Seite 27 [27]
What can I know (if trust in knowledge has been lost)? | 25
true by today: life adapts to the closed logic of the operation and running
of technology, since the reverse is not possible: the technological systems
do not suffer the influence of external factors independent from their
own logic. The machines have in many respects acquired an intelligence
surpassing man’s and do everything better than us. Man becomes a
source of errors; his participation has to be limited in the interest of the
effective operation of the system. Technological requirements arbitrate
over good and evil; they rule out all ethical considerations: either
technology works or free conscience does. What cannot be mechanised
(digitalised), has to die. Technological civilisation is indispensable: one
cannot turn one’s back on it; there is no life outside the technological
complex. Technological necessity itself replaces that of nature.
Ulrich Beck goes so far as to say that science is not reasonable. It
cannot be reasonable, since it has created a world in which “...the sources
of danger are no longer ignorance but knowledge; not a deficient but a
perfected mastery over nature; not that which eludes the human grasp
but the system of norms and objective constraints established with the
industrial epoch.”” This is the society of risks, where, according to Beck,
social conflicts no longer revolve around the satisfaction of needs but
instead around the evaluation of risks, since the hope of well-being is
no longer able to vanquish the fear of risks. The most serious political
decisions touch upon scientific questions that politicians are not
competent to judge, such as nuclear power, climate change, emission
limits, the biological consequences and ethical judgement of genetic
modification, etc. Thus, political institutions, Beck claims, become the
guardians of a development that they neither planned nor are able to
influence. All this makes unavoidable the close intertwining of politics,
science and business, in a way that is impenetrable from the outside. It
makes popular representation an empty formality and leaves the political
parties themselves at the mercy of their own apparatuses. They justify
political decisions on the basis of scientific expertise, while science is
financed by megacompanies and politics serves their interests.
According to Hans Jonas, classical civilisations reach the state of
technological maturity gradually; as a result of slow and more or less
accidental changes, their ends and means become balanced. ‘There is no
such balance in modernity; continual innovation becomes a compulsion.
Its cause is the competition for the maximalisation of economic and
° — Ullrich Beck: Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, p.183. SAGE Publications,
London, 1992.