Throughout his life
Lewis Mumford grappled with the conundrum of what to do about the relentless
march of technological destruction.
Immediately after the first atomic bombs were used in 1945, he proposed:
“If we cannot control ourselves sufficiently to create a harmonious world
order, then we shall have to destroy our machines.”[i] In 1970, after laying out his starkest
premonitions for the future in The
Pentagon of Power, he turned from hope in government policy to a call for
citizen response – pointing to civil disobedience as the worthy response to the
“murderous confrontations and infantile tantrums” of the “megatechnical
wasteland.” Rather than the seizing of
political power that revolution would attempt -- which after the glory days of
the decolonization movements was clearly riddled with the inherent problems of
power -- Mumford advised withdrawal by “breaking routines and defying
regulations.”[ii]
For us today,
living as we do in the eye of Mumford’s worst prophetic vision, the thorniest
question of all now rears its Gorgon head.
The form of civil
disobedience. If the technological
system as a whole is murderous, what might the responsible cadre of citizens do
about it? As Stephanie Mills asks, “Where's the Achilles
heel? Where do we, as Gary Snyder puts
it, ‘shoot the arrow to hit the heart of the growth monster’?”[iii]
Do we storm the factories? Or organize them? Charge the malls? Or stop shopping in them? Do we tear the offenders down? Blow them up?
Or vote? Push for legislation? Influence elected officials? Nominate a candidate? Pass ordinances to keep out
corporations? Tweak the media? Refuse the military? Stop paying taxes? Secede from the nation-state? Should we stop traffic? Drive a vegetable car? Get a horse?
Throw away a computer? Or sue for
damages? Use interstate commerce
laws? Appeal to the United Nations? Or God?
Ply acts of kindness? Go into
recovery? Do we raise chickens? Plant a garden? Brain-tan the hide of roadkill? Break into historical museums and grab up
antique technologies? Store food
underground? Release caged critters from
industrial farms? Become a vegan? Talk on the radio? Shoot a video for YouTube? Start a blog?
Take down a blog? Do we draw a
gun? Withdraw our services? Wait?
Do we start a revolution? Or
perpetrate devolution?
The question of
violence is embedded in any exploration of tactics. One does tend to encounter the imprint of
violence along the same perceptual synapse where one finds the Luddite rebellion. At least that is the way the Luddites have
been reported through history. Yet it
was those original villagers in England who were themselves beset by violence –- and to add to the confusion of
generations to come, it was a violence that was depicted by its perpetrators as
normalcy.
Enclosure was the
act of seizing the traditional common lands that had supported the villages’
sustainability; it was the method used by the state, corporations, and
individuals deemed “deserving” to claim ownership of these lands. Between 1770 and 1830, Parliament passed
3,280 bills transferring 6 million acres of meadows, fields, wetlands, and
forests away from communities into the hands of capitalists. While such acts were questionable enough,
even more shaky arrangements were made outside of government -- another 6
million acres were seized under the table –- until more than half the farmland
in England was no longer growing food for people’s daily tables, but rather was
being developed for capital profit-taking or the enjoyment of capitalists.[iv]
Pure and simple: it
was a Land Grab.
Then came the
factories. Imagine: by 1814 those same
rural villages were overrun by six-story plants belching black smoke where
clean air had once blown, dumping dye into the rivers where boys had fished,
demanding the labor of men, women, and children who before had gardened and
hunted and woven their own livelihoods.[v]
This is
violence.
I will tell you my
gut reaction when people stand up for themselves -- when a handful of Native
communities in Mexico rampages into history on the first day of the North
American Free Trade Agreement, when Israeli citizens break into a
telecommunications company’s penthouse to rip apart its roof-top antennas, when
Vietnamese villagers ransack a mining site to destroy the machines that will
contaminate their water.[vi] At risk of being branded “reckless” or
“naive” by those who have not taken
the time, or applied the intelligence, to weigh the vagaries of the
Megatechnical impact: I let out a whoop
of glee!
This is not a whoop
that champions such actions as political strategies per se. Maybe, in their contexts, they are relevant
strategies; maybe they are acts of recklessness. Questions of means and success are the
thorniest yet; despite all the earnest thinking mounted to address them, they
reside embedded in a sad history wherein some strategies have elbowed some
success, some have proven disastrous -- and few have succeeded at toppling the
basic underlying structures of injustice.
No. My whoop bursts straightaway from the
psyche’s depths. The Zapatistas standing
their ground in the selva! Indígenas
standing up to Bechtel … and winning! A
lone man halting a tank in Tiananmen Square!
Twelve million marching against war!
My whoop is a howl of celebration -- for the glory of courage, for a
love so potent it cannot be held back.
Too, this same
blossom of courage and love is the quality we might now garner from those
lively heroes who rose up against the first inklings of what was destined to
befall us all.
The tasks before us
are many; they demand an appreciation of their complexity, enormity,
interrelatedness -- and the strength of the talents among us that arise to
address them. Look. Whether you judge the current predicament by
peak oil, global heat, climate upheaval, plant extinctions, economic collapse,
microwave pollution, social desperation, or conscious restructuring – no matter
what language you muster to describe the predicament -- the demise of mass
technological empire is afoot.
We do not know how
things will unfold. Predictions foretell
of worlds beset by nature’s revenge, tsunamis of chaos, and Dust-Bowl
desperation -- as well as of worlds thrust forward by community cohesion and
shared endeavor toward a better world.
Just as with our erstwhile society of technology critics, we have some
words to speak of what might take place and what we might do … but, in the end,
no one can know.
Still, despite the
uncertainty, we are alive. And what fear
quakes in our bones? What grief? What desperation? What passion for survival?
Each of us knows
something crucial about our plight in these times; we tell our stories.
All of us have been
wounded in ways both personal and collective; all need care. We reach out to one another.
And, together, we
envision. Based on who we are and where
we have been, we etch out new directions and the values we may apply for
traveling them. One thread of this undertaking is to have
clarity about what we do not want to take with us; the work of dismantling is
critical. Another is to know how we wish
to live; this is the reconnecting, the re-communing, the re-invention of the
means of survival.
In our grappling
for words one thing can be said: we are beings of spirit and bone, intellect
and luminosity, tenderness and terror -- and courage.
To the feast of
life!
[i] Lewis
Mumford, The Human Prospect. Boston
[ii] Lewis
Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The
Pentagon of Power, p. 430-435.
[iii] Email
from Stephanie Mills, February 6, 2008.
[iv] Kirkpatrick
Sale, Rebels Against the Future, p.
34; from Phyllis Dean, The First
Industrial Revolution. Cambridge : Cambridge University New York England London London : Edward Arnold, 1992; J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and
Social Change in England Cambridge :
Cambridge University Cambridge : Cambridge
University Hamden CONN :
Archon Books, 1980; Enclosure in Britain London
[v] Sale , p. 26; from W.O Henderson, Industrial Britain London
[vi] Agence
France-Presse, December 28, 2007; and “Mine Your Own Business,”
