REDEFINING CIVIL SOCIETY AS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SOCIETY.

It is a truism that ideas are the hinges of history. The idea that will necessarily underlie any concerted technological empowerment of the Peace Corps is the idea that advanced technology is integral to effective civil society. While this broader philosophical thesis exceeds the scope of this article, its salient point is that transforming the Corps entails not simply a fiscal decision but a revised technology policy. I noted above the historical confusion of advanced technology with militarism. In Marxism technology came to be seen as a tool of economic exploitation, demonized by philosophers like Herbert Marcuse as a dehumanizing force caricatured by Orwellian dystopias. These stereotypes contrast starkly with diversity-promoting, democratically empowering information technologies. Marx's inspiration, the German idealist philosopher Hegel, was ignorant of the developmental stimuli required by science and technology. The social Darwinism that shaped 19th-century US society believed science unfolded spontaneously within the mythic historical

processes imagined by Hegel. This supposition carried through into John Dewey's pragmatism, influencing historian Thomas Kuhn's "normal science" concept of scientific establishments passively explicating paradigms. Francis Fukuyama's 1992 study The End of History and the Last Man made this Hegelianism explicit in a doctrine of linear political progress assuming

inevitable scientific advance under adroit political administrators rather than proactive technological innovators. Fukuyama's subordination of technological innovation to political administration continued in Our

Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002), espousing technology regulation. Military Organization in the Information Age: Lessons from the World of Business (1999, Fukuyama and Abram Shulsky)

elevated political-administrative over technological processes (with the Wehrmacht as a case study), emphasizing information control rather than dissemination. This outlook pervades current federal failure proactively to nurture either governmental or private telecommunications development.

A fertile alternative politics of technology, combining theoretical cogency with unusual empirical foundations and according with recent knowledge management research, arises from the analyses of Admiral Owens, reflecting his post - Cold War reorganization of the US military and his experience as commander of the Sixth Fleet in 1990 and 1991. Until recently CEO of Canada-based Nortel, a global telecommunications firm, Owens' geopolitical, governmental and information technology perceptions benefit from a unique conflux of strategic insights evolved in publications (e.g. America's Information Edge, with Joseph S.Nye, Jr., Foreign Affairs, 1996; Lifting the Fog of War, with Ed Offley, 2000) and unpublished research. Owens believes America's economy, quality of national life and security can progress optimally only by concerted government-led efforts to move not just the

military but all peacetime society on to a substantively more sophisticated telecommunications level. In discussion with me he cited South Korea as a nation whose competitiveness challenges America's significantly because of superior government vision in technology. "In intelligence management, national defense, and the effectiveness of day-to-day communication and administration, the US Government is today a technological underperformer by a significant margin," Owens commented. He acknowledges that technological innovation cannot depend on flashes of fortunate private genius, military stimulation or mythic historical spontaneity but must be purposefully nurtured by peacetime institutions that facilitate and respond to development opportunities - an observation which, in the form in which Francis Bacon first cast it in the1600s, initiated the scientific era. Bacon's statement "Knowledge is power" acquires new meaning for an age in which raw political or military power, however great, is constrained by the realities of peacetime knowledge-transmitting technology. These include the fact that civil society is now an information technology

construct in which strategic policy cannot succeed without being well anchored in the optimal use and development of advanced information technology for peaceful purposes, since larger peacetime society originates

the technological products that incidentally enable security. "We truly are in a new and different era," Owens says. "New partnerships between government and private resources are necessary if we are to achieve technology's virtually limitless potential to change society for the better. We must accept the seeming paradox that new technologies can bring us

national security only if we resolve to use them calculatedly, and above all other purposes, to build a just and peaceful world. " Hellman adds: "Transforming the structures of our government through technology is a fundamental key to making America both more secure and more efficient in the 21st century. It's not an option but a strategic imperative. It's philosophically fitting, from a number of perspectives, that the Peace Corps should be empowered to lead the way in this evolution."