Genocide cannot be blamed on neutral technology availability

Evidence

To explain genocides and holocausts as a result of the availability of modern technology, modern science, or bureaucratic efficiency is to misunderstand the very nature of instrumentalism as a structure of thought. The invention of nuclear weapons or of sophisticated military technology that wiped off the face of the Earth millions of innocent victims in the colonies, in Japan, and in Europe itself is not a neutral act of science or the result of neutral technological competence. Nor is there any neutrality in the use of otherwise “innocent” instruments to destructive effects. A carpenter’s hammer used to smash the head of another human or a pet loses this epistemological continuum, rendering it anything but a carpenter’s hammer as originally and conventionally conceived. The hammer is epistemologically reinvented at the very moment it is used for murder. It is therefore not the instrument and its availability that make for a rationally justifiable analytical explicans, but it is rather the mind behind its invention and use that must phenomenologically constitute the explicans. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 397

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: an essay tracing how Western ‘technology-as-neutral-tool’ discourse launders responsibility for colonial and genocidal violence, using the hammer-reinvention example as a hinge.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a tool is epistemologically reinvented at the moment of its violent use — and that neither the tool nor its availability can explain violence — reframes the whole technology-and-evil debate.
• XREF: connects to: Earlier eras cannot be judged as lacking technologies they did not know. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1226; Technology itself is neutral; harmful outcomes stem from power relations, not technical necessity. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 262; Classification and symbolization alone do not cause genocide — Gregory H. Stanton, Ten Stages of Genocide, 11