Institutions for a sustainable civilization: negotiating change in a technological culture

Abstract

We have come to think of technology as a tool-as an extension of our grasp into the environing world. The metaphor of the tool is pervasive; it affects the way we think about virtually all of contemporary culture. I communicate a view of technology which is not anchored in the metaphor of the tool as instrument but sees technology as a way of life, an expression of cultural form, and an embodiment of knowledge. I argue that institutions are best understood as technologies themselves, and that as such they are the artifacts of human creativity most urgently in need of serious critical (re)design. In doing so, I sketch a view of institutions as engineered systems which arise within our critical cultural practices; I do not argue that institutions are instruments of administrative control. On the contrary, institutions are the embodiment of our best understanding of how we learn as a species and how we arrive at judgment. Effective institutions, like the institution of English common law, are those which embody our best understanding of the processes of public judgment. Ineffective institutions are those which, like those regulating nuclear technology in Canada, embody in statute singular judgments of value, thus rendering those judgments immune to public criticism. From this picture of institutions as contexts of public judgment emerges a theory negotiation-literally the processes of negotiation which give rise within our cultural practices to the formation of meaning, the formation of concepts, and the formation of modes of understanding which are necessary preconditions for the creation of a sustainable culture.