Pre-modernism is a silly and basically conservative vewipoint. It's very, very, very clear that the world's population cannot live without modern technology. Those who are forced to tend to die in large numbers and no reasonable person would want to live that way. Among reasonable people I number the list members here. If you don't believe in modern technology, the answer is really simple. Go live in the woods for a while.
The fossil record from hunter-gatherer societies show people who were riddled with disease, injury, and infant mortality. Primitive subsistence agriculture is not much better but it has significant advantages. One that is almost always overlooked by modern people is clean, fresh water. Consider how many towns were formed around reliable springs. Wonder why? Parasites and water-borne diseases plague and kill healthy adults and are absolutely murderous on children. Diarrhea due to water-borne illnesses is one of the biggest killers in the third world even today. Only societies that *can* stay put will benefit from having a spring nearby. Societies on the move have to catch as catch can. We in the modern world have forgotten that one of the most important and enormously broad-spectrum "vaccines" is one we all consume every day: chlorine.
"Stay-put" agricultural societies do have their drawbacks. Large groups of people fall prey to communicable diseases and eating staples is less nutritious than eating game (hence the evidence of malnutrition among early agricultural communities). Sanitation is a problem (hence the fact that even up to the feudal period, people made the wise choice to avoid bathing in local bodies of water). However, the undeniable fact is that agricultural communities are vastly, vastly more successful than hunter-gatherers and the more modern the agriucultural community, the more successful. The number of people who, in ancient times, fell victim to communicable diseases was clearly, clearly less than the increase in population agriculture made possible. In fact, the question of why some agricultural societies developed faster than others probably has to do with the yearly, storable food value produced by their staple crops.
No advances in technology are purely beneficial but they produce net benefit or they die on the vine. Capitalism, for example, provided enormous net benefit and to a much larger class of people than feudalism. If you don't like the ancient agricultural revolution or the capitalist revolution or the modern Green Revolution, so what? They've already happened and proven themselves net beneficial. You're quibbling over moot questions. Technology will provide the answers to the problems technology inevitably creates, just as it has in the past. That's the dialectic.
Those who reject modern, commerical, technological society because they don't like the capitalist outcome have simply given up. Of course modern technology causes problems but they are the enviable problems of overabundance - not inconsequential, but far preferable to the probelms of deprivation. Of course technology serves the capitalist class. They own it, so it had damned well better hadn't it? Technology only serves the capitalist class because we give it to them. Technology serves those who possess it. Let's get our hands on it before we reject it. That is the struggle.
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