Rage Against the Machines

Witnessing the birth of the neo-Luddite movement

Ronald Bailey from the July 2001 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

This, in turn, is terrible because global markets create a despised "monoculture" in which "all countries are meant to develop in the same way, with the same hamburgers, the same shoes, the same cars, and the same urban landscapes," as Mander put it at the Teach-In. He summed his comments up by saying that we’re "cloning cultures to be like ours."

As a particularly pernicious example of technological intrusion into happy traditional life, Helena Norberg-Hodge, head of the International Society for Ecology and Culture, complained that Tibetan and Mongolian children are spurning traditional clothing and now crave Levi’s and running shoes. She is also displeased by the fact that after the introduction of the transistor radio in traditional Ladakhi society in India, people no longer sat around the fires and fields singing communal songs because they could now listen to professionally produced music from the cities.

Vandana Shiva, director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in New Delhi, warned the Teach-In participants that the technologies wielded by corporations threaten "liberation from our cultures, our communities, our rootedness." Which of course explains precisely why many people, especially in parts of the world that offer relatively few opportunities, embrace new technology -- the stuff is one way of possibly increasing their quality of life.

As much as the neo-Luddites might wish it otherwise, there simply is no other social and economic model of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty than what might be called democratic, technological capitalism. If one wants effective sanitation, improved medicine, a steady food supply, convenient transport, and cheap and easy communications, there is no alternative to technologically robust, market-based societies. To the arguable extent that countries worldwide are becoming more similar, it is not because corporations are imposing some uniform set of goods and services, but because human beings share a similar set of needs and wants.

Cultural diversity and cultural identity are routinely invoked by neo-Luddites, who insist that we must respect different cultures. That’s a view that proceeds directly from a belief in a universal set of human rights, including a right to self-determination. Yet, neo-Luddites deploy their ideas about diversity and identity in such a way that undermines respect for those rights, at least as they apply to individuals. People, they suggest, should not be able to "disrupt" their cultures through the adoption of new technologies that challenge the status quo.

As the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has written, the neo-Luddite insistence on maintaining or even exacerbating "authentic" cultural differences inevitably endangers liberty. "The notion of ‘cultural identity’ is dangerous," writes Vargas Llosa in the January/February 2001 issue of Foreign Policy. "From a social point of view, it represents merely a doubtful, artificial concept, but from a political point of view it threatens humanity’s most precious achievement: freedom." Why? "The concept of identity, when not employed on an exclusively individual scale, is inherently reductionist and dehumanizing, a collectivist and ideological abstraction of all that is original and creative in the human being, of all that has not been imposed by inheritance, geography, or social pressure," concludes Vargas Llosa.

Indeed, it is no coincidence that democracies tend to be technologically advanced, just as it is no accident that the end of slavery, universal suffrage, universal education, and women’s liberation all arose in highly technological societies. There have been precious few low-tech democracies since ancient Greece (and even Athens was a slaveholding society).

Despite neo-Luddite fears, the rise to near-ubiquity of tech-heavy democracies has been a boon to the people of the world. It is unquestionable that in political and material terms, life is a lot better for a lot more people than it was just a century ago. Universal suffrage, nonexistent at the beginning of the 20th century, is now the norm in 120 of the world’s 192 countries. Democracy, in other words, is now the norm for human societies for the first time in history. While the connections are complicated, technological progress and the wealth it creates help make political advances possible.

The same forces have also been driving up global life expectancies, that most basic indicator of well-being. Average global life expectancy in 1900 was just 30 years, today it has more than doubled to 66 years. Infant mortality rates are at historic lows in the developed world and continue to decline even in poor countries such as Bangladesh and Kenya. While average annual per capita income in those countries remains dreadfully low by U.S. standards -- in Bangladesh it’s $370 and in Kenya only $360, compared to $31,190 in the U.S. -- the trajectory of technology has indeed not been neutral. It has been an enormous gain for most of humanity.

The Teach-In progressives do make a salient point about one aspect of "corporate power" -- corporations are skillful players in whatever political system they find themselves. They typically evince little shame in supporting politicians who favor their interests. This fact annoys other interest groups in a democracy -- labor, say, or environmentalists, or even neo-Luddites -- because they would prefer not to have to compete for political favors. The problem is that all interest groups, whether farmers, corporations, or unions, seek to use a government’s power (and taxes) to further their goals at the expense of other people’s goals.

Of course, when corporations try to use the political process to obtain subsidies, or enact protectionist measures that harm consumers, they should be relentlessly opposed. But in the long run, if one wants to diminish corporate power, the easiest way to do it is to reduce government power, which is something definitely not on the neo-Luddites’ agenda. Indeed, their plans are predicated upon governments with far more sweeping powers than current ones possess.

Primal Scenes

As an alternative to what they see as a disastrous technological market culture, neo-Luddites turn to traditional and indigenous cultures as models for emulation. Jerry Mander asserted in a 1991 interview in The Sun, "Life really is better when you get off the technological-industrial wheel and conceive of some other way. It makes people happier." He more extensively propounded this idea in his 1992 book In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations.

In 1995, Mander told an interviewer, "A little investigation of traditional native economies shows that people were able to survive in most parts of the world, certainly in the temperate zones, but even in the extreme zones, with very little work, maximum pleasure and fun, and minimum technology. ...They hung out. They flirted. They played a lot of music. They slept. They seemed to have a good time. They related. There was a lot of community life."

"As a species, human beings have more experience living wild, in hunter-gatherer bands, embedded in healthy ecosystems," agreed Stephanie Mills, an environmental activist and editor of Turning Away from Technology: A New Vision for the 21st Century.