure gauge in order to do his work; he is not required to, nor is he encouraged to understand the the process on which he is acting. It is not necessary to do his job; He only has to obey the instructions given and no more.

But the most wondering thing is that the student’s problem is quite alike: he has been biasedly trained in no matter how sophisticated instrumental skills to become a commodity of consumption as labor power; and if nature is left out of the scope it is because he does not need it to perform its functions; therefore, if he does not know whether is hot or not, that’s his problem, he’d rather buy a thermometer. He has lost sight of reality since it just simply emanates from the thermometer. He might still wonder why the mercury raises in case of an analog thermometer, but no longer with a digital one, the issue is then definitely left behind. Should we then ask what about any other current digital device, far more sophisticated than a digital thermometer?

The university student and the illiterate worker. The same case, from opposite perspectives. And both resort at last to some kind of magical, mythical thinking, as the genesis of validity, to cope their respective lacks of knowledge. For the student, the thermometer, technology, is the certainty of all truth; also for the worker. Thus alienation from their species-essence, as young Marx would say; either of them, although through inverse paths. The means has become the end and foundation of reality. The worker is yet in the myth, the student has jumped into the mithologized logos. And if it turns out that it is possible to move from one stage to the other with no need for any intermediate one, what a hell should we need it for? Was this the goal?

Well, since we’ve come to that point, doesn’t sounds like competency-based learnig? I think so, don’t you?

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons