Last week’s post here on The Archdruid Report appears
to have hit a nerve. That didn’t come as any sort of a surprise,
admittedly. It’s one thing to point out
that going back to the simpler and less energy-intensive technologies of earlier
eras could help extract us from the corner into which industrial society has
been busily painting itself in recent decades; it’s quite another to point out
that doing this can also be great fun, more so than anything that comes out of
today’s fashionable technologies, and in a good many cases the results include
an objectively better quality of life as well
That’s not one of the canned speeches that opponents of
progress are supposed to make. According to the folk mythology of modern
industrial culture, since progress always makes things better, the foes of
whatever gets labeled as progress are supposed to put on hair shirts and insist
that everyone has to suffer virtuously from a lack of progress, for some reason
based on sentimental superstition. The Pygmalion effect being what it is, it’s
not hard to find opponents of progress who say what they’re expected to say,
and thus fulfill their assigned role in contemporary culture, which is to stand
there in their hair shirts bravely protesting until the steamroller of progress
rolls right over them.
The grip of that particular bit of folk mythology on the
collective imagination of our time is tight enough that when somebody brings up
some other reason to oppose “progress”—we’ll get into the ambiguities behind
that familiar label in a moment—a great many people quite literally can’t
absorb what’s actually being said, and respond instead to the canned speeches
they expect to hear. Thus I had several people attempt to dispute the comments
on last week’s post, castigating my readers with varying degrees of wrath and
profanity for thinking that they had to sacrifice the delights of today’s
technology and go creeping mournfully back to the unsatisfying lifestyles of an
earlier day.
That was all the more ironic in that none of the readers who
were commenting on the post were saying anything of the kind. Most of them were
enthusiastically talking about how much more durable, practical, repairable,
enjoyable, affordable, and user-friendly older technologies are compared to the
disposable plastic trash that fills the stores these days. They were discussing
how much more fun it is to embrace the delights of outdated technologies than
it would be to go creeping mournfully back—or forward, if you prefer—to the
unsatisfying lifestyles of the present time. That heresy is far more than the
alleged openmindness and intellectual diversity of our age is willing to
tolerate, so it’s not surprising that some people tried to pretend that nothing
of the sort had been said at all. What was surprising to me, and pleasantly so,
was the number of readers who were ready to don the party clothes of some
earlier time and join in the Butlerian carnival.
There are subtleties to the project of deliberate
technological regress that may not be obvious at first glance, though, and it
seems sensible to discuss those here before we proceed. It’s important, to begin with, to remember
that when talking heads these days babble about technology in the singular, as
a uniform, monolithic thing that progresses according to some relentless
internal logic of its own, they’re spouting balderdash. In the real world, there’s no such monolith;
instead, there are technologies in the plural, a great many of them, clustered
more or less loosely in technological suites which may or may not have any
direct relation to one another.
An example might be useful here. Consider the technologies
necessary to build a steel-framed bicycle. The metal parts require the
particular suite of technologies we use to smelt ores, combine the resulting
metals into useful alloys, and machine and weld those into shapes that fit
together to make a bicycle. The tires, inner tubes, brake pads, seat cushion,
handlebar grips, and paint require a different suite of technologies drawing on
various branches of applied organic chemistry, and a few other suites also have
a place: for example, the one that’s
needed to make and apply lubricants The
suites that make a bicycle have other uses; if you can build a bicycle, as
Orville and Wilbur Wright demonstrated, you can also build an aircraft, and a
variety of other interesting machines as well; that said, there are other
technologies—say, the ones needed to manufacture medicines, or precision
optics, or electronics—that require very different technological suites. You
can have everything you need to build a bicycle and still be unable to make a
telescope or a radio receiver, and vice versa.
Strictly speaking, therefore, nothing requires the project
of deliberate technological regress to move in lockstep to the technologies of
a specific past date and stay there. It would be wholly possible to dump
certain items of modern technology while keeping others. It would be just as
possible to replace one modern technological suite with an older equivalent
from one decade, another with an equivalent from a different decade and so on.
Imagine, for example, a future America in which solar water heaters (worked out
by 1920) and passive solar architecture (mostly developed in the 1960s and
1970s) were standard household features, canal boats (dating from before 1800)
and tall ships (ditto) were the primary means of bulk transport, shortwave
radio (developed in the early 20th century) was the standard long-range
communications medium, ultralight aircraft (largely developed in the 1980s)
were still in use, and engineers crunched numbers using slide rules (perfected
around 1880).
There’s no reason why such a pastiche of technologies from
different eras couldn’t work. We know this because what passes for modern
technology is a pastiche of the same kind, in which (for example) cars whose
basic design dates from the 1890s are gussied up with onboard computers
invented a century later. Much of modern technology, in fact, is old technology
with a new coat of paint and a few electronic gimmicks tacked on, and it’s old
technology that originated in many different eras, too. Part of what
differentiates modern technology from older equivalents, in other words, is
mere fashion. Another part, though, moves into more explosive territory.
In the conversation that followed last week’s post, one of
my readers—tip of the archdruid’s hat to Cathy—recounted the story of the one
and only class on advertising she took at college. The teacher invited a
well-known advertising executive to come in and talk about the business, and
one of the points he brought up was the marketing of disposable razors. The
old-fashioned steel safety razor, the guy admitted cheerfully, was a much
better product: it was more durable, less expensive, and gave a better shave
than disposable razors. Unfortunately, it didn’t make the kind of profits for
the razor industry that the latter wanted, and so the job of the advertising
company was to convince shavers that they really wanted to spend more money on
a worse product instead.
I know it may startle some people to hear a luxuriantly
bearded archdruid talk about shaving, but I do have a certain amount of
experience with the process—though admittedly it’s been a while. The executive
was quite correct: an old-fashioned safety razor gives better shaves than a
disposable. What’s more, an old-fashioned safety razor combined with a shaving
brush, a cake of shaving soap, a mug and a bit of hot water from the teakettle
produces a shaving experience that’s vastly better, in every sense, than what
you’ll get from squirting cold chemical-laced foam out of a disposable can and
then scraping your face with a disposable razor; the older method, furthermore,
takes no more time, costs much less on a per-shave basis, and has a drastically
smaller ecological footprint to boot.
Notice also the difference in the scale and complexity of
the technological suites needed to maintain these two ways of shaving. To shave
with a safety razor and shaving soap, you need the metallurgical suite that
produces razors and razor blades, the very simple household-chemistry suite
that produces soap, the ability to make pottery and brushes, and some way to
heat water. To shave with a disposable razor and a can of squirt-on shaving
foam, you need fossil fuels for plastic feedstocks, chemical plants to
manufacture the plastic and the foam, the whole range of technologies needed to
manufacture and fill the pressurized can, and so on—all so that you can count
on getting an inferior shave at a higher price, and the razor industry can
boost its quarterly profits.
That’s a small and arguably silly example of a vast and far
from silly issue. These days, when you see the words “new and improved” on a
product, rather more often than not, the only thing that’s been improved is the
bottom line of the company that’s trying to sell it to you. When you hear
equivalent claims about some technology that’s being marketed to society as a
whole, rather than sold to you personally, the same rule applies at least as often.
That’s one of the things that drove the enthusiastic conversations on this
blog’s comment page last week, as readers came out of hiding to confess that
they, too, had stopped using this or that piece of cutting-edge, up-to-date,
hypermodern trash, and replaced it with some sturdy, elegant, user-friendly
device from an earlier decade which works better and lacks the downsides of the
newer item.
What, after all, defines a change as “progress”? There’s a
wilderness of ambiguities hidden in that apparently simple word. The popular
notion of progress presupposes that there’s an inherent dynamic to history,
that things change, or tend to change, or at the very least ought to change,
from worse to better over time. That
presupposition then gets flipped around into the even more dubious claim that
just because something’s new, it must be better than whatever it replaced. Move
from there to specific examples, and all of a sudden it’s necessary to deal
with competing claims—if there are two hot new technologies on the market, is
option A more progressive than option B, or vice versa? The answer, of course,
is that whichever of them manages to elbow the other aside will be
retroactively awarded the coveted title of the next step in the march of
progress.
That was exactly the process by which the appropriate tech
of the 1970s was shoved aside and buried in the memory hole of our culture. In
its heyday, appropriate tech was as cutting-edge and progressive as anything
you care to name, a rapidly advancing field pushed forward by brilliant young
engineers and innovative startups, and it saw itself (and presented itself to
the world) as the wave of the future. In the wake of the Reagan-Thatcher
counterrevolution of the 1980s, though, it was retroactively stripped of its
erstwhile status as an icon of progress and consigned to the dustbin of the
past. Technologies that had been lauded in the media as brilliantly innovative
in 1978 were thus being condemned in the same media as Luddite throwbacks by
1988. If that abrupt act of redefinition reminds any of my readers of the way
history got rewritten in George Orwell’s 1984—“Oceania has never been
allied with Eurasia” and the like—well, let’s just say the parallel was noticed
at the time, too.
The same process on a much smaller scale can be traced with
equal clarity in the replacement of the safety razor and shaving soap with the
disposable razor and squirt-can shaving foam. In what sense is the latter,
which wastes more resources and generates more trash in the process of giving
users a worse shave at a higher price, more progressive than the former? Merely
the fact that it’s been awarded that title by advertising and the media. If
razor companies could make more money by reintroducing the Roman habit of
scraping beard hairs off the face with a chunk of pumice, no doubt that would
quickly be proclaimed as the last word in cutting-edge, up-to-date
hypermodernity, too.
Behind the mythological image of the relentless and
inevitable forward march of technology-in-the-singular in the grand cause of
progress, in other words, lies a murky underworld of crass commercial motives
and no-holds-barred struggles over which of the available technologies will get
the funding and marketing that will define it as the next great step in progress.
That’s as true of major technological programs as it is of shaving supplies.
Some of my readers are old enough, as I am, to remember when supersonic
airliners and undersea habitats were the next great steps in progress, until
all of a sudden they weren’t. We may not
be all that far from the point at which space travel and nuclear power will go
the way of Sealab and the Concorde.
In today’s industrial societies, we don’t talk about that.
It’s practically taboo these days to mention the long, long list of waves of
the future that abruptly stalled and rolled back out to sea without delivering
on their promoters’ overblown promises. Remind people that the same rhetoric
currently being used to prop up faith in space travel, nuclear power, or any of
today’s other venerated icons of the religion of progress was lavished just as
thickly on these earlier failures, and you can pretty much expect to have that
comment shouted down as an irrelevancy if the other people in the conversation
don’t simply turn their backs and pretend that they never heard you say
anything at all.
They have to do something of the sort, because the
alternative is to admit that what we call “progress” isn’t the impersonal,
unstoppable force of nature that industrial culture’s ideology insists it must
be. Pay attention to the grand technological projects that failed, compare them
with those that are failing now, and it’s impossible to keep ignoring certain
crucial if hugely unpopular points. To begin with technological progress is a
function of collective choices—do we fund Sealab or the Apollo program?
Supersonic transports or urban light rail? Energy conservation and appropriate
tech or an endless series of wars in the Middle East? No impersonal force makes
those decisions; individuals and institutions make them, and then use the
rhetoric of impersonal progress to cloak the political and financial agendas
that guide the decision-making process.
What’s more, even if the industrial world chooses to invest
its resources in a project, the laws of physics and economics determine whether
the project is going to work. The Concorde is the poster child here, a
technological successbut an economic flop that never even managed to cover its
operating costs. Like nuclear power, it was only viable given huge and
continuing government subsidies, and since the strategic benefits Britain and
France got from having Concordes in the air were nothing like so great as those
they got from having an independent source of raw material for nuclear weapons,
it’s not hard to see why the subsidies went where they did.
That is to say, when something is being lauded as the next
great step forward in the glorious march of progress leading humanity to a
better world, those who haven’t drunk themselves tipsy on folk mythology need
to keep four things in mind. The first is that the next great step forward in the glorious march of progres (etc.) might
not actually work when it’s brought down out of the billowing clouds of
overheated rhetoric into the cold hard world of everyday life. The second is
that even if it works, the next great step forward (etc.) may be a white
elephant in economic terms, and survive only so long as it gets propped up by
subsidies. The third is that even if it does make economic sense, the next great
step (etc.) may be an inferior product, and do a less effective job of meeting
human needs than whatever it’s supposed to replace. The fourth is that when it
comes right down to it, to label something as the next great (etc.) is just a
sales pitch, an overblown and increasingly trite way of saying “Buy this
product!”
Those necessary critiques, in turn, are all implicit in the
project of deliberate technological regress. Get past the thoughtstopping
rhetoric that insists “you can’t turn back the clock”—to rephrase a comment of
G.K. Chesterton’s, most people turn back the clock every fall, so that’s hardly
a valid objection—and it becomes hard not to notice that “progress” is just a
label for whatever choices happen to have been made by governments and corporations,
with or without input from the rest of us. If we don’t like the choices that
have been made for us in the name of progress, in turn, we can choose something
else.
Now of course it’s possible to stuff that sort of thinking
back into the straitjacket of progress, and claim that progress is chugging
along just fine, and all we have to do is get it back on the proper track, or
what have you. This is a very common sort of argument, and one that’s been used
over and over again by critics of this or that candidate for the next (etc.).
The problem with that argument, as I see it, is that it may occasionally win
battles but it pretty consistently loses the war; by failing to challenge the
folk mythology of progress and the agendas that are enshrined by that
mythology, it guarantees that no matter what technology or policy or program
gets put into place, it’ll end up leading the same place as all the others
before it, because it questions the means but forgets to question the goals.
That’s the trap hardwired into the contemporary faith in
progress. Once you buy into the notion that the specific choices made by
industrial societies over the last three centuries or so are something more
than the projects that happened to win out in the struggle for wealth and
power, once you let yourself believe that there’s a teleology to it all—that
there’s some objectively definable goal called “progress” that all these
choices did a better or worse job of furthering—you’ve just made it much harder
to ask where this thing called “progress” is going. The word “progress,”
remember, means going further in the same direction, and it’s precisely
questions about the direction that industrial society is going that most need
to be asked.
I’d like to suggest, in fact, that going further in the
direction we’ve been going isn’t a particularly bright idea just now. It isn’t even necessary to point to the more
obviously self-destructive dimensions of business as usual. Look at any trend
that affects your life right now, however global or local that trend may be,
and extrapolate it out in a straight line indefinitely; that’s what going
further in the same direction means. If that appeals to you, dear reader, then
you’re certainly welcome to it. I have
to say it doesn’t do much for me.
