Waiting in Toronto for my connecting flight to Copenhagen and then from there to Vilnius for the 4th International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry Conference. I’ve read some of the papers already and am very excited to head off in that direction.

My paper addresses technology, Marcuse, and MacIntyre. I try to use MacIntyre’s critique of Marcuse to redirect that critique. I think there is something very applicable still today to Marcuse’s analysis of technology. Schoolman captures this in part: it’s that Marcuse recognizes that technology works in ways independent of and yet in similar ways to brute political force. This insight lets Marcuse call technology totalitarian. In many ways, can’t we see this. We are subject to the technology of the world. Technology, for instance, let’s us live in the suburbs and drive to work. But the commute is a commute away from the community and away from our families.

Or consider the way that technology has invaded security at the airport. We must go through the X-ray search of our bags. This means we stand in line, in the corrals set up, to be processed.

But even more, consider how technology constrains the ways we work and think in the world. More later.