Expanding Horizons: Rethinking Access to Justice in Canada

Appendix B (continued)

Appendix B (continued)

Citizen Access to Justice: Issues and Trends for 2000 and After (continued)

4. Technology and Humanism

We have been slow to accept the alteration of our natures through the influence of these cultural factors, including the omnipresent influence of technology. This can be hard to see, especially if we are moved by the apparently liberating possibilities of our now-constant immersion in technology, the sort of transvaluation of traditional values celebrated by Donna Haraway in her prescient 1985 essay, "Manifesto for Cyborgs." Haraway is no simple Wired-style techno-booster, certainly, but her nuanced discussion of the cyborg future opened up as many troubling possibilities as emancipatory ones.

"The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity," Haraway writes in the Manifesto. "It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for the appropriation or incorporation by the other."

Haraway's forward-looking analysis became the theoretical ground-zero for a generation of cyber-anarchists, newly wired feminists, and prophets of a transhumanism greeted with both alarm and enthusiasm. Among the last are two significant Canadian thinkers: Arthur Kroker has written darkly and densely about the dangers of the rewriting of the body via technology; while Christopher Dewdney looks forward happily to a time when the species would take its new big step and move beyond the physical.

The influence of technology on the political self is a story which in truth is the story of human history but which tends, in practice, to become the story of the twentieth century. The reason for this truncation in scope is obvious enough, and is symbolized in a few choice inventions which, though in some cases born earlier, only come into their own during the bloody century: the machine-gun, the airplane, the automobile, the telephone, the television, the computer. Mass production and mass destruction are the twinned pinnacles of twentieth-century life, and we still pledge our allegiance to them at every moment.

One consequence of this fact is the current inescapability of capitalism -- something which is sometimes challenged but mostly just accepted, indeed celebrated. Whether we like it or not (mostly not, if the citizens of this country are any indication), our bodies themselves now underwrite the dominance of the market, because every moment of waking and sleeping life is shot through with commitment to the goods and services of the global economy. We are capitalism made flesh.

Another consequence is a profound change in our sense of ourselves, a change best caught by the somewhat misleading label "post-evolutionary." Our mastery of technology means we are no longer beholden to the gene pool, which we can now shape and perpetuate independently of natural reproduction, with all its risks and tempestuous emotions; and we are no longer bound entirely by our natural environment, which we can also shape -- though on the whole we seem bent on destroying it instead. That is one reason the post-evolutionary label is misleading: we are still constrained at the baseline by natural facts, even if this baseline is always shifting because of our ingenuity. The other reason to be suspicious of the label is that we are of course still evolving, if not quite in the manner of crude Darwinian orthodoxy.

What does this entail in politics? First of all, an additional citizenly duty, namely to attend to and understand the conditions of our technological existence -- however painful that may be. It is common these days for those of us in the privileged world to carry on large parts of our existence via e-mail, creating little virtual agoras out of our far-flung friends; or organizing dissent via the decentralized medium of the Internet. But these ethereal movements must nevertheless issue in the still-indispensable actions of shared space if they are to be truly effective. The anti-corporatist protests of June 18 and November 30, 1999, for instance, so effectively drawn from otherwise diffuse quarters, would have meant far less if they had not led to 40,000 people occupying the streets of Seattle, or 500 of them engaging in the highest form of citizenship, peaceful civil disobedience leading to arrest.

In the face of rapidly changing technology, there is therefore a deeper duty still, to reconceive not only citizenship and political commitment for a new era, but human nature itself. In 1928 the critic Walter Benjamin noted that technology is not, as people often say, the mastery of nature; it is, rather, the mastery of the relationship between nature and humankind. The relationship is now constantly in question, and the question is a political one. That is why the "Transhumanist" prophets of our current "cyborg" status are only half right -- or rather, more accurately, why we have only appreciated half, the unironic and apolitical half, of what they tell us.

Yes, we are all cyborgs now, mixed human-carbon hybrids with wires shooting through our watery bodies at every angle; but we have not yet managed the political implications of this fact, lost in the play of speed and pleasure that the wiring makes possible. We are too much taken with novelty and the 'loveliness' of our inventions, the pure electromagnetic wave-functions of cutting-edge technology. Technology becomes a sort of generalized deity, a wispy but all-pervasive god.

Thus our great avoidance rituals in the face of technology, such that we fixate on the cutting edge and lose sight of the majority stuck on the trailing one. Or, if political issues do come up, the way we imagine they are about something like greater access to hardware – when they might really be about greater access to the human software of literacy, that indispensable enabling condition of citizenship, that forgotten civil right.

"Our best machines are made of sunshine," writes Haraway. But that is both a virtue and a vice. Lightness and invisibility, the traits of the effective guerrilla, also entail, where power is entrenched, lack of accountability. The genuine citizen-cyborg must send out as well allow in; she must transmit as well as receive. There is no such thing as a one-way communications node. The difficulty with constant information-access and other projects of personal gratification, the difficulty with all these entertaining machines we keep giving ourselves, is not the old one of folding domesticity and privacy away from the public view, making that realm female and subordinate. It is rather that, in being so entirely permeable to the public view, privacy becomes merely an opportunity for conspicuous consumption.

What do I mean? I mean that the very idea of the polis as a shared space, a space where citizens can seek and find the negotiations and compromises that make for justice, is more and more undermined in an ostentatious display of private enjoyment, the old public/private ideology not transcended but simply reinscribed in a new, less obvious manner. Nowadays, political action is not so much prevented as nullified, made supremely uninteresting compared to the local pleasures of the house, of the cineplex, of the playdium. Why should anyone bother with any form of citizenly responsibility beyond the purely personal claim to pay less tax and claim more benefits? Here comfort becomes its own answer, shopping and surfing and e-trading their own defence.

This will not do. We need the separate private realm not only to escape the public now and then, but also to engage more effectively with the shared, common aspects of life -- to make us the sort of citizens who can actively create and maintain the essential third spaces of civil society. Whatever its many dangers and shortcomings, a well-ordered private realm makes a just public realm possible. Among other things, it makes the public/private distinction itself – along with a host of other oppositional ideas – a matter for specifically public discourse, a contested border war, for only there can we offer arguments that will be assessed by our fellow citizens -- or those who might be.

Importantly, we do not -- cannot -- any longer expect these conflicts to resolve themselves into some larger notional whole, some form of dialectical completeness. We can only play, in all seriousness, in the space of contestation. "Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster," Haraway says, "the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden." This form of utopian thinking is not Edenic. The private realm need not be stark and sparse, as it was for the ancient Greeks, who viewed it as the site of mere necessity, of physical maintenance for the more important things happening elsewhere. But an excessive concern with comfort becomes self-defeating, for it robs the enjoyment of comfort of its point, and its potential role in public justification. The private realm is for solace and rest, to be sure, but at some point these inward projects must be put in service of the larger debate that shapes the whole of social space.

Without that debate, and the legitimacy it alone offers to a specific ordering of space, the purely private realm is mere usurpation, an act of aggression against those less fortunate. Property crimes are most often motivated by need or envy, but they also sometimes have a deeper political point. In effect the burglar or robber wants to know: Where is the justification for you having so much when someone else has so little? And that is not a question that can be answered from the comfort of your own home.

There is, in sum, no political dimension left in the current wave of elaborately evasive private houses and logo-dominated public spaces; no sense of the commitment to a public good -- a commitment that the genuinely private house, in its attention to thresholds, actually maintains. Home is a notion that must establish a relationship between private and public; it cannot be an end in itself. The ideal of the cyborg polis must therefore be pursued in better forms. It is, in its way, not unlike the old civic republican ideal of a public space, where every citizen is a model of the whole, a kind of cybernetic network of common projects.

5. Speed and Citizen Action

I realize I have been speaking at a fairly abstract level, and that this may be unfamiliar territory for those used to a more conventional discussion of access to justice. But my concerns are directly related to the overall project of justice, for I do not believe we can think clearly about access to justice unless and until we understand the contours of our cultural and political situation. I also believe that many people, in this country and elsewhere, have a vague sense that their lives are changing very, very quickly but little concrete understanding of what, precisely, that means or what, if anything, they can do about it.

Speed itself is one of the central problems here. It is the dominant trope of the age -- and likely to become even more dominant as we move further into the new millennium. We are constantly told to move more quickly, to process information in greater volume, to react with increased swiftness to the rapid changes in our environment, our economy, our mediascape. This fetishizing of speed is a problem masquerading as a solution, however, for no amount of increased velocity will get us where we think we are going. Where, in any case, would that be? The culture is dominated not just by speed but by senseless speed, a sharp upward vector without a destination. In fact, we are not so much trying to get somewhere more quickly as we are trying to get away from something with greater haste. What is it? Ourselves? Our sense of unease? Our limitations?

Perhaps all of these. What we must remember as citizens – and this will only become harder to remember as we move more deeply into this new speed-freak millennium – is that speed without direction is only a fool's errand. It has no point beyond itself, in much the same way that so much of the wealth creation we see today seems to have no point beyond itself. We've had many consecutive quarters of growth, and we look set to enjoy more of the same. (This is not always obvious. We are afflicted in Canada by our own invidious comparisons with the United States, which makes us look relatively poor; and there are, to be sure, worrying trends in the matter, for example, declining average income levels compared to the rest of the industrialized world.) But growth is not its own answer. It must have a point, if it is to mean anything, if it is not to disappear in a kind of postmodern legerdemain where nothing signifies anything but itself. Moreover, unbridled growth, the internal logic of capitalism, is ultimately and necessarily self-defeating, for it will eventually – and maybe much sooner than we usually imagine – destroy the very site of its success, the natural environment of this planet.

The point of social wealth must be greater justice for all citizens. That seems obvious when stated so plainly, but what is remarkable today (not only today) is how often that simple point is lost to view. From educational policy to tax strategy, far too much of our thinking is skewed by the crude, and ultimately empty, calculus of short-term utility – and utility of a particularly empty sort, too. A just society is one which allows people to pursue their life goals consistent with the same pursuit being enjoyed by others.

Making that work is a tall order, and one which inevitably involves a measure of disappointment. In a sense, social justice is about the management of existing human desire. It is also about realizing in practice the basic principle that no one should be deprived of the basic goods produced by a society because of natural disadvantages. We want people to be able to succeed, and enjoy the fruits of their talents; but we also want them to share some of those fruits with those less fortunate – because they too are part of the very social fabric that makes success, and its enjoyment, possible in the first place.

The project of realizing the basic principles of justice, of guaranteeing all citizens fair access to justice, has lately become vastly more complicated, more challenging, and more confusing. We now have numerous justice-based obligations beyond the national borders, even beyond the human species, and balancing the different kinds of claims upon us is only going to be more difficult in future. Traditional forms of citizen action are no longer adequate to our desires for accountability and responsiveness. That is, we may have to bypass Ottawa and take our case to Seattle or New York, to APEC or the WTO – and we must be allowed to do so. Moreover, we may have to find our basic accommodations with fellow citizens at more local levels, and in ways that are more fluid and open-ended – ruled by a shared commitment to baseline civility, for example, which makes interaction possible even against a background of deep cultural and personal differences.

Furthermore, we may as individuals have to force ourselves to slow down, to reflect, and to rededicate ourselves to the now-threatened role of citizen, finding new forms and levels of political expression, new ways of being committed and responsive to our fellow-travellers. We may have to do all of this, and more, if we hope to fashion justice from the complicated materials of contemporary everyday life.

Conclusion

There is much more, probably too much more, that needs to be said about the issues I have raised in these pages. These are not ideas that readily translate into specific policy, I know. What I have tried to do here, and what I invite others to do now, is precisely what is now so essential in the service of justice: to reflect.

We need to make time for reflection, to open up spaces both within ourselves and in our social interactions for thoughts about justice that are not driven, in the first instance, by the imperatives of policy-making or problem-solving. That is not to diminish the need for policy, or for solutions more generally; only to suggest that we make better, wiser policies, and achieve more elegant and more beneficial solutions, when we have given ourselves the benefit of thought. Unlike many of the social goods we seek to distribute justly, thought is renewable and relatively inexpensive – at least in material terms!

It is also, however, perpetually scarce. Which means there is always a need for more of it. I have tried, with these brief notes, to make that crucial form of social growth possible in this forum. I hope I have succeeded.