The Nation. - Department of Government at Cornell University

786 The Nation. June 5.1995a hated manufacturer put it-machinery to which their commonalitydid not give approval, over which it had no control,and the use of which was detrimental to its interests, consideredeither as a body of workers or a body of families andneighbors and citizens.What was true of the technology of industrialism at the beginning,when the apologist Andrew Ure praised a new machinethat replaced high-paid workmen-“This invention confirmsthe great doctrine already propounded, that when capital enlistsscience in her service, the refractory hand of labour will alwaysbe taught docility”-is as true today, when a reporter for Automationcould praise a computer system because it assuresthat “decision-making” is “removed from the operator . . .[and] gives maximum control of the machine to management.”These are not accidental, ancillary attributes of themachines that are chosen; they are intrinsic and ineluctable.Tools come with a prior history built m, expressing the valuesof a particular culture. A conquering, violent culture-ofwhich Western civilization is a prime example, with the UnitedStates at its extreme-is bound to produce conquering, violenttools. When U.S. industrialism turned to agricultureafter World War 11, for example, it went at it with all that ithad just learned on the battlefield, using tractors modeled onwartime tanks to cut up vast fields, crop-dusters modeled onwartime planes to spray poisons, and pesticides and herbicidesdeveloped from wartime chemical weapons and defohants todestroy unwanted species. It was a war on the land, sweepingand sophisticated as modern mechanization can be, capableof depleting topsoil at the rate of 3 billion tons a year andwater at the rate of 10 billion gallons a year. It could be noother way: If a nation like this beats its swords into plowshares,they wlll still be violent and deadly tools.2. Industrialism IS always a cataclysmre process, destroyingrhepast, roiling thepresent, muklng the future uncertain.It is in the nature of the industrial ethos to value growth andproduction, speed and novelty, power and manipulation, allof which are bound to cause continuing, rapid and disruptivechanges at all levels to society, and with some regularity,whatever benefits they may bring to a few. And because itscriteria are essentially economic rather than, say, social orcivic, those changes come about without much regard for anybut purely materialist consequences and primarily for the aggrandizementof those few.Whatever material benefits industriahsm may introduce,the familiar evils-incoherent metropolises, spreading slums,crime and prostitution, inflation, corruption, pollution, cancerand heart disease, stress. anomie, alcoholism-almost alwaysfollow. And the consequences may be quite profound indeedas the industrial ethos supplants the customs and habits ofthe past. Helena Norberg-Hodge tells a story of the effectof the transistor radio-the apparently innocent little transistorradio-on the traditional Ladakhi society of northernIndia, where only a short time after its introduction peopleno longer sat around the fields or fires singing communalsongs because they could get the canned stuff from professionalsin the capital.Nor is it only in newly industrialized societies that the tumultuouseffects of an ethos of greed and growth are felt.What economists call “structural change” occurs regularlyin developed nations as well, often creating more social dlsruptionthan individuals can absorb or families and nelghborhoodsand towns and whole industries can defend against.3. “Only apeopleserving an apprenticeship to nature canbe trusted with machines.” This wise maxim of Herbert Read’sis what Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets of the Ludditeera expressed in their own way as they saw the Satanic millsand Stygian forges both imprisonmg and impoverishing textilefamilles and usurping and befouling natural landscapes-“such outrage done to nature as compels the indignantpower . . . to avenge her violated rights,” as Wordsworth said.What happens when an economy is not embedded in a dueregard for the natural world, understanding and coping withthe full range of its consequences to species and their ecosystems,is not only that it wreaks its harm throughout thebiosphere in indiscriminate and ultimately unsustainableways, though that is bad enough. It also loses its sense of thehuman as a species and the individual as an animal, needingcertain basic physical elements for successful survival, includingland and air, decent food and shelter, intact communitiesand nurturing families, without which it will perish as miserablyas a fish out of water, a wolf in a trap. An economywithout any kind of ecological grounding will be as disregardfuIof the human members as of the nonhuman, and its socialas well as economic forms-factories. tenements, cities,hierarchies-will reflect that.The industrial regime has alwayshad the power of the dominantnation-states behind it.4. The natron-state .yvnetg,strcally mtertwrned mth mdustrialum,will always come to its ard and defense, rnaklng revoltfutile and reform rneffectual. When the British governmentdispatched some 14,000 soldiers to put down the uprising ofthe Luddites in 1811 and 1812-a force seven times as large asany ever sent to maintain peace in England-it was sending asharp signal of its inevitable alliance with the forces of the newindustrialism. And it was not above cementing that alliance,despite all its talk of the rights of free Englishmen, with spiesand informers, midnight raids, illegal arrests, overzealousmagistrates and rigged trials, in aid of making the populaceinto a docile work force. That more than anything else establishedwhat a “laissez-faire” economy would mean-repressionwould be used by the state to insure that manufacturerswould be free to do what they wished, especially with labor.Since then, of course, the industrial regime has only gottenstronger, proving itself the most efficient and potent systemfor material aggrandizement the world has ever known, andall the while it has had the power of the dominant nation-statesbehind it, extending it to every corner of the earth and defendingit once there. It doesn’t matter that the states have quarreledand contended for these corners, or that in recent decades nativestates have wrested nominal political control from colomzingones, for the industrial regime hardly cares which cadres