There is a twisted belief held by some in industrialized societies that cancer rates are growing primarily because people are living longer. It's a twisted belief because it treats cancer like a confirmation of success, instead of a warning to be heeded. The logic seems to go that, since people in industrialized societies no longer have to die at the age of 25 from bacterial infections, raiding homicidal tribes, or vicious beasts, they live longer, which is surely a victory for scientific progress, and cancer is just a side effect of our newfound longevity, one that will just as surely be understood and controlled in time, so that eventually humanity will be able to enjoy extreme longevity free of disease, essentially doing a better job than mindless nature ever could.
So goes the myth. Unfortunately, that fairy tale is on its last legs. For one thing, evidence suggests that foragers live far longer than civilization wants to admit, with the modal age of death for forager groups being seventy-two years. As study authors Gurven and Kaplan point out, this should not be surprising, since if the modal, or most common, age of death was consistently anything lower during the two million years of human forager existence, then humans would probably not have evolved the potential for a full seven decade lifespan in spite of regularly dying far before the majority of people ever got near that age. By contrast, chimpanzees that are kept do live longer than their wild counterparts--but only by about fifteen years, and at significant cost to their mental well-being. The reason why chimpanzees don't, say, live an extra forty years in captivity is because their lifespan is more or less predetermined by their evolution in the wild. Nature does not secretly inscribe the potential to live an extra four decades banking on the off chance that a chimpanzee might wind up in a zoo display. The lifespan is calibrated to the expectation of each chimpanzee living in its environment of evolutionary adaptation. Likewise, humans can naturally age to seventy-plus years not because technology and science have suddenly enabled them to, but because seventy-plus years was what humans regularly saw in the wild, hence an evolved life-cycle that anticipates a potential seven decade run, with negligible senescence between puberty and one's forties (see above link to Gurven and Kaplan study). Otherwise, as much as civilization wants to believe it, there is no way that is consistent with current understandings of evolution that technology could double or triple the natural lifespan of an animal simply by removing it from the wild for a few generations.
The second issue with the longevity myth of cancer is that there is virtually no evidence that cancer was common before civilization, and especially before industrial society, despite lifespans that would otherwise suggest the potential to develop age-related malignancies. For example, some preserved corpses from pre-contact South America and ancient Egypt exhibit signs of arteriosclerosis and arthritis associated with aging, yet, out of a sample of nearly a thousand mummies, only five instances of tumors, mostly benign, were found.
However, the most glaring problem with the longevity myth of cancer is the ongoing increase in rates of childhood cancers, which, according to the American Cancer Society, is the second leading cause of death in US children between five and fourteen. It's not even necessary to compare this with pre-industrial societies--we already know that childhood cancers were far rarer in the past and that the rate of incidence has been increasing by about 0.6% a year in the US since 1975. Across the industrialized world, these rates, along with adult cancer rates, are generally expected to continue trending upwards.
Civilization's tendency to normalize suffering and disease is truly disturbing. Cancer, once an unknown illness, is now considered a natural expression of aging, and, perversely, evidence of the necessity of technological medicine for a life free from suffering. The truth is, cancer is a toll that domestication exacts on the body. Similarly, the breakdown of social cohesion and cooperative community is a toll that domestication exacts on human interaction. The assumption of civilization is that humans by nature are inherently self-interested and, if left unchecked, will inevitably tear down society in an orgy of rancor and greed that can only be stopped by the imposition of a higher authority and that harmony can only be achieved by offsetting one individual's self-interest by leveraging another's. Such are the delusional legacies of Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith. But just as physical diseases like cancer are being demonstrated to be the product of domestication, so are civilized assumptions of a repugnant human nature. Are qualities such as greed, vanity, jealousy, egocentrism, violence, and bellicosity inherent in humans? They are, insofar as the potential for cancer is also inherent in a latent sense. The potential to develop cancer has always been present in humans, as well as the potential for individualistic self-interest and the whole gamut of negative human qualities. Placing humans in a domesticated lifestyle, like the chickens in a factory farm, guarantees the manifestation of such unnatural and undesirable side effects. But even though cancer was always biologically possible, it is only recently, with the advent of domestication, civilization, technology, and the concomitant host of radical alterations to our environment, that cancer actually manifests--obviously a warning sign. Is it really such a stretch of the imagination, then, to consider that these same radical environmental changes to virtually all aspects of human life would also have a significant, and odious, influence on human character as well, eliciting the most loathsome social diseases along with the physical, mental, and spiritual ones?
There are many passages from the Dao De Jing that, two thousand years ago, had already apprehended the tendency of technology and progress to draw out the worst in people who otherwise would enjoy peace and harmony. Chapter 3 delineates this notion:
By not exalting the talented you will cause the people to cease from rivalry and contention.
By not prizing goods hard to get, you will cause the people to cease from robbing and stealing.
By not displaying what is desirable, you will cause the people's hearts to remain undisturbed.
and even more succinctly in Chapter 12:
The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors cloy the palate.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Rare goods tempt men to do wrong.
Therefore, the Sage takes care of the belly, not the eye.
He prefers what is within to what is without.
This theme is again repeated in Chapters 19 and 20:
Drop wisdom, abandon cleverness,
And the people will be benefited a hundredfold.
Drop humanity, abandon justice,
And the people will return to their natural affections.
Drop shrewdness, abandon sharpness,
And robbers and thieves will cease to be [...]
See the Simple and embrace the Primal,
Diminish the self and curb the desires! [...]
Have done with learning,
And you will have no more vexation.
However, the final words of Chapter 46 are by far the most striking, leaving us with a profound message to contemplate:
There is no calamity like not knowing what is enough.
There is no evil like covetousness.
Only he who knows what is enough will always have enough.
(all excerpts translated by John C.H. Wu)
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Tyson and Perdue: Our Two-Party System
An objection raised all too often against the idea of anarchist societies is that "human nature" is such that intrinsic greed and the desire for dominance will invariably work to subvert social harmony if given the chance, and, therefore, governments naturally arise as a matter of necessity to maintain a peaceful and beneficial society. This is also the point of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, a 1651 treatise on statecraft that proclaimed government's monopoly on violence a necessary evil to safeguard society from degenerating into a state of nature characterized by a "war of all against all" and that guaranteed lives that were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". While relatively few people outside of academia have read or are even familiar with Hobbes, it is obvious that his philosophical specter still haunts and informs mainstream views on politics, albeit at such a fundamental level as to be confounded with "common sense" by most.
In fact, Hobbes' promulgations on human nature are inherently problematic because he bases them on observations of only historical or contemporary civilized examples. While Europeans had by this time already encountered the radically different indigenous cultures of other continents, it seems that Hobbes was either unfamiliar with reports on their societal structure or otherwise chose to dismiss this information as irrelevant to his writing, opting instead to draw universal conclusions about "human nature" only from a small, highly-domesticated subset of cultures, cultures that could only exist under authority, and which would indeed collapse without it. As government systematically undermines the two million year old instincts of humans to engage in cooperative and egalitarian society in order to pursue its own goals of dominance and resource acquisition, humans respond to these unnatural stresses and the result is, predictably, a degeneration of cooperation, trust, sharing, mutual respect, and psychological and physical well-being.
For example, one could make the point that black slaves in the 19th century were considered (and largely observed to be) more pathetic, less intelligent and more brutish than whites. Slaves, it scarcely needs to be said, weren't educated to the same degree, were made to labor under grueling conditions, were made to endure atrocious and dehumanizing treatment, and had inferiority essentially instilled into them their entire lives, thus predisposing them to conform to and confirm the expectations of whites. Such was the White Man's Burden that a black slave would scarcely be able to feed, shelter, or clothe him or herself if not for the slave owner. I would venture to say that the characteristics of these slaves can give us few useful insights into the nature of sub-Saharan Africans or black people in general, and one can easily find fault and bias (and an agenda) in the white slave owners who argued otherwise. Above all, I don't think there are many who would argue that the slaves' artificial dependence on slave owners for absolutely all their basic needs and protection justified the perpetuation of slavery. One could very well compare Hobbes' view on human nature to those of American slave owners on blacks and quickly conclude how flawed and biased those views are.
However, the more accurate analogy, I think, is that of an industrial poultry factory--the kind that produces the vast majority of chicken and turkey meat destined for supermarket shelves and restaurant kitchens throughout the United States. Tens of thousands of birds are crammed together in each windowless shed on your average industrial chicken farm, with total US annual production at about eight million birds. When they arrive, they will already have had their beaks partially removed to prevent them from pecking madly at each other out of sheer frustration. It hardly needs to be explained that this practice is not done for their own safety, but rather to prevent damage to their meat. Each bird will, at maximum shed capacity, get about 130 square inches of space. Not that they would be able to enjoy it if they had more, since broiler chickens have been bred such that their bodies grow far too quickly for their heart and legs to keep up with, rendering each one essentially immobile beyond just a few struggling steps at a time. Their whole lives are arranged around consuming feed and sitting in their own choking ammonia stench. Birds are fed antibiotics to keep them alive long enough for them to reach their slaughter weight (about forty-five days), and were formerly also fed growth hormones, a practice that was banned in the 1950s. Now, if one were to try and summarize the "chicken condition" or draw conclusions about "chicken nature" solely by examining factory-farmed chickens in isolation; that is, without considering the influence of their imposed surroundings, one would have to conclude that chickens are disgusting, inherently violent, inherently sickly, unable to attain decent health and hygiene on their own, and intrinsically incapable of producing social order on their own. Their observed tendency to hurt each other justifies the removal of their beaks and ought to be viewed as perhaps a necessary evil, but perhaps even a boon, a gift of sorts, by the higher authority. Their susceptibility to infection necessitates the use of antibiotics, which is also another wondrous gift. In short, the plain inability of these animals to provide for any of their own basic needs, much less to thrive on their own, practically mandates that they be kept and cared for in industrial factory farms. After all, what else besides an industrial scale operation could keep so many birds alive, however imperfectly? The necessity of an external source of domination is crystal clear.
Such an analysis is, of course, absurd. We readily have populations of wild and feral chickens for comparison. Wild chickens are not arbitrarily violent to their flockmates, and their penchant for cleanliness is impeccable. They are highly social and are particularly doting mothers and protective fathers, and have no trouble feeding themselves or in general staying healthy, even without the advantage of troughs of feed and antibiotics. If one were to seek to understand "chicken nature", the logical way to go about it would be to study chickens in the wild, i.e., in the environment for which they are evolved and in which their adaptations work perfectly for them, not constantly against them. It would be insane to consider the factory-farmed chickens anything even close to exhibiting natural behavior. What's more, no amount of external intervention in the form of physical alterations, veterinary care, antibiotics, dietary improvements, or environmental enhancements will improve the fundamental well-being of factory chickens, because their well-being was never the point of the factory in the first place.
As civilized humans, we, too, are similarly disarmed and confined, made to be utterly dependent for our lives on the very system that causes us misery in order to exploit us. The crowding that we endure in our urban environments, face to face daily with strangers, is mentally stressful for us just as the crowding in poultry sheds is for chickens. Crowding doesn't benefit either group, but is convenient for the dominant system, and that's why it persists. The chickens' obesity and excessive consumption, much like our own, likewise does not benefit either group, only the dominant system. Nothing of civilization benefits you or the world upon which all life ultimately depends, and to argue it as otherwise, to see it as otherwise, is to endorse your own ruin.
In fact, Hobbes' promulgations on human nature are inherently problematic because he bases them on observations of only historical or contemporary civilized examples. While Europeans had by this time already encountered the radically different indigenous cultures of other continents, it seems that Hobbes was either unfamiliar with reports on their societal structure or otherwise chose to dismiss this information as irrelevant to his writing, opting instead to draw universal conclusions about "human nature" only from a small, highly-domesticated subset of cultures, cultures that could only exist under authority, and which would indeed collapse without it. As government systematically undermines the two million year old instincts of humans to engage in cooperative and egalitarian society in order to pursue its own goals of dominance and resource acquisition, humans respond to these unnatural stresses and the result is, predictably, a degeneration of cooperation, trust, sharing, mutual respect, and psychological and physical well-being.
For example, one could make the point that black slaves in the 19th century were considered (and largely observed to be) more pathetic, less intelligent and more brutish than whites. Slaves, it scarcely needs to be said, weren't educated to the same degree, were made to labor under grueling conditions, were made to endure atrocious and dehumanizing treatment, and had inferiority essentially instilled into them their entire lives, thus predisposing them to conform to and confirm the expectations of whites. Such was the White Man's Burden that a black slave would scarcely be able to feed, shelter, or clothe him or herself if not for the slave owner. I would venture to say that the characteristics of these slaves can give us few useful insights into the nature of sub-Saharan Africans or black people in general, and one can easily find fault and bias (and an agenda) in the white slave owners who argued otherwise. Above all, I don't think there are many who would argue that the slaves' artificial dependence on slave owners for absolutely all their basic needs and protection justified the perpetuation of slavery. One could very well compare Hobbes' view on human nature to those of American slave owners on blacks and quickly conclude how flawed and biased those views are.
However, the more accurate analogy, I think, is that of an industrial poultry factory--the kind that produces the vast majority of chicken and turkey meat destined for supermarket shelves and restaurant kitchens throughout the United States. Tens of thousands of birds are crammed together in each windowless shed on your average industrial chicken farm, with total US annual production at about eight million birds. When they arrive, they will already have had their beaks partially removed to prevent them from pecking madly at each other out of sheer frustration. It hardly needs to be explained that this practice is not done for their own safety, but rather to prevent damage to their meat. Each bird will, at maximum shed capacity, get about 130 square inches of space. Not that they would be able to enjoy it if they had more, since broiler chickens have been bred such that their bodies grow far too quickly for their heart and legs to keep up with, rendering each one essentially immobile beyond just a few struggling steps at a time. Their whole lives are arranged around consuming feed and sitting in their own choking ammonia stench. Birds are fed antibiotics to keep them alive long enough for them to reach their slaughter weight (about forty-five days), and were formerly also fed growth hormones, a practice that was banned in the 1950s. Now, if one were to try and summarize the "chicken condition" or draw conclusions about "chicken nature" solely by examining factory-farmed chickens in isolation; that is, without considering the influence of their imposed surroundings, one would have to conclude that chickens are disgusting, inherently violent, inherently sickly, unable to attain decent health and hygiene on their own, and intrinsically incapable of producing social order on their own. Their observed tendency to hurt each other justifies the removal of their beaks and ought to be viewed as perhaps a necessary evil, but perhaps even a boon, a gift of sorts, by the higher authority. Their susceptibility to infection necessitates the use of antibiotics, which is also another wondrous gift. In short, the plain inability of these animals to provide for any of their own basic needs, much less to thrive on their own, practically mandates that they be kept and cared for in industrial factory farms. After all, what else besides an industrial scale operation could keep so many birds alive, however imperfectly? The necessity of an external source of domination is crystal clear.
Such an analysis is, of course, absurd. We readily have populations of wild and feral chickens for comparison. Wild chickens are not arbitrarily violent to their flockmates, and their penchant for cleanliness is impeccable. They are highly social and are particularly doting mothers and protective fathers, and have no trouble feeding themselves or in general staying healthy, even without the advantage of troughs of feed and antibiotics. If one were to seek to understand "chicken nature", the logical way to go about it would be to study chickens in the wild, i.e., in the environment for which they are evolved and in which their adaptations work perfectly for them, not constantly against them. It would be insane to consider the factory-farmed chickens anything even close to exhibiting natural behavior. What's more, no amount of external intervention in the form of physical alterations, veterinary care, antibiotics, dietary improvements, or environmental enhancements will improve the fundamental well-being of factory chickens, because their well-being was never the point of the factory in the first place.
As civilized humans, we, too, are similarly disarmed and confined, made to be utterly dependent for our lives on the very system that causes us misery in order to exploit us. The crowding that we endure in our urban environments, face to face daily with strangers, is mentally stressful for us just as the crowding in poultry sheds is for chickens. Crowding doesn't benefit either group, but is convenient for the dominant system, and that's why it persists. The chickens' obesity and excessive consumption, much like our own, likewise does not benefit either group, only the dominant system. Nothing of civilization benefits you or the world upon which all life ultimately depends, and to argue it as otherwise, to see it as otherwise, is to endorse your own ruin.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Technology: A Daoist View
"Technology is neutral". This pernicious fallacy undergirds the destruction of our world and ourselves. People actually believe that a computer can be neutral, as though its use does not already imply a host of values and pre-determined behavior, as though a PC does not already prefigure a sedentary lifestyle that has the social, political, military, and economic leverage to commandeer natural resources and deprive them from others, convert it into electricity via pollution-generating factories that themselves already imply the wage-enslavement of disenfranchised miners and dyspeptic white-collared engineers alike. As though a computer did not require that all the spontaneity and wholesomeness of humanity be jettisoned for the sake of a more efficient, clock-work production process. As though industry and government did not have to conspire to subtly (or not so subtly) manipulate parents and children from an early age to pursue high-prestige science and technology jobs ("Get kids into science early! Give them the head start they need for SUCCESS!") to ensure that software engineers, programmers, hardware manufacturers, and the whole bevy of varied specialists are produced with each generation, all to guarantee that computers continue to exist, or as though this specialization doesn't necessarily imply the existence of a government to enforce it in the first place. As though children naturally want to grow up to raise machines. As though using the internet to connect to others does not further enable the atrophy of face-to-face interaction, just as the existence of municipally-filtered water and now bottled water enable the ruin of our streams and rivers (nobody drinks from them anymore so no one pays attention or gives a shit; over 90% of America's waterways are non-potable now and no one cares because that's not where drinking water comes from anyway--we all know drinking water comes from Coca-Cola and Pepsi or otherwise Fiji and wherever Evian comes from).
The very term "technological progress" should already tell us that technology is not neutral. If a technological innovation changes the way people do things, that, by the most basic definition of the word, indicates that it is in no way 'neutral'. So many innovations have been hailed, giddily, as world-changing--well, fossil fuel technology is literally changing our climate, computers were supposed to change the way the industrialized world lived, antibiotics were supposed to change the way we died, and so on and so forth. Changing things is, after all, the whole point of pursuing technology. And yet, these same technophiles insist that these world-changing innovations are neutral--apparently, something that can change people's lives in fundamental and often unexpected and undesirable ways is still neutral. I would have to ask, then--what would be considered NOT neutral?
However, I suppose many would be quick to point out that this is not what is meant by 'neutral' when discussing technology. Rather, it seems that by 'neutral' one means that any given technology may be used to either benefit or harm people--it all depends on how it's used. This is an extremely comforting belief and is indeed ideologically necessary for civilization. Unfortunately, the benefit and harm that result from any given technical innovation has very little to do with how it's used, just whether or not it is used at all.
Let's examine the question through a Daoist lens. The philosophical Daoism of Laozi's Dao De Jing has strong anarcho-primitivist themes, though it still presupposes civilization to a large extent. One maxim of the Dao De Jing says that the world cannot be improved:
Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.
--Dao De Jing Chapter 29 (trans. by Stephen Mitchell)
One example of this can be found in the meteoric rise and now impending collapse of antibiotics. Only one year after Penicillin was introduced into commercial use in 1945, fourteen percent of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria were already resistant to it. By 1950, the figure rose to fifty-nine percent, and by 1995 all but five percent were resistant. In 1999, a mere forty-four years after penicillin entered commercial production, the first Staph strain found to be resistant to all existing antibiotics was discovered. Currently, western medicine is losing its war against antibiotic resistant bacteria, the enfants terribles of antibiotics technology. To wage this war at all is to already be losing it. Resistance in bacteria cannot be solved because it's not a problem in the first place. It is a necessary adaptation in bacteria to help maintain ecosystem balance for the sake of all organisms, not simply the ones who insist on living against natural principles and foolishly believe that technology will allow them to defy the consequences. The eradication of bacteria is not a sane goal, as literally all life on the planet depends entirely on their existence. Nothing could replace bacteria. If people are horrified at the deaths that bacterial infections have caused in the past, then they are the ones out of touch with nature, not bacteria:
Heaven-and-Earth is not sentimental;
It treats all things as straw-dogs.
--Dao De Jing Chapter 5 (trans. by John C.H. Wu)
The only way to thrive in a world completely determined by natural principles is to live in accordance with those principles, not to try and transcend or subjugate them. Nature is not trying to exterminate humans via bacterial infections, but rather attempts to optimize her ecosystems, sometimes through the actions of bacteria. It is commonly felt that forager infant mortality rates are exceedingly high (40-50%), and that modern medicine, with the aid of antibiotics, has brought infant mortality down to a much lower rate. Presumably, most people believe that the ideal would be an infant mortality rate of zero, with each child being given a chance at life. However, if foragers have had a relatively stable rate of infant mortality as people like to think, then for two million years the rest of the biosphere has calibrated itself to that rate and the implications it had for human population and stress on the environment. Nature does not feel that a 50% mortality rate is high. Let's try thinking outside the anthropocentric box for a moment. A mature oak tree, for example, will yield 70,000-150,000 acorns in a good year. Virtually each one of these acorns has the potential to grow into a five hundred year-old oak tree, and it's important to the natural balance that it is so, because at least some of the acorns must replace dying oak trees, and the tree doesn't know ahead of time which ones will be eaten. Every acorn, if given the chance, will try to germinate, to sprout, to grow. Just as important to the forest, however, is the fact that most of them won't get that chance. Most are eaten by the other denizens of the forest and serve a purpose outside of propagation--like everything else in an ecosystem, the acorns and their parent oak trees only serve their own interests in so far as it supports the entire ecosystem. The "death" of the majority of the acorns, like the death of half of all infants born in non-agricultural societies, is a critical and supportive aspect of life for the larger ecosystem, which in the end benefits the oak trees and the people, too. It is not necessary for the oak trees to "understand" this principle, nor is it necessary for people to do so either. The important thing is that there's really not anything either oak trees or pre-industrial peoples can do to misguidedly alter it. Instead, the reality of death guides adaptation. In the case of humans, it causes societies to develop a cultural maturity about death and its inevitability, a maturity that has largely disappeared with the advent of antibiotics and life-supporting technologies, leading to strange notions that nature somehow has to be improved, and that death is an arbitrary, unacceptable tyranny. Unrealistic notions about life and death both are caused by and in turn themselves encourage attempts to master nature through technical means.
Philosophical Daoism holds that nature is already an optimized state and all things must stay calibrated to nature's parameters (the Dao or "Way") or else the system deteriorates in some way and must strive again to recover harmony. One aspect of the system cannot somehow "succeed" at the expense of the rest of the system. This would be akin to the attempt to eradicate infectious disease via antibiotics, or saying your immune system is "fitter" and "more successful" than your lungs during an anaphylactic reaction. The body's immune system would be undermining its own support system if it damaged or killed the body by inappropriately constricting airflow. It wouldn't make sense to favor one aspect of the body over another. It's the bigger picture, the health of the body as a whole, that is important, and various parts of the body wax and wane at different times in a unified effort to support the body. A blood cell will eventually get worn out and need to be destroyed by the spleen. No one mourns the natural death of their blood cells or curses the recycling function of the spleen because these things are understood to be necessary for maintaining homeostasis, the key to health. It makes no sense to champion just one aspect of the body and promote it at the expense of the rest. Philosophical Daoism perceives the human body as a microcosm, a hologram of the larger universe, and therefore, it does not consider the natural death of any person or thing to be tragic and something to be prevented if possible, just as in the microcosm of the body one would not consider the natural recycling of old blood cells by the spleen to be cruel. Of course, ill health happens all the time, mostly in the highly unbalanced environment of modern civilization, so it is not impossible to deviate from the Dao, but when it happens, disharmony is the reflexive consequence. However, having lost touch with the Dao ever since the European Enlightenment, industrialized peoples unsurprisingly fail to perceive an overarching, integrated bigger picture, and their culture holds fast to a belief in progress that at its core is psychotic.
Psychopaths don't believe the other people around them are real, and so they don't extend the same status to them as they do to themselves, making it very easy to objectify, exploit, and harm others. This mental and spiritual illness is most institutionalized in industrial civilization, though it is the basic mentality in all forms of domestication. No one participating in the modern global economy would think to ask the forest for permission to chop it down, and no one would thank the forest afterward either. No one thinks there is anyone to thank--the personhood of the forest is not a concept that exists in modern industrial culture. This is contrary to the feelings of the vast majority of pre-industrial peoples, including pre-industrial agriculturalists, who cross-culturally regarded the elements of their environments as equals or as parents. If you are dealing with equals or parents, you cannot just take what you want but instead must ask for things and reciprocate when you receive them. Of course, thanking the earth for sustenance or supplicating the spirits for assistance may not actually have any real-world effects. This is really beside the point, which is that this mentality serves as a cultural check against wanton exploitation of the rest of the world, safeguarding it from and for these peoples. A healthy relationship with the world, the relationship we were evolved to have, is based on seeing it as a source of company, succor, and mirth; the scientific relationship with the world is very explicitly based on exploitation, mastery, and enslavement.
To say that humans are of nature and therefore anything they do is natural is utterly disingenuous. It's possible for siblings to mate, but I don't know one could argue that that is perfectly normal and natural just because it's possible. It's possible for a fish to be put on dry land, but even a child knows that that fish's natural environment is water. To argue that there can be no inherent baselines for anything is just false. Humans are no different from fish or any other aspect of nature in this sense--just as a fish is evolved to thrive best in a certain environment, so are humans. Any changes to that environment must occur slowly enough for evolution to have a chance to respond. Humans require a human-scale world wherein their evolution, their "human nature", works perfectly for them, not constantly against them. And yet, the whole purpose, the whole appeal, the whole promise of technology is to take humans out of their environments of evolutionary adaptation--essentially, to find ways to take the fish out of the water so that it will have the chance to see dry land.
Modern technology's entire purpose is to do away with a human-scale world, to change things from how they were, away from the parameters that humans need to thrive. Obviously, there would be no point to technology if it didn't change anything--that is, if it really were neutral. There can be no debate as to whether technology is good, bad, or neutral. Technology will ALWAYS be pernicious because, regardless of personal feelings or ambitions for discovery and knowledge, motivations of greed or benevolence, it is beyond debate that humans are evolved to thrive only within certain parameters, and no matter how much some people may enjoy the novelty or knowledge, in the end we cannot fare well when those parameters are systematically transgressed, no matter what noble justifications are used. In light of all the evidence available from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, medicine, and biology, the readily available information about both past and extant forager societies, the sheer fact that humans have lived in anarchist forager societies for over ninety-nine percent of their existence and that we are all still physically, mentally, and spiritually adapted for that mode of life, how can technology, whose purpose is explicitly to cause change, be neutral, beneficial, sane, or ethical?
The very term "technological progress" should already tell us that technology is not neutral. If a technological innovation changes the way people do things, that, by the most basic definition of the word, indicates that it is in no way 'neutral'. So many innovations have been hailed, giddily, as world-changing--well, fossil fuel technology is literally changing our climate, computers were supposed to change the way the industrialized world lived, antibiotics were supposed to change the way we died, and so on and so forth. Changing things is, after all, the whole point of pursuing technology. And yet, these same technophiles insist that these world-changing innovations are neutral--apparently, something that can change people's lives in fundamental and often unexpected and undesirable ways is still neutral. I would have to ask, then--what would be considered NOT neutral?
However, I suppose many would be quick to point out that this is not what is meant by 'neutral' when discussing technology. Rather, it seems that by 'neutral' one means that any given technology may be used to either benefit or harm people--it all depends on how it's used. This is an extremely comforting belief and is indeed ideologically necessary for civilization. Unfortunately, the benefit and harm that result from any given technical innovation has very little to do with how it's used, just whether or not it is used at all.
Let's examine the question through a Daoist lens. The philosophical Daoism of Laozi's Dao De Jing has strong anarcho-primitivist themes, though it still presupposes civilization to a large extent. One maxim of the Dao De Jing says that the world cannot be improved:
Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done.
The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.
--Dao De Jing Chapter 29 (trans. by Stephen Mitchell)
One example of this can be found in the meteoric rise and now impending collapse of antibiotics. Only one year after Penicillin was introduced into commercial use in 1945, fourteen percent of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria were already resistant to it. By 1950, the figure rose to fifty-nine percent, and by 1995 all but five percent were resistant. In 1999, a mere forty-four years after penicillin entered commercial production, the first Staph strain found to be resistant to all existing antibiotics was discovered. Currently, western medicine is losing its war against antibiotic resistant bacteria, the enfants terribles of antibiotics technology. To wage this war at all is to already be losing it. Resistance in bacteria cannot be solved because it's not a problem in the first place. It is a necessary adaptation in bacteria to help maintain ecosystem balance for the sake of all organisms, not simply the ones who insist on living against natural principles and foolishly believe that technology will allow them to defy the consequences. The eradication of bacteria is not a sane goal, as literally all life on the planet depends entirely on their existence. Nothing could replace bacteria. If people are horrified at the deaths that bacterial infections have caused in the past, then they are the ones out of touch with nature, not bacteria:
Heaven-and-Earth is not sentimental;
It treats all things as straw-dogs.
--Dao De Jing Chapter 5 (trans. by John C.H. Wu)
The only way to thrive in a world completely determined by natural principles is to live in accordance with those principles, not to try and transcend or subjugate them. Nature is not trying to exterminate humans via bacterial infections, but rather attempts to optimize her ecosystems, sometimes through the actions of bacteria. It is commonly felt that forager infant mortality rates are exceedingly high (40-50%), and that modern medicine, with the aid of antibiotics, has brought infant mortality down to a much lower rate. Presumably, most people believe that the ideal would be an infant mortality rate of zero, with each child being given a chance at life. However, if foragers have had a relatively stable rate of infant mortality as people like to think, then for two million years the rest of the biosphere has calibrated itself to that rate and the implications it had for human population and stress on the environment. Nature does not feel that a 50% mortality rate is high. Let's try thinking outside the anthropocentric box for a moment. A mature oak tree, for example, will yield 70,000-150,000 acorns in a good year. Virtually each one of these acorns has the potential to grow into a five hundred year-old oak tree, and it's important to the natural balance that it is so, because at least some of the acorns must replace dying oak trees, and the tree doesn't know ahead of time which ones will be eaten. Every acorn, if given the chance, will try to germinate, to sprout, to grow. Just as important to the forest, however, is the fact that most of them won't get that chance. Most are eaten by the other denizens of the forest and serve a purpose outside of propagation--like everything else in an ecosystem, the acorns and their parent oak trees only serve their own interests in so far as it supports the entire ecosystem. The "death" of the majority of the acorns, like the death of half of all infants born in non-agricultural societies, is a critical and supportive aspect of life for the larger ecosystem, which in the end benefits the oak trees and the people, too. It is not necessary for the oak trees to "understand" this principle, nor is it necessary for people to do so either. The important thing is that there's really not anything either oak trees or pre-industrial peoples can do to misguidedly alter it. Instead, the reality of death guides adaptation. In the case of humans, it causes societies to develop a cultural maturity about death and its inevitability, a maturity that has largely disappeared with the advent of antibiotics and life-supporting technologies, leading to strange notions that nature somehow has to be improved, and that death is an arbitrary, unacceptable tyranny. Unrealistic notions about life and death both are caused by and in turn themselves encourage attempts to master nature through technical means.
Philosophical Daoism holds that nature is already an optimized state and all things must stay calibrated to nature's parameters (the Dao or "Way") or else the system deteriorates in some way and must strive again to recover harmony. One aspect of the system cannot somehow "succeed" at the expense of the rest of the system. This would be akin to the attempt to eradicate infectious disease via antibiotics, or saying your immune system is "fitter" and "more successful" than your lungs during an anaphylactic reaction. The body's immune system would be undermining its own support system if it damaged or killed the body by inappropriately constricting airflow. It wouldn't make sense to favor one aspect of the body over another. It's the bigger picture, the health of the body as a whole, that is important, and various parts of the body wax and wane at different times in a unified effort to support the body. A blood cell will eventually get worn out and need to be destroyed by the spleen. No one mourns the natural death of their blood cells or curses the recycling function of the spleen because these things are understood to be necessary for maintaining homeostasis, the key to health. It makes no sense to champion just one aspect of the body and promote it at the expense of the rest. Philosophical Daoism perceives the human body as a microcosm, a hologram of the larger universe, and therefore, it does not consider the natural death of any person or thing to be tragic and something to be prevented if possible, just as in the microcosm of the body one would not consider the natural recycling of old blood cells by the spleen to be cruel. Of course, ill health happens all the time, mostly in the highly unbalanced environment of modern civilization, so it is not impossible to deviate from the Dao, but when it happens, disharmony is the reflexive consequence. However, having lost touch with the Dao ever since the European Enlightenment, industrialized peoples unsurprisingly fail to perceive an overarching, integrated bigger picture, and their culture holds fast to a belief in progress that at its core is psychotic.
Psychopaths don't believe the other people around them are real, and so they don't extend the same status to them as they do to themselves, making it very easy to objectify, exploit, and harm others. This mental and spiritual illness is most institutionalized in industrial civilization, though it is the basic mentality in all forms of domestication. No one participating in the modern global economy would think to ask the forest for permission to chop it down, and no one would thank the forest afterward either. No one thinks there is anyone to thank--the personhood of the forest is not a concept that exists in modern industrial culture. This is contrary to the feelings of the vast majority of pre-industrial peoples, including pre-industrial agriculturalists, who cross-culturally regarded the elements of their environments as equals or as parents. If you are dealing with equals or parents, you cannot just take what you want but instead must ask for things and reciprocate when you receive them. Of course, thanking the earth for sustenance or supplicating the spirits for assistance may not actually have any real-world effects. This is really beside the point, which is that this mentality serves as a cultural check against wanton exploitation of the rest of the world, safeguarding it from and for these peoples. A healthy relationship with the world, the relationship we were evolved to have, is based on seeing it as a source of company, succor, and mirth; the scientific relationship with the world is very explicitly based on exploitation, mastery, and enslavement.
To say that humans are of nature and therefore anything they do is natural is utterly disingenuous. It's possible for siblings to mate, but I don't know one could argue that that is perfectly normal and natural just because it's possible. It's possible for a fish to be put on dry land, but even a child knows that that fish's natural environment is water. To argue that there can be no inherent baselines for anything is just false. Humans are no different from fish or any other aspect of nature in this sense--just as a fish is evolved to thrive best in a certain environment, so are humans. Any changes to that environment must occur slowly enough for evolution to have a chance to respond. Humans require a human-scale world wherein their evolution, their "human nature", works perfectly for them, not constantly against them. And yet, the whole purpose, the whole appeal, the whole promise of technology is to take humans out of their environments of evolutionary adaptation--essentially, to find ways to take the fish out of the water so that it will have the chance to see dry land.
Modern technology's entire purpose is to do away with a human-scale world, to change things from how they were, away from the parameters that humans need to thrive. Obviously, there would be no point to technology if it didn't change anything--that is, if it really were neutral. There can be no debate as to whether technology is good, bad, or neutral. Technology will ALWAYS be pernicious because, regardless of personal feelings or ambitions for discovery and knowledge, motivations of greed or benevolence, it is beyond debate that humans are evolved to thrive only within certain parameters, and no matter how much some people may enjoy the novelty or knowledge, in the end we cannot fare well when those parameters are systematically transgressed, no matter what noble justifications are used. In light of all the evidence available from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, medicine, and biology, the readily available information about both past and extant forager societies, the sheer fact that humans have lived in anarchist forager societies for over ninety-nine percent of their existence and that we are all still physically, mentally, and spiritually adapted for that mode of life, how can technology, whose purpose is explicitly to cause change, be neutral, beneficial, sane, or ethical?
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