Hubris and Hybrids: A Cultural History of Technology and Science

  • Mikael Hård &
  • Andrew Jamison
Routledge: 2005. 335 pp. $90 (hbk); $29.95 (pbk) 0415949386 | ISBN: 0-415-94938-6

It is a truism that culture, broadly defined, shapes science and technology as much as they shape culture. This once controversial position became the conventional wisdom decades ago, after purely internal histories of science and technology, followed by largely uncritical interpretations of their developments, were displaced as the dominant models.

In their excellent book Hubris and Hybrids, historians Mikael Hård and Andrew Jamison engage in a cultural assessment of science and technology. They replace the traditional ‘heroic tale’ of scientific genius with stories of the frequently mixed blessings of science and technology.

The ‘hubris’ of the title is reflected in James Watson's book The Double Helix (Atheneum, 1968), which recounts the race to discover the structure of DNA. In Watson's book the professional and monetary rewards were seen virtually as ends in themselves; there was a role for intuition along with conventional scientific methods; there was questionable treatment of peers; and there was little concern for the social and moral consequences of research. For Watson, limits to either human intelligence or human power over nature had virtually disappeared. Yet Watson never denied his own flaws, and so helped to push scientific heroes off their traditional pedestals.

Frankenstein (Kenneth Branagh, left) refused to take responsibility for his creation (Robert De Niro). Credit: FOX ANNE MARIE/CORBIS SYGMA

But even this account is too ‘romantic’ for Hård and Jamison, who seek even franker explorations of science from inside the laboratory — but only if paired with external (yet no less frank) analyses, such as Vandana Shiva's Stolen Harvest (South End, 2000). ‘Hybrids’ is the implicit theme of Shiva's book, which describes the way large corporations use the biotechnology derived from the genetic code. Some of these enterprises make huge profits while exploiting poor farmers, harming the environment, and undermining traditional balances between mankind and nature.

Hård and Jamison describe this story as a “tragedy” but wisely go beyond merely stressing the victimization. They never reduce their stories to wholesale good versus evil. Instead they focus on the growing convergence between science and technology into ‘technoscience’. This is not simply about the elimination of most of the remaining barriers between scientific discovery and technological applications. It is also the story of changing meanings of being human, as we incorporate ever more technology within ourselves and our immediate surroundings. The authors discuss the possible cloning of people in the future, as well as current issues such as the implantation of mechanical devices, the increased consumption of genetically engineered foods, a growing reliance on mobile phones and the Internet for daily communication, and endless modifications of the natural environment.

The authors invoke the influential concept of ‘cyborgs’: beings that are like humans in their ability to learn, feel and experience consciousness, but also like machines in having been ‘programmed’ to learn, feel and experience the world in only particular forms. Hence the authors' proper use of ‘hybrids’, a term they creatively apply to various contexts.

Hård and Jamison also provide useful summaries of the writings of earlier scholars, including Lewis Mumford, Siegfried Giedion, Lynn White and Raymond Williams, who all provided ground-breaking studies of science and technology in broad historical and cultural contexts, and Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault, who offered penetrating critiques of science and technology as being to varying degrees socially constructed. Hård and Jamison revisit, update and sometimes revise these earlier studies. By contrast, they criticize the founding editors of the leading journals of the history of science (George Sarton) and of the history of technology (Melvin Kranzberg) for promoting traditional uncritical views. Sarton's journal Isis may once have been guilty as charged, but Kranzberg's Technology and Culture was never so one-sided.

Far from being a critique of the excesses of only modern science and technology, Hubris and Hybrids is an extremely wide-ranging historical survey. Its coverage begins with the Scientific Revolution, Britain's Industrial Revolution, and the Enlightenment. More modern topics include technocracy movements, artistic uses of science and technology from William Morris to the film The Matrix, appropriate technology, the greening of corporate America and Europe, film and industrial design, and Asian developments. The richness of the authors' observations on these historical phenomena is exemplified by their comments on the medieval period: “eyeglasses and mirrors created opportunities to experience a technically mediated reality”.

The authors hardly claim expertise in every area they discuss, but even so I was disappointed by their simplified comments on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Not only do Hård and Jamison follow most other commentators in wrongly describing Victor Frankenstein's unnamed and quickly abandoned creature as a “monster”, but they also follow the crowd in wrongly characterizing Victor as a “mad scientist”. Except in appearance, the “creature” — as he is usually called until the novel's later stages — is repeatedly portrayed as more human and humane than his creator. In my view, this should have been connected with the authors' own emphasis on humanity's changing identities. As for Victor, he is quite sane but is extraordinarily self-centred, as indifferent towards his family and friends as he is to his creature. Ironically, his creature embodies Victor's missing moral compass.

Were Victor truly mad, he might well have escaped Shelley's actual target: his refusal to take responsibility for his research project. Here the authors missed the opportunity to use Frankenstein to bolster their own case. Neither work is a Luddite tract. Shelley argues that only if scientific experiments prove harmful to society should they be stopped. Hubris and Hybrids extends this same position to inventors and engineers.

Recognizing that the relationship between the past and the future is different for historians from that for scientists, inventors and engineers, Hård and Jamison wisely offer no simple historical lessons, much less any silly predictions. What they provide instead are provocative and perceptive reflections that deserve to reach a wide general audience.