Engineering and Freedom, Part 3

click here to read part 1 
click here to read part 2 

The automobile has advanced scientific and social engineering, to the expense of personal freedom and privacy, in less obvious ways. 

In particular, as the immediate effect of the car was catastrophic, it was the ground for institutionalization of medicine and medicare in Western societies. Prior to the twentieth century, hospitals were for the old and young, the only people that tended to be habitually ill. However, most people up until the nineteenth century were born, and died, at home. 

When Abraham Lincoln was gunned down in Washington in 1865, there were no special facilities to aid the stricken top elected official of the United States. He was simply removed to a nearby townhouse, where he died several hours later. Victorian times saw a great boom in hospital-building, partly due to advances in medical science, partly due to the evangelical fervour of the time which encouraged Catholic and denominational sects to spend money on mercy houses to save the souls of the damned of the new bourgeois society. Indeed, most hospitals in Western Europe and North America existing today trace their origins in one form or another to the nineteenth century. 

During the first decade of the twentieth century, newly-institutionalized (but not yet socialized) medicine began to encounter the results of the internal-combustion engine: automobile accidents. Westerners today, when travelling in Africa or Asia, always marvel at the reckless drivers they encounter there, but the early auto-age in every country invariably sees a sudden spike in the death rate, as drivers drive heedless of other drivers. 

At least the newer-modern countries have the benefit of the Occident’s initially blind attempt to develop a communications system organized around motorized transport. Conveniences like street markings and stop-lights are relatively recent things, however. In North America, automobile ownership became a mass (but not majority) phenomenon in the teens of the century, a decade or so prior to this happening in Western Europe. 

When, by the ‘20s, most North Americans had access to a car, the rate of death by accident reached catastrophic levels. Today, with improvements in automobile design, policing and road safety, the number of road deaths is lower in absolute numbers than 80 years ago, even though the number of cars on the road, and the number of hours driven per capita, have increased many times since then. 

At first, however, the social response to the casualty rate on the roads was to set up emergency facilities, adjunct to the traditional hospitals. The now-fabled E/R physicians and the departments in which they worked were more than anything responsible for the socialization of medicine. Emergency rooms were at first run for a fee, but the injuries received through automobile accidents could result in astronomical medical bills. 

Soon enough, health insurance was invented to take care of the middle- and upper-classes. This left many people, even relatively comfortable people, without access to medical coverage. Further, as demand for medical professionals increased, the corpus of knowledge that was necessary to learn in order to be legally qualified to practice medicine expanded, the expense of health services steadily increased. 

At the same time, the E/R remade hospitals into facilities used by all members of the community. A hospital emergency room, prepared to treat accidents, could hardly turn away those with other life-threatening conditions, too. And what about those with catastrophic injury who, as it happens, could not pay their bills? How would admitting nurses know if a person did or did not have insurance coverage? Often hospitals would receive bad press when they turned deathly sick or injured children or women away for lack health insurance. 

In any case, the deprivation of the old and poor of on-going medical care came to be seen as a scandal throughout the “civilized” world. Nevertheless, it was less this controversy over health-care access that initially got the state involved in subsidizing health care. Rather, the hospitals themselves, weighed down by the cost of providing emergency care, came to depend on government hand-outs to keep afloat. Many hospitals were saved from closure during the Depression by direct take-over by government. 

After the Second Great War (where emergency medicine was further enhanced in battlefield hospitals), the involvement of the state diminished the profit-motive in emergency and general hospital care, and as governments assumed the medical debts of those unable to pay, the demands for them to assume those who could pay (barely) increased. 

In most places, state-subsidized health care became the norm. Even the “free market” United States could not resist state medicare, and that country’s failure to introduce universal coverage (with "Hillarycare" in the mid-1990s) has less to do with popular distaste for it, than the determination of the for-profit health sector to prevent their nest egg, that is, partial coverage for the poor and the elderly, so they can go on making big bucks charging high fees to others for the relatively meagre care they offer in return. It is not coincidental that the age of emergency-medicine has been the great era of the advance of medical knowledge. 

The emergency room was a dandy way for physicians to gain experience of all sorts of weird injuries and maladies. Medicine was traditionally ineffective because people viewed the body as a temple, filled with all sorts of magical essences (necessitating, for example, the practice of bleeding to “get the humours in balance”). E/R doctors and surgeons had no choice but treat the body as a live cadaver if they wished to save lives at all, and the injuries to most every part of the anatomy became the domain of countless specialist practitioners. 

The new role wrought by the emergency room, that of the doctor as habitual life-saver, has converted a once semi-dreaded professional into the beau of the single world, and self-regarding mortal deity, too. The indifferent and haughty style of the emergency-room doctor, who has little need of bedside manner, was imported elsewhere into the medical profession (most doctors at least train or spend their first few years practising in emergency wards). 

Today’s demand for “alternative medicine”, that is, medicine that runs directly counter to conventional medicine’s treatment of patients as body parts, was reflected decades ago in the lament over the loss of doctor’s house calls, when physicians mostly eschewed this form of treatment as inefficient. 

The impetus for all this was the invention and diffusion of the automobile, a device that not only requires state intervention in civil society in order to be functional in the first place; it inspires yet more interventionism as a "side-effect" of its use. 

click here to read part 1  
click here to read part 2  

Part 4 of Engineering and Freedom

Engineering and Freedom, Part 2

click here for part 1  

The author and journalist Tom Wolfe was among the luminaries who were asked by Rolling Stone magazine at the end of 1999 to name the most significant invention of the twentieth century. Wolfe’s reply: “The German engineer Gottlieb Daimler's invention in 1885 of the first small, high-speed internal-combustion engine. Daimler's engine made possible the car, the truck, the airplane — the tank, the ballistic missile and the rocket. Without Daimler's engine, there would have been no world wars, no atomic bombings, no threat of worldwide nuclear destruction, no space exploration, nor, for that matter, any Vietnam War. Such were the minor byproducts of the man's genius. The serious business has been the explosion of families, communities, entire populations. Just about everyone who wants to now ups and leaves, gets in the car, the truck, the bus, the airplane and says goodbye to home, hometown, hometown restrictions and that old-time religion. More than all the ideologues, philosophers and cynics combined, it has been Daimler's engine that has led to people discarding religion so casually and blithely you can't even give them any such somber, knit-brow name as `atheists.’ Thanks to Gottlieb Daimler ... you're outta there! Nobody can any longer look over your shoulder. After all, which did more to get the sexual carnival rolling, the pill or the drive-straight-to-the-room motel?" (Tom Wolfe quoted in Rolling Stone (December 30, 1999/January 6, 2000): from Internet site http://www.mit.edu/~yandros/doc/collection.txt, November 1, 2001) 

The motorcar, of all internal-combustion devices, has done the most to reorder and re-engineer modern culture and settlement. The automobile is a private possession that is also used as a public conveyance. In order to accommodate this private, but mobile possession, the public (ie. the state) has become involved in various kinds of structural and social engineering. 

The most obvious effect of the automobile has been its transformation of cities from dense, centralized places into highly dispersed, decentralized “cores” surrounded by suburbs. Suburbia came about not only because the car made lengthy daily commuting possible. The noise, dirt and danger of automobiles forced the “sub-division” of cities, such that residence was far removed from work, and work far removed from leisure, leisure from residence, and so on. An unanticipated effect of the shift to low-rise building, due to the automobile, was that it made possible “wheelchair-accessibility.” 

The geographical specialization and spread encouraged by automobile communications, has made everyone a paraplegic, such that dependence on a prosthesis, the motorcar, is essential to getting around. This is how the car became a staple of modern life. Rural parts have been affected as much, or much more, than the urban, by the car. In the twentieth century, internal-combustion technologies (including farm equipment) caused the massive centralization of farm-holdings and small-town settlement. 

For decades, possession of an automobile has been essential to participation in rural life (a disproportionate number of Model-T Fords were sold to farmers), such that country folk are as helpless as city slickers, even more so, when deprived of this feat of modern engineering. 

For country people, the automobile has been a boon. Urban-dwellers experience the true drawbacks of the automobile the most of anyone. The car is supposed to be a utility, a method of “getting from A to B,” but motorists in larger cities are reliably frustrated in this simple goal by the fact of other motorists, their number and their behaviour behind the wheel. 

Traffic jam and gridlock are an inevitability, one that is only temporarily relieved by the construction of new roads and highways, which only encourage further dependence on automobile communications, and thus, further gridlock. Cars effect paralysis when they malfunction and break down, as they frequently do. When breakdown occurs before destination, the motorist is left with the inconvenience not only of stranding, but also of worry about the now-useless prosthesis dead on the highway. Gridlock and breakdown have also created a new sort of crime, “road rage”, countless incidents of law-abiding citizens, when stuck in traffic, lashing out violently at other motorists or pedestrians. 

This kind of aggression is provoked by the necessity of identifying each motorist merely as a car. The private enclosure of the automobile prevents the normal course of society from taking shape in the car-dominated milieu. 

Thus it is that motorcar-mores must be enshrined in law for the most part, and subject to strict enforcement by police patrol. Freedom from arbitrary questioning and detention by police was a hard-won right in liberal societies. There is no legal obligation for people to carry identification when in public, but as the car is an essential instrument in contemporary society, every motorist not only must possess proper certificate at all times, but produce it on demand when stopped by police on the road. 

The car is a private possession, although its function as public transport brings it into the realm of the regulatory state. As such, people in liberal societies have subjected themselves to a degree of control by government, traditionally seen only in authoritarian societies. 

The car breaches the traditional line between public and private in other, more paradoxical ways. The automobile furthers state intervention into the very bodies of people in modern society, and it simultaneously diminishes the “republican” (that is, what belongs to the public) character of any community it dominates. 

There is a prosperous community in Fairfax county, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. Thousands work there, at many upstart and well-established firms belonging to the new economy. Some live there. Yet, to borrow a phrase, there is no there there. Literally: on any map, it is just a particular freeway interchange. The automobile has made it acceptable for people to work and even live in places where there is apparently nothing resembling what is known as “civic feeling.” 

But then, why should there be? In the “Five Corners,” as this business park has come to be known, the prospective patriciate — the business leaders who were the engine of city incorporation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — have no real motive to form an actual an town or city because they already are as barons in their own domains: they are undisputed, often dictatorial, masters of their workplace offices and “campuses,” virtual small towns to themselves. 

Civic feeling is missing among New Economy executives in the Five Corners because the service environment of the car, with its large parking lots and giant expressways, minimizes psychological connect between people who merely happen to work and live in proximity with each other. 

In the commercial/high-tech “parks” that take up more and more land space at the edge of every North American city, there is a discernable lack of comfort for going anywhere without one’s car. Since driving to the next building or two over would seem wasteful, and few wish to walk there, it is often the case in these industrial parks that the closest neighbours remain as strangers except through occasional telephone call or e-mail. Pedestrian traffic is utterly discouraged in the high-tech parks, which rarely bother to construct sidewalks. 

The parks are often financed by a consortium of the firms that locate there, which also construct their own individual office buildings to be convenient only for those coming and going by car: exterior pathways lead only to the parking lot, with the outlying street accessible only by a driveway, for example. Given that geography organized around the car leads to such an estrangement of pride in and belonging to one’s community and fellow citizens, New Economy firms have moved in to provide the leisure and even marketplace needs of their employees. 

All but the dinkiest of companies these days includes at least a small kitchen with a fridge and adjacent dining area for the comfort of employees, and the firms of the information economy, especially - the ones most likely to locate in industrial parks great and small - tend go a lot farther in catering to their employees’ needs. The Ottawa headquarters of Nortel Networks, for example, is a virtual (in the older sense) community to itself. 

However, it pales in comparison to the services offered by the edge city firms in the U.S., such as those located in Fairfax county, Virginia or Silicon valley, California. Edge city companies have sought to make the workplace as homey, as domesticated as possible, as compensation for the lack of society of industrial-park culture. They make it comfortable and ergonomic for employees so they don’t mind as much working the twelve and fourteen-hour days demanded by most high-tech firms. 

One can ask, if most people in the New Economy spend most of their waking hours at work, and if their social network is composed mainly of people with whom they work, do they actually “live” at their homes or at their workplaces? 

The domestication of the work environment is seen everywhere around the new-style firm: from the loss of honorifics for superiors, so that everyone down to the custodial staff is addressed by first name only, to the adoption of casual office dress, to the ritual of distribution and signing of birthday cards, to work-related “retreats” in the woods or in the mountains, to workplace courtship and extra-marital liaisons. 

All this was unheard-of for the vast majority of employers a century or even fifty years ago. Camaraderie among colleagues and co-workers has been a feature of work life for all time, likely. But the spirit that existed among co-workers in former times, as compared to today, tended to be as exclusive and non-domesticated as possible. 

Until recently, of course, the sexes rarely mixed in the workplace, and so associations which naturally developed among craftspeople of either sex were exclusive of the other, and thus not domesticated. The majority of people employed right outside the home, that is men and boys, wanted to make their workman’s associations as undomesticated as possible. 

The modern bourgeoisie in particular mastered the strict division of the domestic and professional life, a split that was reflected often in the personalties of members of the middle class (schizophrenia is often referred to as the “middle-class disease” for the disproportionate number of sufferers who come from that background). It was, ironically, the automobile, a result of the bourgeoisie’s industrially-based civilization, which put private life into obsolescence as it proceeded to domesticate the social environment completely. 

The very fact that the car is private property, and very expensive at that, creates constant demand for its use. The environment of the automobile (which includes everyone whether they drive a car or not) is thus reorganized to assume a domesticated form. The car extends in a limited way the creature comforts of home, and so people come to demand such comforts outside the home, too. 

The standard-model automobile, whether mini-van or sport-utility vehicle, is itself beginning to appear more and more like home. But even more humble cars are now built with ergonomic cup holders, cushioned seats and standard cassette/compact disc players, to approximate the home as much as a car can. One new line of mini-van even includes a digital television set mounted on the back of the driver’s seat. 

The paradox of the car is that while it extends vastly the geographical reach of what is formally called “public,” it simultaneously diminishes opportunities for true public contact between people. 

The car reversed the bias of Western society from privacy and relative economic autonomy to state intervention in the personal and social lives of all people. Property rights and bodily integrity were abridged by the automobile through the vicissitudes of highway construction and highway accident-inspired emergency medical care. 

The current bureaucratic control of public education is also in large part a result of the motorized transport, in the form of the school bus, the only vehicle on the road that can, by itself, legally block traffic coming behind it. The humble school bus, practically on its own, closed the local schoolhouse, shipping kids off to one- or two-thousand student primary and secondary schools that could only be governed by ever-expanding “administration.” Now, rural and small town kids receive much the same education (or at least the same form of operant conditioning) as do urban kids. In this sense, rural folks have become as urbanized as actual city kids, just as the urban environment itself has become domesticated. 

 The automobile has created a catacomb world where the public has been refashioned to appear as much as possible like the private, while the incursions of the state and public into private life are everywhere but go mostly unobserved. The world of the car isn’t all for bad, in spite of what its critics may believe. The very act regulating traffic, in terms of zoning laws and so on, has created beautiful, safe neighbourhoods that the average worker can afford. And the suburbs are not just great collectivities of square boxes full of people made square by their living in such a homogeneous environment. Nevertheless, the “edge” civilization of modern times is entirely dependent upon engineering, the greater part of which in turn is dependent on regulation and subsidy by the state. 

Part three of Engineering and Freedom 

Engineering and Freedom, Part 1

There is a paradox inherent in technology. Any automated technique liberates people from the constraints of their own anatomy, extending and objectifying the limbs, senses and other faculties to create what Freud called “the prosthetic God.” (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, tr. Joan Riviere, rev. and ed. James Strachey. London, 1969). 

Technologies greatly amplify the physical and mental freedom of human beings to explore and control the world. But the way the environment is reorganized to accommodate this amplification also is a cause of human bondage. The automobile, for example, dramatically reduced urban population density by subdividing the distinct functions of the city. Thereafter, those unable to afford a motorcar, or who had poor access to public transport, were effectively amputated from full intercourse with society. But even those with cars are beholden to them just as they are to all the other automated technologies, as much as a cripple is to her wheelchair. 

By changing the scale and nature of the environment, technology turns the human body invalid. During the twentieth century, the entire material environment of Occidental and East Asian societies became engineered — constructed according a plan or blueprint. This includes, of course, the symbolic or artistic aspects of culture — now transmitted through television, the movies, records, the Internet, and in specially-designed places for public performance. 

“First World” society was transformed, during the last century, from Gemeinschaft, the “organic community,” to Gesellschaft, the mechanical or rational community. The world of engineered technology is the most conspicuous aspect of the modern Occident. 

But, emphatically, Western society is not built upon the values of efficiency and rationality, alone. This is demonstrated by simply referring to the fundamental tenets of Western politics: democracy, the rule of law, freedom of speech, thought, etc. 

None of these values have rationality or efficiency as their primary goal, quite the contrary. There could be nothing more inefficient than having policy and law determined by the population at large, most of whom are unschooled in and indifferent to the workings of government, and otherwise prone to divide into faction over what laws should or should not be instituted. 

Consequently, democratic decision-making succumbs to “politics,” wherein statute and programmes are erected based on compromise and “horse-trading,” a most inefficient of getting things done. 

Nearly all the great rationalists of the ages have agreed that, democracy is very worst sort of government, including all the others. Plato devised his ideal state, as laid out in the Republic (or Polity), in which the true democracy of his Athenian home was banished, in favour of rule by an elite group of philosopher-kings, called the Guardians. 

Throughout his works, Plato damned Hellenic mass democracy, which he blamed for the condemnation of his master, Socrates. Aristotle was more moderate in his assessment of democracy, but nevertheless also favoured an elite rule by learned men. The Enlightenment philosophers, the supposed pioneers of liberal thought, were scarcely any less damning in their view of democratic rule than were the ancients. 

Voltaire advocated rule by a “benevolent despot,” essentially a philosopher-king of the Platonic model. Rousseau seemed to favour direct democracy, as occurred at Athens, but with no allowance for party or faction within the assembly. 

All were supposed to adhere to “right reason,” with abstainers being “forced to be free” in spite of their own inclinations. This is hardly a liberal or democratic schema, but it was put into practice by the Terrorists of the Committee of Public Safety to guillotine thousands at the end of the French Revolution. 

The dictatorship of The Committee of Public Safety was accompanied by the complete abnegation of what limited rights were available to Frenchmen in that day and age. Civil and legal rights, as embodied at first in English common law, undermine the role of the state as keeper of public (and private) order.  

Warrants and writs, and other conventions that protect individuals from unreasonable search and seizure, detention, coercion of testimony, and so on, owe little to philosophical systems. They evolved slowly, as a result of “political” conflict and compromise between the interests of the individual, and those of the state. In police states, there is little crime except that committed by the authorities themselves. 

Ordinary street crime in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia was eliminated through the detention of anyone suspected of an offence. Later dictatorships had more sophisticated, though no less efficient, methods of keep ordinary criminality down. 

The nullification of legal and civil rights that this entailed is the most rational method of eliminating the problem. Logically, the cost of lost liberty due to the suspension of civil rights, is worth the benefit of increased security of the person and property. Such conventions as right to silence, or the trial- verdict by one’s peers, could never have been developed based on rational precepts. 

Rational philosophers have throughout the ages viewed free exchange in the marketplace as a base and unsavoury use of the faculties, satiable by strict regulation and control. Plato favoured a primitive communism for his Polity, while Aristotle championed the “autarky” of a household-based economy. 

The classical political economists were rarely in favour of total laissez-faire, and after Karl Marx, most rational intellectuals have sought some sort of regulation of the market. Laissez-faire, meanwhile, was not devised, but identified as a viable system by the Physiocrats and Adam Smith in the eighteenth century.  It came about not because of the rationality of philosophies and systems, but of the self-interest of countless participants in the market. 

Liberal freedoms, then, were not borne of logic and rationality. Western philosophy has made a far better case for dictatorship than for democracy — for totalitarianism than for freedom. Liberalism evolved from the conflict in early-modern times between newly-empowered royal states, and the emergent middle ranks of European society. 

Through long struggle and war, monarchies were compelled to grant some degree of liberal rights to individual citizens, in religious matters, and then in legal and civil affairs. Liberalism stood in opposition to the rational and efficient administration established by the great kings of Europe, and aimed to create a margin between state and society, a civil space in which the individual could act unmolested by authorities or other citizens. 

Rationality undermines freedom practically as well as theoretically. Engineering, which automates manual and handicraft technologies, has progressively shaped and re-shaped landscape and society for more than two hundred years, bringing convenience and utility, and also dependence upon automation for everyday needs, and paralysis when faced with technological failure and breakdown. 

Engineered technology is usually seen, favourably or not, as the fruit of laissez-faire capitalism. But an economy not encumbered by high taxes or excessive regulation does not, in fact, contribute much to the progress of engineered technology. In a state of perfect or ruinous competition, profit margins are too low for firms to invest much in research and development. 

Historically, technological advance has been subsidized directly or indirectly by the state, in fulfilment of its essential function as monopolizer of coercion. The state began as an armed camp; when it comes under attack from insurrection or invaders, it assumes precisely that form once again. Organized warfare has forced states to invent or adopt engineering novelties. 

The state, unlike private capital, can “afford” to invest in technologies that are without apparent commercial potential. The roads and aqueducts of ancient Rome were built to defend and fortify the empire, not to expedite commerce. In the Hellenistic empire of the Seleucids, Hero and Archimedes constructed steam engines, but only their martial inventions (such as the catapult and the screw) found widespread application. 

Steam-powered engines remained novelties in the second century before Christ, because the imperial state of that time found no purpose in financing their construction or operation. Steam power was not rediscovered until the eighteenth century. Contrary to popular understanding, however, the “industrial revolution” in northern England and Scotland in the 1700s, which brought in the factory-based economy, was not initially dependent upon steam power. 

Rather, the advances in productivity in the textile and other industries came about because of the division and specialization of labour. As exemplified in Adam Smith’s description of the pin manufactory in the Wealth of Nations (1776), the minute divvying up of the work involved in creating a good allowed a single, largely unskilled workman to produce in a day as much as twenty skilled craftsmen. 

The division of labour, Smith observed, was key to the “wealth of nations”, and came about spontaneously as trade was loosened from state taxation and regulation. Machines are but the fruits of the division of labour, Smith wrote. In fact, machine-industrial production did not predominate until well into the nineteenth century, after its value had been proven in armaments factories financed or controlled by the state. 

Europe owed its technological predominance over the rest of the world due to the competitive struggle amongst its various countries (England, France, Prussia, Russia, Spain, Portugal, etc.). Historian Paul Kennedy noted in his study of the rise and fall of great powers, that it was the need for the various European states (that, unlike the other metropolitan centres of civilization, had not been united under a single power since the fall of Rome) to keep abreast of each other militarily, which launched the modern age of engineered technology. 

Industrial revolution has occurred in most places not through the private capital accumulation, but from the heavy investment of the state in armaments production, to fight or prepare to fight wars. 

Thus, Britain only became fully industrialized after the twenty-five years of French Revolutionary / Napoleonic wars, and the growth of heavy industry in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century in the United States was slow, until the Civil War sparked the American industrial revolution (which nevertheless was centred in the northeast and mid- to far-West of the country, not touching the midlands and deep southeast until the 1940s and ‘50s). 

Prussia and Japan were transformed into industrial powers in the nineteenth century under dirigiste, militarist governments. Stalin’s Russia, in making the leap from an agricultural to factory-based economy, directly copied the example of post-1867 Japan. The economic power of the United States in the post-World War II era has been assured in large part through the investment of the U.S. Defence Department in high-tech projects to fight the Cold War (resulting, for example, in cellular technology and the protocols which make the Internet possible). 

Engineering advance rarely occurs in a liberal marketplace, because a competitive environment is anathema to investment in sophisticated technology, which must be subsidized in their construction and operation before any return is seen. Unless subsidized by the state, technological innovation is deemed by market actors as too risky and dear to be economically feasible. It is when the government, through funding and fiat power, supports engineering, that it is accepted generally. 

Today, people in Occidental countries live in unprecedented prosperity, due in no small part to the progress of engineering during the twentieth century. But affluence is no essential prerequisite to the practice of civil and other forms of liberty. As described by the classicist H.D.F. Kitto, the free people of Athens, lived hardly better than their slaves, in spite of their involvement in far-flung trade during the fifth century BC. The evolution of direct democracy in Attica prior to and during the classical age, resulted from conflict and compromise, rather than abstract theorizing, and most free citizens of that time and place were far less interested in philosophy than were the most famed of the Hellenes. 

Modern societies with enduring liberal traditions, gained civil and economic freedom prior to becoming “technological societies,” and many countries (such as Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) underwent technological modernization under totalitarian conditions. Totalitarianism, with its ever-present bureaucracy, is the apex of engineered modernism, in fact. In the twentieth century, people in liberal societies exchanged a good deal of their liberty to live under mostly engineered (socially and technologically) conditions.  

Part two of `Engineering and Freedom'.