Oops. Yes, it would seem the archives agree with you.
>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>>Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Cuba's painful transition from sugar economy
>Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2005 12:56:39 -0400
>
>... I'm all for a robust eclecticism, which would combine old techniques
>and new technology, taking the best of each and combining them in
>imaginative ways. I don't see it as an either/or thing, though there seems
>to be a great temptation to do so.
My post had been in response to your later exchange (which I read first) with Dwayne, which I'd read as too rah-rah-hi-tech:
>Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>
>>The urge to fly from modern systems, instead of moving through them to
>>even greater, fairer things is, I think, an indication of deep weariness
>>and confusion.
>
>Yup. And that's one of the sadder symptoms of the erosion of Marxism:
>nostalgia and despair.
>
>Doug
IMO, a sad symptom of weariness, confusion and despair is excessive confidence in technological progress narrowly construed; it strikes me as nostalgia for the techno-euphoria of, say, the 1964-65 New York World's Fair, the world of tomorrow that never happened. From engineered building materials to blockbuster drugs, there have been many instances recently of mass-marketed high-tech flops -- innovations belatedly recognized as catastrophically flawed, exacting incredible costs of all kinds. Most of these mishaps may be things that we can "move through to greater fairer things," but the problem with agricultural technology is that mistakes can be for keeps. Flaws in genetic engineering that involve heritable traits can escape into nature and change the world for the worse in irreversible ways diffcult to "move through."
Carl