This is a fascinating discussion between Noam Chomsky and William F. Buckley. It is split here into two sections, and is obviously not the debate in its entirety.
PART 1
PART 2
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Questioning "Progress"
The following are extensive excerpts from a 1998 article by Lionel Basney in Books & Culture, called Questioning "Progress": The resurrection of Ned Ludd.
* * * * *
Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine opened an interview with Kirkpatrick Sale by asking, “Other than arson and a lot of vandalism, what did the Luddites accomplish in the long run?” Sale [author Rebels Against the Future] answered that the Luddites had raised the question of industrial culture itself, of its meanings and costs. This is what Glendinning meant by Luddite: someone sharply awake to the ways “mass technological society” threatens family, community, and health; someone willing to dissent from the robot enthusiasm with which new technology is adopted...
Rebels Against the Future is really two projects in one – a freshly researched, crisply told history of a fascinating popular upheaval; and a projection of the Luddite predicament and premise into current conditions, from the first Industrial Revolution of mechanical looms and British capital to the second of microchips and the global economy.
The Luddites understood, from the start, that the mechanical loom was only a symptom and instrument of a larger change. Loom smashing was as much a form of publicity as a vehicle of policy. Indeed, Sale writes, “the workers' grievance... never was just the machinery,” but rather the new “political economy and the... principles of unrestrained profit and competition and innovation at its heart.” The new political economy was destroying an older moral economy based in communities, where economic questions like value and moral questions like integrity were answered by common consent and tradition. In the new economy, such issues, insofar as they had meaning, were determined by capital and the good of machinery, and imposed on the workers by force...
What joins their predicament to ours, however, is less specifically social conditions than a common economic principle – the theory that constant technological innovation supported by capital provides, in the long run, a better society by increasing economic productivity. If this theory were correct, of course, there would be less reason in Luddite objections. But we must be careful in testing the theory: for one thing, we must disentangle it from accidental advantages. If it works, it must work apart from extraordinary exploitable resources (like America's) or an empire (like Britain's) built to provide labor and markets at the point of a gun. Such accidents cannot be evidence for the theory; indeed, they show only that it needs inputs of energy and people it cannot provide for itself...
… the theory is not only false but responsible for many evils – the snowball process of the destruction of traditions andcommunity, the end of meaningful work (Sale observes that 40 percent of Americans labor at “disposable” jobs; and massive harm to the environment. It is in this predicament that the Luddite protest seems to offer usable lessons – that industrialism is always cataclysmic, that faster economic growth means faster consumption of the world, that an explicit and urgent resistance on the part of ordinary people is appropriate...
We live in a technolatrous culture: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that more sophisticated machines will be built and will change our lives for the better. If we want evidence, the economy seems eager to provide it- the stock market soaring in a “long boom” attributed to high-tech innovations. And yet technology has generated a muted but insistent chorus of dissent.
Observers like Edward Tenner, in Why Things Bite Back, chronicle the daily contradictions, costs, and frustrations of the dream of a perect technology, its “revenge-effects” on our bodies and minds. Writers such as Neil Postman argue that, by drawing us away from tradition and significant communication, our dominant technology does us moral harm. E.F. Schumacher and his disciples have tried to reconceive technology in forms that would foster community and nurture local life. Philosophers such as Albert Borgmann and Don Ihde (behind whom one glimpses the formidable, ambiguous figure of Martin Heidegger) question the ontology and epistemology of a world of devices and images...
To talk technology is to talk politics, economics, morality, culture, and religion; and this confirms Sale's most basic point about the Luddites: that even in their comparative naivete, they understood it was not machinery itself that posed the danger. For it is nonesense to state the question, as is so often stated, in terms of being “for” or “against” technology. Technology includes any change we make in our environment with a practical end in view. No neo-Luddite is “against” technology; this would entail being “against” your pencil or your coffee cup.
This does not mean, however, that technology is ever “value-neutral,” and it is a measure of our confusion that so many well-intentioned people take refuge in thinking that it is. It would be better to say that some machines (not all), detached from the web of human needs, plans, uses, beliefs and consequences, could be described as morally empty. Most machines seem to have less innate value than trees or faces: they are not embedded as Heidegger might say, in a world of meanings.
But to detach a machine from the web of uses and beliefs is merely a thought experiment. No actual machine ever exists that way; none, therefore, is value neutral. All machines, as the authors of Responsible Technology insist, embody choices among forms of knowledge and power; all machines impose uses on us; all machines close off some avenues of social action as they open others – and “there is no purely neutral or technical justification for any of these decisions.”
The neo-Luddites are not questioning “technology,” then, but the technology we actually have and live with. Like all questioners of a powerful status quo, the neo-Luddites will be called idealists and dreamers. In fact, their analysis is far richer and more realistic than that of [Bill] Gates's technolatry, because it asks a wider range of questions...
In recent years I have talked with many people about these dangers, and the conversation almost invariably pauses here – at a more or less abstract suspicion of peril. What stops the conversation is not a lack of comprehension but the difficulty of knowing how to feel: to go on we need a plausible stance, which we feel we do not have.
On the one hand skepticism about our dominant technology hardly belongs to neo-Luddites alone (nor would they claim it did). Many of us wonder about a social movement of such scope that seems to mandate itself to resist criticism. We may feel that our freedom toe exercise responsible judgement has been taken away from us, as if we were children at an increasingly spooky Christmas – so many fascinating gadgets in the boxes, so much darkness outside.
On the other hand, what resistance is sensible, or even possible? It seems impossible to slow the development of technology or even to take its gifts one by one. Technological change is, as Neil Postman says so well, not cumulative but ecological. A new class of device changes the whole felt world, as it changes how almost everything – eating, traveling, working, caring, and being cared for – is done. There seems no way to resist changes so global and yet so intimate. If we sympathize with Bill Gates, it may be (if truth were told) partly in compensation: we hope his enthusiasm is right; we hope the changes may be beneficent. Wwe may envy Gates's ability to shut out the contrary evidence. Any effort to resist seems like (to use Witold Rybzcynski's term) “ghost dancing” - courageous perhaps, but futile, and so more an object of pathos than of admiration...
[The neo-Luddites] resistance had begun not in countercultural bias but at the point where technology threatened specific instances of family, place, common morality, faith, and the earth's abundance...
In lieu of detail, this may be said: considering only environmental consequences, it is clear that the dominant technology and its culture cannot continue on their present course indefinitely...
The neo-Luddite query, at its simplest, is this: Who will choose our vital technology, and on what basis?
But to make technology responsible – answerable to our needs, careful of the approaching limits of the planet, responsive to conscience – such simple decisions must be replaced by complex ones, that include all the things – family education, nature, faith, and the long-term future – that technolatry ignores. But in what social space will such decisions be made?
… community offers the conditions for an open responsible conscientious examination of social change...
… What you take as the defining relationships of your life – with power, profit, and the abstractions of progress, on one hand, or with communities of faith, specific places, and God, on the other – will finally determine whether your cultural practice can be sustained and for how long...
… what will be the effects on agriculture and other productive practices of a market that makes it possible for anyone to undersell anyone else? The answer is plain: the consumption of the planet is an all-out, dog-ravenous competition to lower costs... questions are are more complex: not just what will the effects of this competition be for money, but what will they be for the earth, for education, for democracy, for health care, for religious belief? These are questions a genuine community could answer for itself...
Jackson calls for a planetary inventory and assessment of technology in view of the approaching end of cheap energy. What this will teach us, he argues, is that we can never know enough to run the earth – only enough to live in small communities in “little places of unwilderness.. intensely loved.” This means local history, local business, the maintenance of local cultural life, a “homecoming” major in American education. It means adjusting our cultures to their natural conditions and not the other way around...
Even setting aside the superstitions of “inevitable technological progress,” however, there is one last important objection for neo-Luddism to encounter. It is the conviction, widesprea among people of goodwill, that only global development and the newest technology can deal with urgent social problems. The challenge to neo-Luddite thinking is clear: Can better health care, more food, social liberation, and increased political stability be obtained through local, grassroots development with modest capital and smaller, not larger, technology?
If, as the neo-Luddites believe, an unexamined, runaway technology will shortly make civilization unworkable, then a community-based resistance is both pragmatic and urgent. It may be that only this kind of resistance can succeed, for only self-conscious communities can be faithful to actual places and ways of life. Through such faithfulness, love becomes a principle of knowledge and of practice – and from love we can derive hope (as McKibben says) both for the human and for the
* * * * *
Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine opened an interview with Kirkpatrick Sale by asking, “Other than arson and a lot of vandalism, what did the Luddites accomplish in the long run?” Sale [author Rebels Against the Future] answered that the Luddites had raised the question of industrial culture itself, of its meanings and costs. This is what Glendinning meant by Luddite: someone sharply awake to the ways “mass technological society” threatens family, community, and health; someone willing to dissent from the robot enthusiasm with which new technology is adopted...
Rebels Against the Future is really two projects in one – a freshly researched, crisply told history of a fascinating popular upheaval; and a projection of the Luddite predicament and premise into current conditions, from the first Industrial Revolution of mechanical looms and British capital to the second of microchips and the global economy.
The Luddites understood, from the start, that the mechanical loom was only a symptom and instrument of a larger change. Loom smashing was as much a form of publicity as a vehicle of policy. Indeed, Sale writes, “the workers' grievance... never was just the machinery,” but rather the new “political economy and the... principles of unrestrained profit and competition and innovation at its heart.” The new political economy was destroying an older moral economy based in communities, where economic questions like value and moral questions like integrity were answered by common consent and tradition. In the new economy, such issues, insofar as they had meaning, were determined by capital and the good of machinery, and imposed on the workers by force...
What joins their predicament to ours, however, is less specifically social conditions than a common economic principle – the theory that constant technological innovation supported by capital provides, in the long run, a better society by increasing economic productivity. If this theory were correct, of course, there would be less reason in Luddite objections. But we must be careful in testing the theory: for one thing, we must disentangle it from accidental advantages. If it works, it must work apart from extraordinary exploitable resources (like America's) or an empire (like Britain's) built to provide labor and markets at the point of a gun. Such accidents cannot be evidence for the theory; indeed, they show only that it needs inputs of energy and people it cannot provide for itself...
… the theory is not only false but responsible for many evils – the snowball process of the destruction of traditions andcommunity, the end of meaningful work (Sale observes that 40 percent of Americans labor at “disposable” jobs; and massive harm to the environment. It is in this predicament that the Luddite protest seems to offer usable lessons – that industrialism is always cataclysmic, that faster economic growth means faster consumption of the world, that an explicit and urgent resistance on the part of ordinary people is appropriate...
We live in a technolatrous culture: we hold these truths to be self-evident, that more sophisticated machines will be built and will change our lives for the better. If we want evidence, the economy seems eager to provide it- the stock market soaring in a “long boom” attributed to high-tech innovations. And yet technology has generated a muted but insistent chorus of dissent.
Observers like Edward Tenner, in Why Things Bite Back, chronicle the daily contradictions, costs, and frustrations of the dream of a perect technology, its “revenge-effects” on our bodies and minds. Writers such as Neil Postman argue that, by drawing us away from tradition and significant communication, our dominant technology does us moral harm. E.F. Schumacher and his disciples have tried to reconceive technology in forms that would foster community and nurture local life. Philosophers such as Albert Borgmann and Don Ihde (behind whom one glimpses the formidable, ambiguous figure of Martin Heidegger) question the ontology and epistemology of a world of devices and images...
To talk technology is to talk politics, economics, morality, culture, and religion; and this confirms Sale's most basic point about the Luddites: that even in their comparative naivete, they understood it was not machinery itself that posed the danger. For it is nonesense to state the question, as is so often stated, in terms of being “for” or “against” technology. Technology includes any change we make in our environment with a practical end in view. No neo-Luddite is “against” technology; this would entail being “against” your pencil or your coffee cup.
This does not mean, however, that technology is ever “value-neutral,” and it is a measure of our confusion that so many well-intentioned people take refuge in thinking that it is. It would be better to say that some machines (not all), detached from the web of human needs, plans, uses, beliefs and consequences, could be described as morally empty. Most machines seem to have less innate value than trees or faces: they are not embedded as Heidegger might say, in a world of meanings.
But to detach a machine from the web of uses and beliefs is merely a thought experiment. No actual machine ever exists that way; none, therefore, is value neutral. All machines, as the authors of Responsible Technology insist, embody choices among forms of knowledge and power; all machines impose uses on us; all machines close off some avenues of social action as they open others – and “there is no purely neutral or technical justification for any of these decisions.”
The neo-Luddites are not questioning “technology,” then, but the technology we actually have and live with. Like all questioners of a powerful status quo, the neo-Luddites will be called idealists and dreamers. In fact, their analysis is far richer and more realistic than that of [Bill] Gates's technolatry, because it asks a wider range of questions...
In recent years I have talked with many people about these dangers, and the conversation almost invariably pauses here – at a more or less abstract suspicion of peril. What stops the conversation is not a lack of comprehension but the difficulty of knowing how to feel: to go on we need a plausible stance, which we feel we do not have.
On the one hand skepticism about our dominant technology hardly belongs to neo-Luddites alone (nor would they claim it did). Many of us wonder about a social movement of such scope that seems to mandate itself to resist criticism. We may feel that our freedom toe exercise responsible judgement has been taken away from us, as if we were children at an increasingly spooky Christmas – so many fascinating gadgets in the boxes, so much darkness outside.
On the other hand, what resistance is sensible, or even possible? It seems impossible to slow the development of technology or even to take its gifts one by one. Technological change is, as Neil Postman says so well, not cumulative but ecological. A new class of device changes the whole felt world, as it changes how almost everything – eating, traveling, working, caring, and being cared for – is done. There seems no way to resist changes so global and yet so intimate. If we sympathize with Bill Gates, it may be (if truth were told) partly in compensation: we hope his enthusiasm is right; we hope the changes may be beneficent. Wwe may envy Gates's ability to shut out the contrary evidence. Any effort to resist seems like (to use Witold Rybzcynski's term) “ghost dancing” - courageous perhaps, but futile, and so more an object of pathos than of admiration...
[The neo-Luddites] resistance had begun not in countercultural bias but at the point where technology threatened specific instances of family, place, common morality, faith, and the earth's abundance...
In lieu of detail, this may be said: considering only environmental consequences, it is clear that the dominant technology and its culture cannot continue on their present course indefinitely...
The neo-Luddite query, at its simplest, is this: Who will choose our vital technology, and on what basis?
But to make technology responsible – answerable to our needs, careful of the approaching limits of the planet, responsive to conscience – such simple decisions must be replaced by complex ones, that include all the things – family education, nature, faith, and the long-term future – that technolatry ignores. But in what social space will such decisions be made?
… community offers the conditions for an open responsible conscientious examination of social change...
… What you take as the defining relationships of your life – with power, profit, and the abstractions of progress, on one hand, or with communities of faith, specific places, and God, on the other – will finally determine whether your cultural practice can be sustained and for how long...
… what will be the effects on agriculture and other productive practices of a market that makes it possible for anyone to undersell anyone else? The answer is plain: the consumption of the planet is an all-out, dog-ravenous competition to lower costs... questions are are more complex: not just what will the effects of this competition be for money, but what will they be for the earth, for education, for democracy, for health care, for religious belief? These are questions a genuine community could answer for itself...
Jackson calls for a planetary inventory and assessment of technology in view of the approaching end of cheap energy. What this will teach us, he argues, is that we can never know enough to run the earth – only enough to live in small communities in “little places of unwilderness.. intensely loved.” This means local history, local business, the maintenance of local cultural life, a “homecoming” major in American education. It means adjusting our cultures to their natural conditions and not the other way around...
Even setting aside the superstitions of “inevitable technological progress,” however, there is one last important objection for neo-Luddism to encounter. It is the conviction, widesprea among people of goodwill, that only global development and the newest technology can deal with urgent social problems. The challenge to neo-Luddite thinking is clear: Can better health care, more food, social liberation, and increased political stability be obtained through local, grassroots development with modest capital and smaller, not larger, technology?
If, as the neo-Luddites believe, an unexamined, runaway technology will shortly make civilization unworkable, then a community-based resistance is both pragmatic and urgent. It may be that only this kind of resistance can succeed, for only self-conscious communities can be faithful to actual places and ways of life. Through such faithfulness, love becomes a principle of knowledge and of practice – and from love we can derive hope (as McKibben says) both for the human and for the
wild. 
Welcome!
Hello, and welcome to Dare To Ask! This is a blog for open discussion of media and technology effects, cultural attitudes, and self-examination as a nation (I'm American) and a world.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
FAQ 
Here are some questions and answers that may help you better ask questions here at DTA. If you have any additional questions, please feel free to comment, and we'll do our best to answer them.
Q. What does "media effects" mean? And "technological effects" for that matter?
A. The term "media effects" refers to the ways in which media, particularly mass media (TV, film, Internet, radio and print) affect their audiences. Study of this topic academically usually happens in the fields of psychology, sociology, and media theory.
"Technological effects" follows in the same vein, however it branches out further and typically looks at what the effects of post-industrial technologies are in society, culture, moral behavior, government, economics and so forth. Some studies of technological effects go back further addressing such developments as the clock and the printing press.
Q. What is "technological optimism?"
A. At its most basic level, technological optimism is exactly what it sounds like - a positive view towards any and all new technological developments, and an overarching support of scientific and technological "advancement" as the inevitable and most beneficial path for both society and humanity.
Its counterparts are "technological moderates" and "technological pessimists," sometimes referred to as Luddites, or neo-Luddites.
Q. What is a Luddite, or neo-Luddite?
A. The term Luddite refers back to a populist rebellion during Britain's industrial revolution. Under the supposed "leadership" of Ned Ludd, several different groups of frustrated citizens smashed looms, feeling that the shift from small local weavers to factories was destroying both their livelihood, their way of life and their communities. A neo-Luddite is someone who has concerns about the effects of technology (and often specifically computer and media technology) on culture, society, morals, economics, government, etc.
Q. What does "media effects" mean? And "technological effects" for that matter?
A. The term "media effects" refers to the ways in which media, particularly mass media (TV, film, Internet, radio and print) affect their audiences. Study of this topic academically usually happens in the fields of psychology, sociology, and media theory.
"Technological effects" follows in the same vein, however it branches out further and typically looks at what the effects of post-industrial technologies are in society, culture, moral behavior, government, economics and so forth. Some studies of technological effects go back further addressing such developments as the clock and the printing press.
Q. What is "technological optimism?"
A. At its most basic level, technological optimism is exactly what it sounds like - a positive view towards any and all new technological developments, and an overarching support of scientific and technological "advancement" as the inevitable and most beneficial path for both society and humanity.
Its counterparts are "technological moderates" and "technological pessimists," sometimes referred to as Luddites, or neo-Luddites.
Q. What is a Luddite, or neo-Luddite?
A. The term Luddite refers back to a populist rebellion during Britain's industrial revolution. Under the supposed "leadership" of Ned Ludd, several different groups of frustrated citizens smashed looms, feeling that the shift from small local weavers to factories was destroying both their livelihood, their way of life and their communities. A neo-Luddite is someone who has concerns about the effects of technology (and often specifically computer and media technology) on culture, society, morals, economics, government, etc.
