Is the desire for more complex and more powerful tools
- the human condition?
- the European political condition?
- the male primate condition?
- the post-Edenic condition?
I’ll take all of them, but mostly the fourth. There are many instances of human societies deliberately rejecting the “next step” in technological complexity. The best example I know of is the Tasmanians. At a certain point in their history, they decided to backtrack. They tossed out new technologies they considered harmful, and stabilized their culture where they wanted it. That worked for them – until the big ships arrived, of course.
Tim Flannery, in his book The Future Eaters, tells the story in detail. The Ojibway also seem like an instance of deliberately standing still in order to be in the right. We shouldn’t omit the Amish. On a lighter note, in London a few years back a group of aesthetes decided the 18th Century was their ideal. They stopped paying their electric bills, used (whale oil?) for light, rode around on horses, and so on. I don’t know if they’re still at it. Any number of individuals or small groups have lived a radically simplified life. Religious types such as the Essenes, or Himalayan yogis, or Franciscan monks, did it. The neo-Luddites do it. People everywhere have slammed the brakes on “progress” and have taken up the simple life.
However, most humans haven’t. Most humans have been trying strenuously to conquer nature. This goes not only for Europeans. For centuries, China and India were much farther along the techno trail than the Europeans. (Maybe we can blame our ills on the Asians. Modern technology would be impossible without the zero, and the Hindus invented it.)
Early human cultures in the Western Hemisphere also steadily made “advancement” in their tool-making. That’s evident from the archeological record. As their tools and weapons became more complex, the impact of humans on the rest of nature became more noticeable.
Within Western Hemisphere Paleolithic cultures, we see “progress” made, from hand-held flaked stones to bows and arrows. We’ll never know what sort of cultural evolution they would have had if the Europeans hadn’t intervened. But why would they have gone a different route from most other cultures on the face of the Earth?
What we do know is that when the Spanish brought horses, the Americans eagerly made use of them. Who wants to lug a travois across the plains when you can load up the noble beast? This “labor-saving” thought process is found worldwide. So I don’t think it’s just a European problem. Can we limit the drive for power to them? No. It’s the human condition. Or, better to call it the human conditioning. We’ve become conditioned to think and feel this way. I suggest it’s not the way we started out. But that was a very long time ago. Long before the Industrial Revolution – or the Agricultural one.
For my text, I take Andrew Bard Schmookler’s The Parable of the Tribes. He makes a convincing case: once the drive for political power started, there was no stopping it. Immediately, technology was pressed into its service. When was it? 10,000 years ago? 25,000? A million? Where was it? Europe? Africa? Pago-Pago? No matter. It started, and societies everywhere took it up. (With some exceptions, as noted above.) The problem is primarily political, a question of human attitude rather than human nature, and not restricted to any region of the globe.
Are we basically good or evil? Schmookler sets aside that terminology. He says we’re evolved to be good enough. Good enough to live happily on the planet that evolved us. When we forced a split between ourselves and the Earth by seeking domination instead of cooperation, that’s when we kicked ourselves out of “Eden.”
The problem is that people act politically. There is no political solution. Politics itself is the problem. Gaining power over others – the essence of politics – is the problem, whether it’s power over human beings or power over the rest of nature, or over God. When politics started, the problem started. It was a historical event. And history doesn’t move backwards. So we can’t return to the past. Instead, we can evolve into a new humanity centered on (dare I say it?) Love. We don’t need an act of Congress, we need an act of Consciousness. The politicans will trot along behind, as they always do. E. F. Schumacher said it: “The problem is metaphysical, and the solution must therefore be metaphysical.”
Meanwhile, here I am, moralizing via the most complex and potentially dangerous technology yet devised – the Cybersystem. Is it simply a coincidence that the Internet was built by the most powerful military establishment in the world? The techno-utopians think we’ve stolen the Net away from the bad guys. But if the proliferating dystopian novels about the near future are any indication, we have some sobering surprises ahead of us. The Net ain’t the answer. But we can use it to ask provocative questions.
All in all, I personally feel we humans went wrong when we started to use fire as a tool. Prior to fire, we were cool dudes. Nowadays we gather around glowing screens, having forgotten that our bodies are uniquely designed for another technology, that of self-awareness. The human body is a wondrous instrument we can use to direct spiritual energy in the most ingenious ways. But, to accomplish it, one must be free from the tyranny of materialists. No national government wants that freedom for us. Would a global government be any different? Not likely. A massive centralization of political power would probably be accompanied by an increase in the number of glowing screens seducing us into ignorance.
Wisdom, on the other hand, comes from folks like the Ojibway. What will prevail, reality or illusion? A faith in the power of reality motivates me. For an eco-mantra, I can’t do much better than Thoreau’s words: “simplify, simplify.”
