JUST THE MEANS, MA'AM

A Family Affair is a 1937 film. It is the first of a series of films known as the Andy Hardy films with Mickey Rooney – whom we recently lost . This first edition also stars Lionel Barrymore and Spring Byington. The plot line concerns a judge, Barrymore, who holds up an aqueduct project that will in the long run be detrimental to the interests of local citizens, but which promises a host of short-term benefits. While the film's basic political conflict is relatively simple – moneyed interests versus the common good – it does demonstrate how political pressure on elected officials, the judge being one, can be strident and difficult to ignore. The film illustrates how decisions by officials, be they representatives or judges, can negatively affect a vast array of people who have at their disposal a wide range of political resources: money, emotional leverage, family ties, friendship, expertise, maybe even brass knuckles, and the like. When the stakes are high, you can count on them using these sources of power. What I want to focus on is the notion that technocratic projects, such as an aqueduct project, seem to have a certain level of inertia simply because they are technocratic.

Part of the natural rights' bias for positivist thinking is a prejudice toward favoring ways to control what is – both in our social and natural environments. This world we live in, for the pure technocrat, is one of objects. Our role, according to this view, is to control it. In order to control it, we need to know it. Hence, after an array of ways to accomplish this aim over the centuries, science has been developed – it has proven itself to be an awesome option to attain that knowledge. “Knowledge is power, and the aim of science is control and manipulation. Nature has no worth or meaning save as an inventory of natural resources.”¹ We, as a people, have drifted toward having an exploited relationship with nature. Nature has no use other than to provide those resources that are instrumental to the way of life we have developed. We have been exploiting nature to ever higher degrees of degradation and term it a good thing, as progress. And we seem very intent on enjoying the short term benefits such exploitation accrues and are oblivious to the long term consequences which promise to be ominous. But just don't blame it on science.

The growth of science in western nations, including the US, has happened in a transnational cultural tradition hospitable to the scientific-technocratic view with supportive religious beliefs. Judeo-Christian dogma is well-steeped in the biblical claim: man has domain over God's creation. The impetus for this posting comes from yesterday's 60 Minutes broadcast. One of its “articles” was about Pope Francis. The pontiff's namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, was known for his concern for the poor and other marginalized people. This present leader of the Roman Catholic church seems be following the saint's example. St. Francis was also associated with a view of nature as the object of his love, not as the target of his exploitation. He has been called the patron saint of ecology. He apparently saw nature as a venue in which to get to know God. Unfortunately, this saint's view of our natural surroundings did not have much of an effect on Christian thinking. Instead, what we seem to have, first, according to Philip Selznick, is a logic of dominance. The world, as stated above, is seen as made up of objects. We are free to pretty much control and manipulate these objects. Second, in our thinking about how to use this world, we treat ends, goals, aims, as given. Our emphasis is on processes to attain poorly conceived objectives. We spend scant interest on justifying these things we seek.² We want something and that seems to be reason enough.

From this perspective, the plot of A Family Affair has a more insightful angle. In its more “Hollywood” treatment, the film attempts to point out that this area of doing business is a dangerous source of short-sightedness. It is the same scientific community that is now beginning to warn us of how this short-sightedness is about to bite us if we don't change our ways. But then again, that is not what we have come to expect from that community. We have come to expect procedures from them, not aims: means not ends.

1Selznick, P. (1992). The moral commonwealth: Social theory and the promise of community. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p. 54.

2Ibid.