[WS:] C'mon, there is vicious cut-throat competition in the electronics industry and nobody gets shot in the head for trying to change society - in this country, at least. One may lose tenure or social standing for that (albeit not very often), but not life.
The problem seems to be of a different kind - the number of people negatively affected by technological changes is far smaller than the number of people who are, or think they are, affected by social changes. A new I phone may negatively impact Nokia, but most people outside Finland do not give a flying fuck about it. However, an amendment recognizing, say, same sex marriages, impacts a lot of heterosexual people who think that this amendment will negatively impact their own lives. One may call such a belief "false consciousness" or what not, but the fact remains that a lot people take such a belief very seriously. Hence the opposition to social change tends to be much stronger than opposition to technological change.
In her critique of Corey Robin's book, Sheri Berman pointed out that the left tends to blame undesirable popular beliefs on "false consciousness" instead of trying to understand how people actually think. While I think that this critique does not stick to Robin's book, the point itself is valid. Many on the left gave up the difficult intellectual task of trying to understand both their enemies and their appeal to the general public in favor of simple demonization of them. Robin's book, btw, takes that difficult intellectual work quite seriously imo. Consequently, the left fails to recognize the stakes many people have in the status quo, Far being a form of "false consciousness" these folks have genuine reasons for accepting the status quo and their own subordinate position in it, and these reasons are justified by these stakes. To use the above referenced example, a person who fears that his social status as the male head of a patriarchal household will be threatened by the legalization of gay marriages makes a rational choice by supporting politicians who promise to thwart that social change, even though these politicians may have a negative impact on, say, the prospect of that person receiving affordable health care. It is not "false consciousness" but rational choice grounded in that person's preference for maintaining his social status to other considerations. Likewise, a thug who assaults someone who "dissed" him does so not because he does not understand the consequences of his actions which entail the risk of imprisonment and injury to another human being, but because he values his own respectability more than other considerations.
So unlike the technological change, the resistance to social change comes first and foremost from below, from a great number of people who feel that the change threatens their own social status and respectability they currently have (or think they have) - no matter how inferior by some abstract standards. True, that resistance is often instigated and manipulated by elites and their reactionary stooges who stand to lose from the proposed change even more, but their machinations find many willing executioners from below. As Robin aptly observes, it is much easier to mobilize people for action to defend what they already have (or think they have) from a real or perceived threat than for action to create a new social order that has not been tried before, and many doubt that it is even possible. That tilts the playing field greatly in favor of reactionaries. It is not that social reformers fail because they are being shot in the head, but because they fight a very uphill battle with very limited resources.
Wojtek
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 8:17 AM, Gar Lipow <gar.lipow at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/003560.html
>
>>I've never owned any other computers in my life but Apples, and I have an iphone. And they always make me feel like this whenever I look at them: it's wonderful that people are able to invent and build something so beautiful, and it's horrible that people somehow aren't able to bring the same intelligence and effectiveness to invent and build better societies.
>
>>Along the same lines, Frank Oppenheimer (brother of Robert and creator of the Exploratorium in San Francisco) once said: "Just as present technology had to await the explanations of physics, so one might expect that social invention will follow growing sociological understanding. We are desperately in the need of such invention, for man is still very much at the mercy of man."
>
>>That's true, but it leaves out the unfortunate reality that anyone who tries to invent a better way of organizing politics and society will be punished severely. If people who tried to invent better cell phones were regularly shot in the head, we wouldn't have good cell phones.
>
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