Incidentally, there has been research which suggests that _any_ change, even the most delightful changes which no one would oppose, nevertheless damage, temporarily, the immune system. You are given tenure and a maximum raise and the next week you come down with a bad cold. Some people are just so incapable of enjoying life that they can't imagine it without new thrils and a new costume at least every two weeks.
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Which only means that 'change' is not an unalloyed good. When you make that precise point, I agree with you.
But, seemingly unsatisfied with such parsimony, you go much further. In a previous post, you asserted:
One of the horrors of capitalism, both in itself and as source of other evils, is the rapid pace of innocation. This is one of the theoretical weaknesses of "progressive" as opposed to serious socialist, a really naive and even destructive belief that change is inherently a virtue, while it is more often at best harmless and all too often destructive. Humanity needs a rest of constant change if it is to survive.
We _have_ to destroy capitalism root and branch for the same reason, survival. Commodity production must cease. But on the whole, necessity is the only rational reason for change. Merely desirable change which is not necessary should come slowly
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Here, you take us from an acknowledgment of capitalism's damage done to an insistence that some sort of moratorium on "innovation" is essential for human survival.
"Innovation" under capitalism does indeed consist of many, many unnecessary tinkerings (unnecessary, that is, to everything but the ceaseless quest for leverage). Market besotted sorts surely over-celebrate the notion of how innovative we are. Even so, I strongly disagree with you here.
The view that an idealized (and probably centralized) "rational" decision making process should guide 'change' under 'serious' socialism, or any other future arrangement, seems spectacularly flawed to me. Innovation under capitalism has produced displacement and destruction (geographical, psychological, etc). On that we agree. But you go too far when you apparently conclude that rapid innovation is *solely* an emergent property of capitalist relations, and not something that can occur for other reasons and to meet the demands of other concerns besides competitive advantage and profit maximization.
To put it another way, it may turn out that some societies, even free of capitalism, move very fast (both technically and socially) while others remain comparatively slow. I object to preemptive condemnations of future arrangements
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This is the sort of thinking which informed some listmembers' tut tutting about, of all things, processor speed and complexity. If only we weren't shackled to Microsoft's bloated software, the argument went, we could all manage perfectly well with 486s. Although many tech heads will probably call me an apostate for saying so, I think there's a lot truth to that view. But, bound as it is to the idea that innovation in computer architecctures is entirely at the service of office productivity software, Youtube viewing and MP3 downloading it's an idea which, to paraphrase David Bohm, is 'good, but only up to a certain point.'
It's not very difficult to imagine a world with no MSFT, no bloated office software and no Stoya vids which, confronted with the task of modeling Earth's atmosphere and other awesomely complex things, found itself demanded faster, more complex computing devices.
The point is that while it's undeniable the push, push, push of change we experience under capitalism is something we'd be better off without, the problem with this speedup is not it's velocity, but rather, that it's in service to profit enhancement and not other, larger issues.
I have similar arguments with back-to-simplicity ecologists who fail to understand that the way technology is deployed under capitalism is not the only available method. They mistake the machine (broadly defined) for the abuse; remaining blind to the hand at the controls.
.d.