IT in Western Culture: A New Technology with Ancient Roots.(information technology)

What is the cultural and social significance of the Internet in the Western world? I shall argue that the Internet is a flower of the Western mind--not a fleur du mal but rather a product of the most deeply rooted, humane and cherished values of Western civilization: freedom of speech and freedom of association--the values of classical democracy. And I shall consider some of the consequences of the new technologies of communication and information to which the Internet belongs for the modern pursuit of freedom and community.

If we accept, with Irving Louis Horowitz, that Technology advances by leaps and bounds, [while] morality advances very slowly, indeed, perhaps not at all, then the Internet is a new means for the advancement of Western freedom whose pursuit reaches back to the classical sources of European civilization. It is important to set the Internet in its proper cultural context as a new technological device developed by free societies for the achievement of even better, quicker and freer communication among large numbers of people separated by great physical distances, without displacing themselves.

The Internet could not have been developed in unfree societies. For free societies are, by definition, debating societies, and the Internet is a technology of debate. The Internet is associated with Western freedom in another way, too. In the West, as Max Weber observed in 1918 in a speech at Munich University, Scientific work is chained to the course of progress. This is not only because of the complexities of nature, but also because of the Western freedom of enquiry and what Weber described as the rational restlessness of the Western mind: its cultural impulse to know combined with an incessant search for application. The Western search for application is the search for the practical use of scientific knowledge, the development of more efficient means for the achievement of goals, be they material, social, or cultural. And, indeed, great progress has been made in the sphere of science and technology while the most fundamental political and moral ideals have remained unchanged. It is this very cultural stability in the ends of Western men and women which enables us to speak of Western civilization.

In what follows I shall show the classical origin of the spirit of the Internet and consider some of its implications for modern Western freedom and community. I shall show first, that the Internet corresponds to the Athenian agora of classical antiquity; and second, that it is a parallel and complementary institution to the many other institutions of flee, public, and critical discussion which include title national parliaments, and with them constitute Western democracies. Indeed, the importance of free speech as a mark of a free society is enshrined in the very term parliament, a word for speaking or debating points in dispute. I shall argue that this peculiarly Western conception of freedom which the Internet extends much more widely than had ever been possible, derives from the classical sources of Western civilization and specifically from the humanism of classical Athens.

Classical Humanism

Isaiah Berlin once said that ideas have no definitions, only histories. The cultural and institutional history of Western Europe is, largely, a history of European engagement with classical notions of humanity. Classical humanism, as a repertoire of ideas regarding mankind, has been the subject of numerous interpretations whose practical applications have marked European life as so many revivals of classical Greece.

Humanism, the feeling of fellowship among human beings and that peculiar, positive conception of man, not as sin (soul) and dust which is how Christianity came to describe mankind, but as mind and body, i.e., reason and form, was born in ancient Greece. The first Great Awakening to what the Victorian humanists described as the presence of man occurred in the so-called Golden or Classical Age of Greece, in 5th century BC Athens. The European Enlightenment which arrived, almost, but not entirely independently at the same conclusion, only corroborated, as Karl Popper would say, the intimations of Greek philosophy and of Greek institutions which it revived and amplified.