Techno-Fix Nation: America and the World since 1945

Howard P. Segal

Techno-Fix Nation: America and the World Since 1945

For much of the twentieth century, and continuing even through today, the United States could accurately be characterized as the world's foremost Techno-Fix Nation. As exempified by the New Deal and the Great Society, there were repeated government projects intended to solve long-standing and hitherto unsolvable problems like rural and urban poverty, inadequate or overly expensive energy transmission, insufficient irrigation and other environmental challenges, inadequate public education, and an overall absence of sense of community. In many cases longstanding social, economic, political, and cultural barriers to permanent solutions were overcome, in theory if not always in practice, by projects and policies that had their ideological origins in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technocratic visions of the Frenchmen Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, among others. Their dreams of having French and then West European society dominated by technical experts not subject to petty distractions migrated to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the post-World War II era American models of technology-based "modernization" were the rage in both governmental and academic circles and were attempted through much of the non-Communist world. In the post-Cold War era different American versions of techno-fixes have been attempted in areas ranging from controlling climate change to extracting data from unprecented amounts of information to transforming education everywhere by the universal allocation of laptops. By now it is the United States that has exported techno-fix visions throughout much of the world.