Native peoples in
earlier centuries were stymied when they tried to talk about the European
conquest; their pre-Columbian vocabularies had no words to describe such a
battering. And it’s like that
again. You and I can only peg together
language to describe the invasion overwhelming our bodies, psyches, and
cultures by technology. And that
assault, taken together with the economic/political institutions that fuel it,
is swiftly diminishing life’s future on this Earth.
Back in
the 1980’s and ‘90’s, I thought I had a few words. I was part of a society of activists and
thinkers collaborating to refurbish the analysis of technology that the
original resisters against industrialism, the Luddites, had initiated. We were a lively collection of folks from
countries all over the world. Theodore
Roszak. Kirkpatrick Sale. Vandana Shiva. John Mohawk.
Gustavo Esteva. Stephanie Mills. Helena Norberg-Hodge. Langdon Winner. Godfrey Reggio. David Suzuki.
Jerry Mander. Chet Bowers. Beth Burrows.
Satish Kumar. Charlene
Spretnak. Sigmund Kvaloy. Susan Griffin. Teddy Goldsmith. Now, we
knew how to talk. Sitting together
around conference tables at five-day meetings that boasted such titles as
“Mega-technology and Development” and “Mega-technology and Economic
Globalization,” we proclaimed that the “new technologies that were coming”
would wreak a havoc grander in scale than even the industrial revolution had
wrought.
But what were we expecting? It wouldn’t affect us? Did we think we would go on meeting in
luscious locations to spin our theories?
Write a white paper or two? Give
a rally speech? Hang on to our land
lines?
I’ll be
frank: we didn’t think anything. We couldn’t.
We had no way to imagine. No
vision. No words other than
“supercomputer,” “satellite communications,” “genetic engineering,”
“transnational corporation.”
And so
that cadre of stellar minds fell through the unforeseen cracks that gashed open
when tectonic plates of political/economic/technological proportion clanked
apart like iron. Most got a computer and
a cell phone. Some landed the grant
monies they were seeking and clicked into the focus of a more manageable
pursuit. And more than one insisted
that, for strategic purposes, we not speak of technology any more. And then that ever-so-brightly rising star of
resistance -- paralleling one that had begun two centuries before during a comparable
siege -- shot into a glorious sky, only to burn away.
Plutonium pit. Packbot.
Prostate cancer. Broken
back. Brain tumor. Beached whales. Wasting elk.
Whiplash. WiMAX. iPod.
Oil tanker. Iraq. The biggest shopping mall on the planet. The tallest skyscraper. Scrape.
Save. Spend. Crave.
Credit card. Debit card. Macromind.
Multiple sclerosis. Melting ice.
The concerned will
rave about war, poverty, oil depletion, and climate upheaval – as well they
should. Some venture to name racism,
capitalism, empire; cruelty and greed can be high on the list. But technology’s role in shaping these same
tragedies handily slips from the perceptual gaze. Despite all and still, the notion of
technological development is linked in the popular mind to “progress,”
“advancement,” “evolution.”
And
fear.
“I WANT
MY MAMMOGRAM!” shrieks a radio listener like a child. The tantrum occurs on a talk show during my
1990 book tour for When Technology Wounds. Also like a child, the woman carries zero
awareness of likely precedents to her susceptibility to breast cancer: like
synthetic hormones and pesticides. Or
the radiation from last year’s mammogram.
The
inherent disjuncture of mass society does not propagate the kind of thinking
that would unify the parts of the whole.
It severs instead. It
fragments. It scatters – and lays ground
for engaging and defending only one fragment at a time.
 |
| Wendell Berry |
“I am a Luddite!” Such was the scandalous proclamation Wendell Berry bellowed at the first official gathering of our new generation of technology critics. San Francisco was the place, 1993 the year.
For the
time, the statement was heretical. Since
the rebellion (and demise) of the original Luddites at the launch of the
industrial revolution some 180 years earlier, this new wave had been
constrained by an intellectual context forged by the winners of the earlier
conflict: the term “Luddite” had been made into a dirty word, a put-down, a
brazen denigration.
Everyone burst with laughter –-
Wendell was, as always, preposterously right-on -– and everyone breathed in
relief. A deep-seated taboo had
irretrievably been broken: without further excuse we were going to be who we
were. To boot, our work -- which up
until that moment had been conducted solo -- could move forward enriched by
interaction among a worthy collection of hearts and minds.
A
small flurry of activity followed.
Well,
OK: our actions got swept up in the onrush of media attention the Unabomber was
getting. In 1995, in an attempt to
bargain with mail-bombing Ted Kaczynski, the New York Times and Washington
Post published his manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future.” Fortuitously, Kirk’s Rebels against the Future
rode this event like a wrangler on a small bull and, in the process, gave
readers a glimpse into the long-repressed details of Luddite history. The Jacques Ellul Society was born, named for
the French sociologist who had so brilliantly critiqued technological
society. One of our group, biologist
Martha Crouch, quit the university in protest against its collaboration with
biotech corporations. Others took on the
fight against bio-specting in Yellowstone National Park. A few stalwart researchers tried to reveal
the negative impacts threatened by the entry of computers into education. Stephanie, Kirk, and I regaled a
standing-room-only audience in New York City with our theatrical performance Interview with a Luddite, and we all spoke copiously on the radio.
At the
same time other thinkers and activists –- alternative-technology inventors,
Native and land-based peoples favoring traditional livelihoods,
monkey-wrenchers, anarchists, and modern rebels against the future –- were
challenging technology with their own words and acts. Some dedicated anarchists tore down high-voltage
power lines in the American West and liberated lab animals from science
experiments; environmentalists draped tall buildings with pro-Earth banners;
and a group of simple-living advocates in Ohio put out a hand-set magazine
called Plain and threw gatherings for
contemporary Luddites, to which they exhorted everyone to travel on foot,
buggy, or train.
The
upshot: the proclamation “I am a Luddite” re-entered the vernacular. And none too soon, we suspected.
What we
were referring to as the “new technologies” in the early ‘90s have by now facilitated
not only the emergence of a global economic order whose means and goals are
corporate dominion, ecological ransacking, and mass consumption; they have
infused our very rhythms, thought patterns, and identities. Indeed, the upheavals we are enduring are
equal in scope and magnitude to those that swept through the early-19th
century.
Then:
the destruction of the commons. The
break-up of village life, wild spaces, the family. The separation of work from meaning, city
from country, luxury from misery. The
creation of slums. Child labor. Environmental illness. Theories of progress, inevitability,
utilitarianism, laissez faire. The
budding of rebellious but deeply conservative thoughts in the work of Keats,
Shelley, Lord Byron, Charles Dickens.
The melding of machine with discontent, radical politics with rusticity,
hope with passion.
Today:
global warming, climate upheaval, economic collapse. The microwaving of the planet. The demise of the last wild places left. The exhaustion of oil reserves. The rise of the richest class of individuals
in history -– with a parallel fall in quality of life for everyone else. Environmental refugees. Species extinctions. Build-up of nuclear, biological, and
electromagnetic weaponry. The
continuation of rebellious but deeply conservative thoughts. The melding of cyberspace with violence,
radical politics with marginalism, passion with desperation.
And is
not today’s world that teeters so precariously on its cliff of demise the
extension of economic and social patterns that were made painfully evident some
two centuries ago? Is not the
resistance mounted by courageous bands of weavers, foresters, and villagers in
Europe and the United States -– and the systemic analysis they offered -- as
relevant now as they once were?
My presence at the
1993 gathering of contemporary Luddites began three decades before in a lecture
hall at U.C. Berkeley. It was in
Professor Allen Temko’s class on the history of the city that I first
encountered the ideas of Lewis Mumford.
 |
| Lewis Mumford |
My
God! When I read his words, I had to
stop every three or four paragraphs and breathe just to contain my
excitement. His aim was to merge the
intellectual with the passionate, the lofty with the earthy –- and this he
did. To the hilt. Born in 1895 and growing up at a time when
Americans were swelling with pride over the streamlined possibilities of mass
mechanistic society, when “science” and “democracy” appeared to be ushering in
a permanent era of peace and prosperity, he pierced through the veneer to
reveal the deepest patterns of a civilization in trouble.
What
stunned –- and inspired -- me was his sweep of vision.
Mumford
asserted against all prevailing belief that the centerpiece of the cult of
“progress” -- technology -- did not lie at the dividing line between our animal
ancestry and the first sparks of human consciousness; art, music, ritual, and
language did.[i] “I have taken life itself to be the primary
phenomenon, and creativity, rather than ‘the conquest of nature,’” he wrote, “as
the ultimate criterion of man’s biological and cultural success.”[ii]
In his
two-part ‘Myth of the Machine’ series, Mumford described progress as “a
scientifically dressed up justification” for practices the ruling classes had
used since the time of the pharaohs to congeal and perpetrate power.[iii] He identified the Megamachine as the central
theme of Western society: a social
construction built upon absolutism, centralization, mechanization,
regimentation, militarism, genocide, biocide, spectacle, and alienation – with
attendant loss of the very qualities the species had developed through
evolution: autonomy, human scale,
spontaneity, diversity, communalism, and participation.
Displaying
a moral indignation that bucked the overarching assumptions of the times, he
spoke of the potency of the Megamachine’s grasp upon the popular mind: “The
wonder is … that the hopeful dream has remained alive for so long, for some of
its original luminosity still dazzles and blinds the eyes of many of our
contemporaries who continue to pursue the same archaic fantasies.”[iv]
And he
fortuitously foretold that a “dominant minority” -– the masters of technology
and accumulated wealth –- would create “a uniform, all-enveloping,
super-planetary structure, designed for automatic operation,” just as he
described every-day citizens as “cut off from their own resources for living,
feel(ing) no tie with the outer world unless they are constantly receiving
information, direction, stimulation, and sedation from a central, external
source.”[v]
My own
grasp of the dynamics of such a Megamachine was thrust forward by industrial
medicine’s perpetration of birth control.
After two years of suffering chronic yeast infections from the
imbalances generated by synthetic hormones, a physician at Congressional
hearings in 1970 rattled the myelin off my nerves with his proclamation that
The Pill was “the largest experiment” foisted upon unsuspecting human beings in
the history of medicine.
Being a
victim of medical technology came with some poignancy: I was the great-granddaughter of the founder
of the Cleveland Clinic and haled from a family whose members had given their
lives to the healing profession. But my
suspicion of allopathic medicine was not yet as deeply rooted as it would
become; still seeking the quick fix, I replaced my packet of chemicals with the
latest pharmaceutical do-dad: the Dalkon Shield Intrauterine Device. And sure enough, with an already depressed
immune system from The Pill, I contracted pelvic inflammatory disease.
By the time,
in the late 1970’s, I met Jerry Mander in the cafés of San Francisco’s North
Beach and launched into his Four
Arguments for the Elimination of
Television, I was fertile for the all-encompassing analysis he had focused
upon a single technology.
Too, there had been
the vision. It had come as a flash when
I was taking time off from the intensity of anti-war protest in Berkeley to
work on a maple sugar farm in Vermont.
The year was 1970; Earth Day was on the horizon. But more crucial to me, Paul Ehrlich’s
article in the September 1969 issue of Ramparts
magazine -- “Eco-Catastrophe: The End of the Ocean”[vi] -- had
jolted my notion of the future.
“THE
OCEANS,” the cover art proclaimed on a marble headstone inscribed for the
Earth’s seas:
Born:
Circa 3,500,000,000 B.C.
Died:
1979 A.D.[vii]
On the
farm marvelous insights pushed through the icy drudgery of digging winter
ditches, a by-product of physical work I surmise, as if to bring color to
black-and-white thoughts. Most often it
was a feeling of awe that grew up in me like a crocus through snow. This time though, the insight was a moving
picture that took over my inner world: citizens
storming factories. I didn’t yet
harbor consciousness of the dysfunction of the whole of mass society -- and yet
the kind of mass protest we had engaged in to stop the Vietnam War had morphed
to a prophecy of what might be required to stop destruction by technology. Just as my reproductive organs were wracked
with disturbances from technical interventions, I was catching glimpses of what
would unfold as the historical textures of my lifetime. The template that would become mine had been
delivered: the personal is political.
This blog is a book. Please feel free to read the
next chapter now. Go to the Table of Contents under the introduction on the
right side of the page and click on the next chapter.
[i] Lewis
Mumford, Technics and Civilization.
NY: Harcourt Brace, 1934.
[ii] Lewis
Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The
Pentagon of Power. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970, preface.
[iii] Lewis
Mumford, “Prologue to our Time,” The New
Yorker, March 10, 1975, p.45.
[iv] Lewis
Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: The
Pentagon of Power, p. 7.
[v] Lewis Mumford,
The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of
Power, p. 352, Ill.
[vi] Paul Ehrlich,
“Eco-Catastrophe: The End of the Ocean,”
Ramparts, Vol. 8 No. 3, September 1969, pp. 24-28.
