Frankly, I'm disappointed with this discussion. Surely, there must be a middle ground between nuclear power plants and eating grass. Surely, it must conceivable that by means of human intelligence, education, discussion, and experimentation, we could come up with some honorable and responsible way of living on planet earth.
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Yes, I believe that it is possible.
The heart of the discussion was whether certain technologies and complex systems are, in and of themselves, repressive while others are less so.
Nuclear power became a lightening rod for all the usual reasons. It's controversial reputation, immense scale and complexity provided us with an opportunity to explore the idea of inherent tyranny within a technology.
I have no special love for nuclear power but it is the paradigmatic big system and, therefore, a good focal point for such a discussion.
Would a system like nuclear power be 'wrong' if developed in a different, freer society? Would it be developed at all if people were free to choose? Right now we don't know and can only guess.
People who believe systems complexity to be a condition of modernity, as I do, tend to think that even freer people would wind up supporting an advanced industrial base and most of the gadgetry of modern life.
Others who believe this complexity to be the result of capitalist coercion believe that the elimination of oppression will mean the death of advanced industrialization.
At base, this is the disagreement.
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Joanna wrote:
Most Americans live the most impoverished social lives I have ever encountered. As a result, the only thing they think they have is technology and doo-dads and in fact, if they lost these, they would feel that they lost "everything."
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I suppose it's true that Americans are isolated from each other, "socially impoverished" and far too deeply in love with the technosphere. I suppose it's also true that there are people in other cultures who have fewer things but a richer life.
And yet, Mr. Ashcroft's efforts notwithstanding, people continue to make their way here from across the globe. Not all of these migrants are fleeing death squads and deep poverty; some are attracted to the mobility, the essential rootlessness of this place. A friend of mine is from Georgia (the former Soviet republic and again independent state).
He complains constantly about the loneliness, the emptiness of American life. At home, he knew where he stood and his place in the world without question. Here he is adrift.
And yet he stays when return is possible. Why? He tells me that he feels he can be a different person here, that in the void there is a strange freedom to remake himself - as an MDMA selling club kid, as a database administrator, as a mountain biking enthusiast, as a devout religionist, as a wry commentator on the American scence as an insider who's an outsider. He is ecstatic, he is depressed. He is inifinitely weak and supremely strong at once.
This is the modern state to me. Not simply the capitalist opressive state, but the full condition of a species that realizes, for the first time, that its entire history and future clings to the surface of a small world circling a star destined to die a spectacular death - taking the little world with it.
How can you look at the images of the earth from space and feel anything except deep love and profound loneliness? Perhaps even a sort of existential terror.
This is the burden of modernity. Even the destruction of capitalist oppression will not deliver us entirely from the thing novelist Bruce Sterling once described as moving "across the globe with slow, sinister majesty."
DRM
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