Social Values and Politics: The Uninvited Guests

Extract

The workings of many factors have wrought political change the world over. Among these, the impact of scientific-technological development upon society has been the most powerful agent of political transformation. Obvious as this has been for a long time, the progress of science and technology continues to outpace political creativity by a broad margin. Increasingly, political institutions are being left to accommodate themselves to the accomplished fact of scientific-technological progress— or to lose their functional significance. The logic of the political which alone can devise and master the social order, has become subservient to the logic of the apolitical. It is as if our society insists upon giving to Karl Marx's crude hypothesis what our economic experience withheld; we are about to validate Marxist determinism by the failure of our political imagination rather than the failure of our economic system. It seems as if the contrivances of science and technology now tell us not only what we should do with them but also how to order our lives. If this appearance is not deceptive — and it is proposed here to show that it is not — political change will befall our society like a natural event beyond man's control. To foreclose a disastrous deterioration of the political order and hence the human condition, it will be necessary to develop an appropriate philosophy of political change and, in the light of such a philosophy, policies which govern the integration of scientific and technological progress — the making of our “tools” — into political development. Part of what follow will be devoted to showing why the political needs to remain primary in order to insure that political change will be beneficial change. At the threshold of political change must stand political will.