> On May 6, 2011, at 1:17 PM, // ravi wrote:
>
SNIP, TOO...
With that behind, I will return to the issue at hand. What do we make of
> Kerala and the role of technological progress in shaping the lives of
> individuals? You write that modern socialists have turned into
> anti-industrial eco-fanatics (btw, I do not hold new environmentalism(*) in
> much esteem) who devalue life and that maybe that’s because they have lost
> faith in the idea of socialism or communism. Funny thing about Kerala and
> the idea of socialism/communism… you should look it up! :-)
Yes, Kerala should be looked up...
P.S: by “new environmentalism” I mean the “oops, my arse is on fire!”
> awareness that has crept into the affluent populace (personified in Al Gore
> and his followers), who had so far been enjoying “technological progress” at
> the cost of *someone else*.
>
But, you see, this is another instance where Somebody is speaking out of his *$$. The "new environmentalism" here is not new in the slightest - it is straight up Progressive Conservationism gone global - and there's not an ecosocialist I know or have read who is anti-industrial or eco-fanatical (I feel pretty confident that Somebody knows next to nothing about environmentalism and its political traditions, valences and complexity)... what they are is unimaginable to Somebody, they/we are concerned with environmental justice, understanding - as Somebody clearly does not - that the natures we generate, the built environments we construct, and the technologies we choose, and the commodities we produce directly reflect and feed back on the societies we live in and reproduce in positive or negative ways depending on the amount of social justice embedded in those processes of generation, construction, selection and production.
Somebody has causality back-asswards, you'll note he writes constantly about progress, well-being and technology but never justice, never democracy... he's a Progressive patrician Republicrat - the kind of private high school educated engineer trained at West Point under Eisenhower or Great Society reformer educated under Johnson (it is possible Doug new some residual fellows of this ilk at Yale, I knew a few at Swarthmore), effectively taking the position that it is up to sophisticated technological (and/or political) elites who understand better than the people what the people's real problems are to come up with the technological means to improve the lot of the people for the people.
This is why Somebody almost surely doesn't know about Kerala, its success and imitators.