Technology and the contested meanings of sustainability Book

My review would be a number of pages ... so I will simply limit it to insights gleaned from the last chapter (only four pages long).

AMERICA would do well to listen up. We are a country founded upon the industrial revolution ... much of our success and failure is surely timing ... being born in post Enlightenment and poised for a full blown technological pursuit. Technology has always promised liberty and prosperity ... irradication of hunger and illiteracy, equality for all, the end of drudgery and increase of leisure and personal time. But this brilliant promise has not succeeded "despite two centuries of gigantic effort. The technological measures that have freed us from hunger, disease, and illiteracy" have become part of the invisible periphery of life ... but, "the commodities that fill the center of our lives with entertainment and diversion" offer only passing and shallow gratification. We are, justifiably, proud of the intricacy and power of our technology, but this confidence about the means does not continue when we consider the ends. What are we producing?

"Medical technology provides healing and wholeness where otherwise there would be insufferable pain and crippling disfiguration. Media technology allows us to consider all things and to be enlightened about the world in an intelligent and compassionate way. But once restored to health and well informed, we are now able to take up life." But what kind of life? "Can engineers, managers, lawyers, and all the other members of technostructure be content in their work if they must admit that it serves a life that often is ruled at its center by triviality and frivolity?" Are we content producing healthy fools and trivial intellectuals? This is our problem.

Maybe the largest and most consuming argument of this book is that post-Enlightenment when we cast off any kind of divine center (and you have to travel through much of history to find any where without a divine center ... maybe the few intelligencia of ancient Rome) ... we found no center. Liberal democracy demands that we leave any definitions of life up for personal choice. So there is no public discourse in what defines "the good life." What is an appropriate center for our lives? What is the right content to make us proud at the end of our days?

What Borgmann speaks generally about is focal practices. Engagement with things as opposed to commodities. The two he spends the most time on is running (jogging) and the culture of the table (feasting). Regular engagement with the world that involves your whole body, the seasons of the earth, the local world in which you live ... this is helping us toward an appropriate center. These are things that test our limits and require the slow development of skill and discipline and the real engagement with our world.