Sorry for not getting back to you – had a busy few days – will try and respond tomorrow.

thanks

Alex

1) Can you give some examples of how you think “techno-fundamentalism” is evident in: a) feudal societies; b) pre-class societies?

2) I think the thrust of your argument is that the consumerist ideology is pervasive, dominant, and shared by most people in industrialised countries (in virtue of it being both a “mode of thought” an ideology and something that is powerful enough to threaten the planet’s ecology). Therefore, surely Jenson’s argument and your use of it does refer to ordinary people, because one cannot easily separate the popular “mode of thought” from the ideology propagated by PR etc. They seem to me to be reflexive.

3) In a market economy, can you easily differentiate between individual consumption habits and decisions regarding technology and industry? Capitalists and governments make decisions on production, planning and regulation based on what is most profitable (not always coterminous with what people want to buy, but usually); even non-consumer manufacture and infrastructural works are closely linked to patterns of profit and consumer spending, for example the building of new roads.

Thanks for the link to your other article; I’ll take a look. And thanks for taking the time to respond.

I don’t disagree with your description of capitalism and I agree that a market economy more or less guarantees devastating and anti-social outcomes. I would however perhaps suggest that what I described as “techno-fundamentalism” may have roots beyond the economy, (most likely in a much older system of domination and control: patriarchy).

As for class differences, again I don’t really disagree. You write:

“Life for the vast majority of people even in an industrialised country is not a comfortable ride on a sleek train; for many, it is a difficult grind, with long hours doing often alienating work, totalitarian structures of authority, declining community solidarity, and a host of attendant social problems. You write: “we appear incapable of changing our practice and instead we barrel ahead in the same arrogant way that has brought us to this parlous state.” Is a working class family that buys a highly energy consuming plasma screen TV “too comfortable” or “barrelling ahead in the same arrogant way”?

I did not suggest that life for people in the western societies was comfy or easy – and I specifically mentioned many of the terrible effects of capitalism even on the relatively privileged: alienation, inequality, absence of community etc.

As for the Jensen quote, I was referencing it specifically with regard to consumerist ideology and its principal architects in the PR and advertising industries, not with regard to the choices ordinary people make within the economy . And when I wrote that “we appear incapable of changing our practice and instead we barrel ahead in the same arrogant way that has brought us to this parlous state” I was referring to major decisions regarding technology and industry – I was not criticising individual consumption habits.

You say: “my focus in this article was identifying the dominant modes of thinking rather than discussing remedies. ” Naturally our diagnosis of the problem, its nature, inflection, range and extent will have a bearing on any remedies we may propopse. I was trying to bring out two main points in my comment, both pointing to a tendency I perceive in your article to elide the substantive features of capitalist society: the dominant mode of production and class differentiation.

On the first point, I would suggest you need to include an appreciation how capitalism – of which consumerism is ultimately a mere expression – functions. It is not, as in Jenson’s quote, a situation where people are just too comfortable to “get off”, but a fiercely competitive and dynamic system in which those companies that don’t prosper die. Therefore what might appear at an abstract level to be “barrelling along in the same arrogant way”, is actually the logic of capitalism taken to its natural conclusion. And all those decisions that got the system to that point are perfectly rational and internally consistent – within this mode of production. This is why the “ideology is incapable of adapting to reality” – where reality is defined as the trend towards total environmental degradation. So you need to apply a systematic economic understanding of where this impulse comes from; it is not due to arrogance, ignorance, or comfort (although these are all present).

On the second point, I feel you ignore the class differences within capitalist society. This is brought out clearly in Jenson’s quote. Life for the vast majority of people even in an industrialised country is not a comfortable ride on a sleek train; for many, it is a difficult grind, with long hours doing often alienating work, totalitarian structures of authority, declining community solidarity, and a host of attendant social problems. You write: “we appear incapable of changing our practice and instead we barrel ahead in the same arrogant way that has brought us to this parlous state.” Is a working class family that buys a highly energy consuming plasma screen TV “too comfortable” or “barrelling ahead in the same arrogant way”? Their actions certainly seems rational from their point of view, and in their particular context.

How we perceive the problem crucially affects the solutions we propose. I think you need to include these nuances even in a psychological exposition because they critically inform how that mode of thinking is generated.

denaturalists boast of “progress” but always omit to take into account the regress.
and regression is so huge that we obtain a negative balance. clearly machines killing thousands and swords killing two or several people amounts to enorm regress.
then there appear to be more cancer, diabetes, heart problems, obesity, madness, hatred, anger than ever before.
i conclude we have regressed by a lot. yes, some individuals were blessed by new tools and findings but for most people the balance is negative. tnx

Who says progress equals technological advance, necessarily???

Progress is not linked to amassing wealth/material gain, nor is it linked to attaining further control of the world through technology.
Therein lies the problem – the perception of progress and success.

My idea of success is learning to work with what is already available on earth. We can work to enhance nature’s processes, instead of spending so much time and resources on MANIPULATING those processes. For instance, there are cures and medical solutions to MANY of our current ailments growing on trees right under our eyes! Instead, we want to tinker with synthetic chemicals which cause more good than harm, chemicals whose dispensation has become the unrelenting focus of the most sophisticated DRUG CARTEL of our time – the very well lubricated pharmaceutical industry (incredible profit). In fact, many of the diseases alive and well today are the result of our modern way of living. Instead of our digestive systems breaking down what should be organic-untampered with foods, machines that mimic that very natural system now do it for us (hearty whole grains = flour, refined sugar, etc.), thereby robbing our bodies of an essential function that (literally) regulates, harmonizes our bodies. There is a time to burn down certain parts of the forest to make way for other trees, as certain Native American tribes did in the past. There is a time, a season to plant a particular seed that might require the aid of a moonlit sky rather than the rays of the sun. Nature has its own M.O and we are going completely against the grain – no pun intended. Some of the wisest people I’ve met live in rural parts of the world. They are wise, not simply knowledgeable, because they apply their knowledge judiciously injecting into their agricultural practices nature’s temperament, its cyclical flow. They RESPECT the land, an ENTITY onto itself.

It’s a matter of working in tandem (community, shared goals), in harmony. We can develop best practices agriculturally, medically, etc. But not disregarding and in fact outright scoffing at the planet’s (which includes all living creatures) very ESSENCE. In order to make this work, we really have no choice. We are all in it together, whether we like it or not and it’s not a matter of ideology or religious conviction. NATURE is the ultimate equalizer, it trumps religion and political ideology because its evidence is irrefutable. You can’t deny global warming and its disastrous consequences some of which we are already witnessing (polar bears losing ground, tsunamis, etc.). Nature is TRUTH. Our bodies don’t lie – 30 days of (the very lucrative) McDonald’s WILL cause substantial damage! Endless hours of video games instead of bike rides and good old playing tag WILL reap a penchant for VIOLENCE! The evidence is clear and all around us.

I am not a religious person in the least, yet when I survey our current world I can’t help but think of the story of BABEL, the desire to erect an edifice as high as to reach God which resulted in bitter fighting and then dissent – the scrambling of language, division. Somehow, a few of those biblical stories I learned in my earlier life resonate with my current thinking. The GREED, the desire to be GOD (and who is God, Nature maybe?). Do we really need cloning? Is that a worthwhile scientific advance? Shouldn’t some things be left alone? Why not live a good life and then pass on, let someone else live?

Maybe the trick lies – the wisdom – in knowing we have the ability to tap into power, but deciding to live simple, harmonious lives.

But no, we prefer to indulge in our greed, the pursuit of power and control, the endless quest to sate every desire of the flesh, and come to find now…..”IT’S ALIIIVEEE!!!!!”

I don’t think I did suggest such that the dominant modes of thinking that have arisen – consumerism, techno-fundamentalism etc are purely psychological phenomena. For instance I identified the prevailing economic system as “aggressive state managed capitalism” – that’s an institutional description not a psychological one. Moreover again focussing on institutional effects I wrote:

“Psychologists and writers such as Oliver James, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Clive Hamilton and many others have told us what does contribute to human well-being: community, meaningful non-alienated work, relative economic equality, shared goals and values, and an altruistic other-centred orientation. These are all of course values and attitudes that the dominant institutions of our time at best fail to provide, and at worst actually destroy.”

You write:

“what we can do is engage in action and promote values that counterpose this way of thinking with a more humane alternative. That practically that means building values of community, solidarity, and mutual support, creating alternative institutions and engaging in positive action based on these values”

I absolutely agree with you, however my focus in this article was identifying the dominant modes of thinking rather than discussing remedies.

thanks

Alex

PS You may find this piece of mine of interest – it focusses on the interplay between psychology and insitutions:

http://alexdoherty.wordpress.com/2009/01/14/having-and-being-religious-experience-and-the-left/

“one might expect that the introduction of new technologies would now be carried out in a far more responsible manner but unfortunately in the grip of technological fundamentalism we appear incapable of changing our practice”

I would ask two questions of this. Firstly, who is the “we” here and who are those introducing new technologies? Secondly, how do we change “our” practise? We live in complex societies where most people have no economic capital, do not run businesses or innovate in terms of new technology; for most people in the UK, life is still a struggle of competing demands and pressures. What does “changing our practice” mean for the vast majority of people? Merely buying less? Leaving a job on a factory production line? Even for those who do have access to capital and productive mechanisms, it can be quite rational on an individual level to introduce extremely ecologically harmful technology.

We face systematic problems that cannot be solved by only examining psychology. While this is part of it, I feel your approach reduces these questions to the individual, whereas a better account would take notice of the relationship between ideology, social relations and economics.

While it is apparent that there is a consumerist “mode of thinking”, the more interesting questions are how this has arisen, and how it can be changed. Why is it that the consumerist ideal is simply “common sense” to many people today whereas it was not previously? Equally, why has the extreme consumerist paradigm intersected neatly with the rise of neoliberalism, falling trade union membership and activity, increases in working hours and decreases in pay, the decline of the welfare state, and the breakdown of communities?

The conjunction of these factors suggests the power of social structure and ideological production in shaping human consciousness is profound. Unfortunately, there is no rationalistic fix to systematic social problems: we can’t individually think ourselves out of capitalist society. But what we can do is engage in action and promote values that counterpose this way of thinking with a more humane alternative. That practically that means building values of community, solidarity, and mutual support, creating alternative institutions and engaging in positive action based on these values. I understand these are huge tasks for the Left, which by and large is avoiding engaging with ordinary working class communities to build for the future.

But it is the only way. To change collective psychology, we need to challenge the ruling society’s “common sense” ideology, which means creating new forms of social relations and promoting alternative economies.

should be “short sighted…”

Think about previous techno-fixes: uhhh, they’re wearing some sort of body armour, ‘that’s okay, let’s invent depleted uranium and hollow tip ammuniition’.

uhhh, killing all these whales for oil is unsustainable.. it’s getting harder to find them/make a profit, “don’t worry, we can drill it right out of the ground”.

uhhhh, the rest of the world is going to challenge our foreign domination of markets, “no worries, we;ll just invent the atomic bomb”

uhhh, the Soviet’s have the bomb.. “ahhh no problem, we’ll just invent a missile defense shield in space”.

Those with engineering capabilities lack many other capabilities. Those with capital to invest in “techno-fixes” usually don’t have benevolent intentions.

Techno-fixes (ddt, pesticides) are foolish. Engineers are foolish. There is no vision, and there is no imput from general population or even critics, and we are advised: “Before saying there is no solution, it’s worth asking the engineers”. Ahh yes, let’s ask those clowns who never ask us anything, but rather work for the government/military and blindly impliment egotistical solutions.

“have you looked to see if anyone is working on a techno-fix to global warming?”

I mentioned two techno-fixes in the article and I referenced a lengthy Corporate Watch report on the topic. Perhaps as other respondents appear to have done you were reading an entirely different article – one that I must have written in my sleep in which I apparently made no references at all to techno-fixes and where I advocated cutting human life span, abolishing all technology and so on.

As for the technology you mention… what is needed is urgent action that will rapidly reduce CO2 emissions – the methods of doing so are at hand:

properly insulating buildings
shifting from a car based transport system.
radically reducing airplane use
increasing the use of genuine renewables – (a techno-fix that can take us some of the way to arrest climate change)
reducing the incredible wastefulness of the global economy.

There are many more.. I would recommend George Monbiot’s ‘Heat: How we can stop the planet burning’ for many sensible solutions.

Alternatively we can put our faith in technologies that remain at the experimental stage and that if they ever arrive and if they work as well as claimed will likely arrive much too late to handle the problem they were designed to fix. For instance carbon capture and storage – a technology that is getting a great deal of R & D spending, backing from governments and major energy corporations is estimated by Shell (who have an incentive to overestimate the effectiveness of the technology) not to be in widespread use until 2050. Even if that over-optimistic figure is correct it will likely be too late to prevent runaway warming.

“Nope. I am though claiming that there is not always a techno-fix solution to all of our problems – global warming being a classic case in point.”

Alex, have you looked to see if anyone is working on a techno-fix to global warming? It’s easy to scope out the problem, takes about 20 minutes with the net. First step, quit burning fossil fuel. That’s easy to do if you have a large enough (30 TW) and cheap enough replacement. There may be more ways, but space based solar power looks to be large enough and, done on a huge scale, cheap enough. You make hydrogen and combine with CO2 out of the air to make liquid fuels. On this scale, dollar a gallon synthetic gasoline looks probable.

Then you take about 100 ppm (1000 billion tons) of CO2 out of the atmosphere. One TW will do that in 12 years. Storing this much CO2 is a problem, a cube 10 km on a side. But 50 TW is enough in that same 12 year time to convert the CO2 back into oil. We simply refill the old oil fields because we know they didn’t leak over millions of years.

Global warming over solved and we head into an ice age? No problem, reflectors at L2 will rewarm the planet as much as you want.

Before saying there is no solution, it’s worth asking the engineers. There probably are situations where techno fixes don’t exist (or we don’t have to tools to solve them yet) but global warming is not one of them.

Best wishes,

Keith Henson

As for consumerist fundamentalism I pointed out again uncontroversially that unbridled consumerism is incompatible with long term survival, I also pointed out that consumerist values are inimical to human happiness. Again it does not follow from that that all consumer products should cease to be produced. I’m a bit surprised that these trivialities are so hard to understand.

Lastly it seems rather bizarre to me that advocates of cryonics support spending vast sums of money on what may be a technical impossibility – radically lengthening the lives of rich affluent people – when vast numbers of children around the world are dying from easily treated diseases before they make it to adulthood. And I’m the one who’s pro-death?

But there is something beyond this logic. Many of the great religions value life. Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead and told his followers to do likewise. Even if this is just a myth, it is a very powerful one and accepted by a huge number of people as being “a good thing”.

What Doherty described as “consumerist fundamentalism” is doing just that thing that Jesus did — healing the sick and making “the (nearly) dead” easier to raise by future technology.

wld it mean that if’d be starving i cld eat a baby to survive? tx

socalled progress has caused unprecendented rates of cancer, heart problems, breakup of marriages, murder [on intranat'l and internat'l levels], depression, diabetis, etc.

murdering people now is so easy. fire a missile from ‘better tools’ [thanks to 'progress'] even brings joy to some ueber- und untermenschen.

and an unseen war, such as in afgh’n, is not a war at all. this marvel comes from our ‘better tools’ and agencies such as CNN, BBC, CBC.
tx

“Is Alex claiming we should now stop? No more progress? Should the next generation have a lower standard of living, a shorter lifespan, less food?”

Nope. I am though claiming that there is not always a techno-fix solution to all of our problems – global warming being a classic case in point.

Jeff writes:

“Continuing change, continuing evolution, continuing growth of human knowledge and capability is the one unchanging feature of life on our planet. Technology has delivered all the benefits of modern life — along with, yes, some unanticipated problems, which of course, technology will be called upon to solve. And so it shall.”

I am very happy to benefit from many of the products of the technological age, – a lengthened lifespan, modern medicine and so on these are not things to be ignored or downplayed. However, the “unanticipated problems” that Jeff mentions now include what I described as “apocalyptic runaway climate change” – that is not hyperbole – check any sensible scientific study, the work of the IPCC etc. Therefore if the technological age has brought us to the brink of destroying the biospehere perhaps its time to maybe question the way we have been proceeding thus far. no?

Jeff also says:

“the advance of humanity riding the wave of technology is how things are and how they are going to be.”

Well that is precisely the techno-fundamentalist attitude that I was attempting to desribe. Exactly the kind of attitude that leads to the zany and dangerous plans to loft sulphur into the atmosphere or dump iron filings into the oceans.

As for my being intimidated by science – Jeff obviously has no way of demonstrating such a claim. All I will say is that these days I spend a lot of my time reading articles on climate change written by…. scientists! Guess I must enjoy feeling intimidated eh.