Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Abundance Without Fairness and Sustainability Is False Abundance

I didn't like Bill McKibben's book Enough very much but I liked his more recent book Deep Economy much more. I wouldn't go so far as to say that these two books starkly represent bioconservative versus technoprogressive framings of the same planetary dilemmas, but I will say that it was the bioconservativism of the first that I disliked and it is the technoprogressivism of the second that I liked. The rhetorical and political relations between the two books are more complex when all is said and done than that might seem to suggest but there it is. For more on these two idiosyncratic terms, by the way, bioconservative and technoprogressive, see this essay.

Anyway, I mention all this just because a friend recently forwarded an article to me from Spiked Online (how he has time to read that site when there are far more reliably progressive sites widely available for better discussions of these topics is a bit beyond me -- but the reading habits of dem-left futurists never fail to perplex me... many of them still take seriously or even defend ugly-minded imbeciles like Tom Friedman, William Safire, Virginia Postrel, and Glenn Reynolds when almost no sensible progressives I know otherwise still waste their time on these corporatist shills), and this article is, among other things, a critical review of McKibben's book and a few others making complementary points. The article disgusted and infuriated me, and to get a taste of the reasons why let me offer up two representative quotations and register my reactions and you can go on from there. (It's week one of the new term, by the way: busy, busy, busy!)
Our ancestors struggled for a world where we could take abundant food, clean water and adequate shelter for granted. Not only have we achieved these goals, at least in the developed world, but modern technology and economic organization have improved our lives hugely.

"At least in the developed world." Uh-huh. Now re-read that bit about "our ancestors," and that bit about how "we could take abundant food, clean water, and adequate shelter for granted," and how "we achieved these goals," and "improved our lives." Sorry to be Captain Bringdown, but there are of course millions upon millions upon millions of people who can't take any of this "abundance" for granted in the least, and this isn't because they are sad atavisms along the developmental trajectory for which relatively rich North Atlantic people happen to represent some natural culmination, the self-congratulatory climax of "prosperity/modernity" and the rest, but very much and very directly in consequence of centuries' longstanding and still ongoing confiscation, exploitation, and violence.
And yet the prospect of everyone having access to the best the world has to offer is commonly seen as an environmental nightmare rather than a worthwhile goal.

This is, to be blunt, an ugly idiotic lie. Environmentalists know that "the best the world has to offer" (you know, the rhinestone encrusted cellphones, craptacular already crumbling "Tuscan" McMansions, the identically ugly refrigerator-box shaped cars we presumably all covet) is simply too much for the world to be able to offer for long even to those privileged few who presently irresponsibly do enjoy it (many of them without much actual enjoyment by all appearances) and is absolutely not sustainably scalable to "everyone" on these terms or via these institutional formations. That is a very different sort of claim from the expression of general hostility to prosperity, or modernity, or civilization that it is often identified as by those who cling desperately to and spin desperately for the status quo even as we careen toward the sheer cliff-face of pointless extinction from it.

One can easily grasp and affirm this sort of point about the widespread psychic dissatisfactions and the structural unsustainability of the idealized "lifestyles" of the so-called "developed world" while still maintaining that there is in fact quite a lot of absolutely unnecessary and easily addressable suffering, ignorance, and social constraint in the world, all of which could be cheaply, immediately, and sustainably redressed (even without Robot Armies! Nanosantas! Immortality Pills! Cyberheaven! at our disposal yet). That is to say, one can easily decry the nightmare of false abundance and artificial scarcity on which the present unjust unsustainable undemocratic distribution of "developmental" cost, risk, and benefit depends, while at once championing the desirability and attainability of real abundance here and now and in futures worth working our way to together.

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