At heart Sale like a faction of enviro-lefties is a small is beautiful libertarian who hates large populations and complex economic systems because it requires government planning to manage its complexity in a humane way. Smashing international society into autarchic islands of self-sufficient local markets creates the context where libertarian markets of small producers can take on a utopian glow, free of both corporate and evil government power.
There is of course a xenophobia that runs through this kind of thought, where the politically correct horror at the invasion of new settlers into indigenous areas in Brazil relates directly to the horror at "others" invading our local economies disruptively.
Nathan Newman nathan at newman.org http://www.nathannewman.org
----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com> To: "lbo-talk" <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Monday, July 02, 2001 5:41 PM Subject: the mind-numbing carrion of hope
Anyone read the interview with Kirkpatrick Sale at <http://www.primitivism.com/sale.htm>? Amazing stuff. A couple of highlights:
>Q: Your thoughts on the coming year 2000 computer coding debacle. Do
>you see this potential disaster as helping to foment a new
>wellspring of opposition to technology?
>A: As near as I can tell, people regard Y2K as an act of God, not of
>technology, and they understand it no better than the Egyptians
>understood a plague of locusts. If it is as bad as I think it will
>be, people will react as they always do in anger, going after more
>and better rather than rejecting the whole thing: if I hate my wife,
>I want a better, younger woman, not celibacy.
[...]
>Q: What emerging technologies should we be especially concerned about?
>A: The computer, particularly the PC will bring unmitigated
>disaster, simply because it enables the powers of this society to do
>faster and more efficiently the kinds of things it likes to do, with
>resulting social disintegration, economic polarization, and
>environmental devastation.
[...]
>Q: What are some of your upcoming projects?
>A: I am planning to do a book on Robert Fulton and the impact of
>steam technology on the settling and development of America. The
>steamboat, lest we forget, is the harbinger of the industrial
>revolution for America, and is its central symbol, as the steam
>factory was for Britain, and I think it will be salutary for an
>American audience to understand why it has the technologies it has
>and what they have done in shaping the country the way it is. In
>brief, the steamboat opened the way for settlement of the heartland,
>the destruction of nature, the elimination of the native population,
>the development of a cotton/slave economy, and the Civil War.
[...]
>Q: What tendencies give you the most hope for our future?
>A: As you will see in that chapter, I do not feed on the
>mind-numbing carrion of hope. I do not have any confidence that the
>human species will survive for more than another 25 years, and if
>some remnants do, the best I can do is pray that they will have
>learned the lessons of industrial technology and not commit the same
>crimes again.
>