What is technology? The modern age exemplifies a kind of material fixation, such that we are expected to believe that everything is better on account merely of progress in material technologies. And no, it would be impossible to deny the benefits of modern technology. Technology allows for myriad forms of constructing the self which are simply impossible. Instead of memorizing key pieces of information, one need simply remember the optimal means of utilizing Google. The access of the individual to information has increased by an incalculable magnitude, and we shouldn’t seek to regress from this. Material technology has an inextricable and influential effect on society which can’t be discounted; the pill has, for better or worse, wreaked its will on gender relations on the present by lowering the riskiness of extramarital sex. Whether one considers this ultimately better or worse (I find myself shrugging when one considers the countering eugenic and dysgenic effects) than previous states of affairs, it is the case that the pill exists and many things like it are possible.

We cannot “regress” on material technology, where the Baconian sense of mastering nature is considered. The only means of progressing on material technology is through present technology. We are already at a point that the development of new computer technologies would be impossible without more rudimentary computer systems themselves, and given the number of institutional systems benefited by the kinds of calculation and computation by computers which would be either strictly impossible or extremely expensive when done by human hand, it would appear that a neo-luddite response to the changes of society envisaged and formed by the rise of material technologies is out of the question. Rather, an embrace of technology per se appears the proper way forward.

But, and here’s where it becomes scary, or enlightening: what really is technology? Technology is, in the most abstract of senses, the utilization of known regularities exhibited by systems in order to capture the effect of a particular output provided certain inputs. This describes most obviously material technologies, but what if one considers social technology?

The initial response is undoubtedly that “social technology” makes little sense, but follow along for a moment. What explains the success of certain institutions over others within the same society? It usually has little to do with the kinds of people it attracts; that is, between institutions within the same culture, the quality of people available to be populated by that institution varies little. The explanation of success between institutions has more to do with the arrangement of those institutions and less with the people available.

If we abstract our idea of technology away from the merely material, we come to the definition of technology that it is those arrangements of things, contingent on their exhibited regularities, which produce a particular effect. From that definition, it isn’t hard to understand the concept of social technology. Namely, it is those technologies which utilize expressed regularities of human nature in order to capture optimal production with respect to whatever that understanding of optimal production is. So far as institutional arrangement is relevant to how it is instrumental in the production of goods, it follows that institutional arrangements are instances of social technology, akin to the wheel or computer.

What are we to say concerning the present state of social technology and its research? Those fields which ought to be producing findings which any corporation, government, or religious organization should be capitalizing is instead so fixated on certain ends that it has given up trying to describe the regularities of human social interaction, and instead seeks only to constrain it according to certain poorly described ideals. There are a multitude of findings in the frontiers of social science research which contradict the expressed ideals of Progressive social arrangement, so why is the ideal of Progressive social arrangement so little changed? There is really only one explanation left remaining: that it was never about maximizing the values conducive to civilizational attainment and sustainability, but only as a vanguard which might impute the authority of scientific credentials to its message. In fact, we have, with reference to the understanding and utilization of social technology, regressed. Anyone who perceives that the family is the locus and elementary foundation of society sees right away that record high levels of single motherhood and bastardry are an indication of a fundamental failure of society to use even tried and true methods of social technological development.

Instead, research which might obviously impose a falsifying observation with regard to the standard social science model of society is frequently anathematized. Even in those cases where such research into social technology proceeds, its results are disputed, shouted down, and ultimately overlooked. If one forgives Orwell his narrative excesses, we are already living in 1984. Facts which the regime finds inconvenient are routinely denied, misrepresented, and memory-holed amidst a slog of politically correct nonsense.

That we have regressed on the front of social technology is undeniable to anyone who can see the difference between the positive and the normative. The social sciences are crippled by a religious (there is no other word for it) zealotry, and research into fundamental features of human society are maligned wherever they would obviously, or even mistakenly, produce findings which oppose the modern paradigm of tolerance and multiculturalism. The social sciences should be the most exciting frontier of science following the paradigm shifts of quantum mechanics in the early and mid-20^th century, but we’ve been hobbled from forwarding sensible paradigms of social scientific research by the slaving of that research to orthodoxies that care little for what is, and instead spend their time ranting on what ought to be.

The result is a social science paradigm that has little interest in what’s possible, with a concomitant dedication to achieving the impossible.