The Nation. - Department of Government at Cornell University

788 The Nation. June 5,1995century-and then by reputation kept it alive right into thetwentieth-it could also be said that its failure was that it didnot spark a true debate on that issue or even put forth theterms in which such a debate might be waged. That was a fadurefor which the Luddites of course cannot be blamed, sinceit was never part of their perceived mission to make their grievancea matter of debate, and indeed they chose machinebreakingexactly to push the issue beyond debate. But becauseof that failure, and the inability of subsequent critics of technologyto penetrate the complacency of its beneficiaries andtheir chosen theorists, or to successfully call its values intoquestion, the principles and goals of industrialism, to saynothing of the machines that embody them, have pretty muchgone unchallenged in the public arena. Industrial civilizationis today the water we swim in, and we seem almost as incapableof imagining what an alternative might look like, or evenrealizing that an alternative could exist, as fish in the ocean.The political task of “resistance” today, then-beyond the“quiet acts” of personal withdrawal Mumford urged-is totry to make the culture of industrialism and its assumptionsless invisible and to put the issue of its technology on the politicalagenda, in industrial societies as well as their imitators. Inthe words of Neil Postman, a professor of communications atNew York University and author of Technopoly, “it is necessaryfor a great debate” to place take in industrial society between“technology and everybody else” around all the issuesof the “uncontrolled growth of technology” in recent decades.This means laying out as clearly and as fully as possible thecosts and consequences of our technologies, in the near termand long, so that even those overwhelmed by the ease/comfort/speedipower of high-tech gadgetry (what Mumford calledtechnical “bribery”) are forced to understand at what priceit all comes and who is paying for it. What purpose does thismachine serve? What problem has become so great that itneeds this solution? Is this invention nothing but, as Thoreauput it, an improved means to an unimproved end? It also meansforcing some awareness of who the principal beneficiaries ofthe new technology are-they tend to be the large, bureaucratic,complex and secretive organizations of the industrialworld-and trying to make public all the undemocratic waysthey make the technological choices that so affect all the restof us. Who are the winners, who the losers? Will this inventionconcentrate or disperse power, encourage or dlscourageNow you can rent or buy videos by mail of over 2,600 hard-tofindquality films, Including Betty Blue; Eat Drink Man Woman;Ju Dou; Queen Margot; La Belle Noisuese; The Decameron;The Blue Kite; The Wonderful, Hom‘ble Life of Leni Riefenstahl;Biue and White; Zero Patience; and 31 trtles by Ingmar BeqmanOur collection includes foreign films,limited releases, indies, docs, class~cs.It’s simple and Inexpensive. Rogert3Ebert recommends Home Fllm FestivalHome as an Idea whose time has come.”Film Festival” Phone or write for free lnformatlon andP o BOX 2032, kranton. PA 18501 list of films: 1-800-258-3456.self-worth? Can society at large afford it? Can the biosphere?7. Phrlosophically, resistance to industrialism must be embeddedin an analysrs-an rdeology, perhaps-that IS morallyinformed, carefully artrculated and wrdely shared. Oneof the failures of Luddism (if at first perhaps one of itsstrengths) was its formlessness, its unintentionality, its indistinctnessabout goals, desires, possibilities. If it is to be anythingmore than sporadlc and martyristic, resistance couldlearn from the Luddite experience at least how important itis to work out some common analysis that is morally clearabout the problematic present and the desirable future, andthe common strategies that stem from it.All the elements of such an analysis, it seems to me, are inexistence, scattered and still needing refinement, perhaps, butthere: in Mumford and E.F. Schumacher (SmallIsBeautIful)and Wendell Berry (The Unsettlmg of America) and Jerry Mander(In the Absence of the Sacred) and the Chellis Glendinningmanifesto (UtneReader, March/April 1990); In the writing ofthe Earth Flrst!ers and the bioregionalists and deep ecologists;in the lessons and models of the Amish and the Iroquois; inthe wlsdom of tribal elders and the legacy of tribal experienceeverywhere; in the work of the long line of dlssenters-fromprogressand naysayers-to-technology. I think we mlght evenbe able to identify some essentials of that analysis, such as:IndustnulBm, the ethos encapsulatlng the values and technologiesof Western civilizatlon, is seriously endangering stablesocial and environmental existence on thls planet, to whichmust be opposed the values and techmques of an organic ethosthat seeks to preserve the Integrity, stability and harmony ofthe biotic communlties, and the human community within it.Anthropocentrrsrn, and its expression in both humanismand monotheism, is the ruling principle of that civilization.to which must be opposed the principle of blocentrism andthe spiritual identificatlon of the human with all living speciesand systems.Globulism, and its economic and military expression, is theguiding strategy of that civilization, to which must be opposedthe strategy of localism, based upon the empowerment of thecoherent bioreglon and the small community.Industrralcap1talwn, as an economy built upon the exploitationand degradation of the earth, 1s the productive and distributiveenterprise of that civilization, to whlch must be opposedthe practices of an ecologlcal and sustainable economy builtupon accommodation and commitment to the earth and followingprinciples of conservation, stabdity. self-sufficiencyand cooperatlon.A movement of resistance starting with Just those principlesas the sinews of its analysis would at least have a firm and uncompromisingground on which to stand and a clear and inspirationalvision of where to go. If nothmg else, it would beable to live up to the task that George Grant, the Canadianphilosopher, has set this way: “The darkness which envelopsthe western world because of Its long dedication to the overcomingof chance”-by which he means the triumph of thescientific mind and its industrlal constructs-“is just a fact.The Job of thought at our time is to bring into the light thatdarkness as darkness.” And at its best, It might bring into thelight the dawn that is the alternative. 0