Deneen on technology, culture and modernity

Whenever I read a post like this, lamaenting the lost past, I think of the many Amish, old order Mennonite and old German Baptist Brethern (Dunkers), in my home county in Kansas, and how they have struggled to adpat to technology while keeping their agrarian, Christian identity.

Within these groups and between them their are many differences. Some drive cars, but cover over or remove the radios. Some eschew cars, but affirm tractors, especially those with a fast road gear so they can drive around as if they had a car. Some will have electricty in their barns, but not their houses, and some both. Some will have indoor plumbing, some not. Some used to not put warning lights on their carriages, but several tragic rear end collisions put an end to that.

What is interesting is that they too have lost the kind of knowledge whose loss Deneen laments. In my county, for example, I know of no Amish or Mennonites remaining who uses draft horses or oxen to farm. The whole history and knowledge of how to breed, train, and use horses and oxen for farming has been or is being quickly lost.

My point is that it is always a matter of degree when it comes to technology, and is it just pointless nostalgia to think that any time can go backwards. The technology of typewriters and typesetting, for example, are lost to us; whole rafts of skills that people devoted their whole lives to, dead when they die. (I remember when, as a boy, I saw our local newspaper being set up with a hot lead typesetting machine. How amazing and wonderful it was. All gone forever, except in museum settings.)

There is nothing that can be done about any of this, so why argue whether something "should" be done. Even the Mennonite groups, who are as intentionlly thoughtful about this as anyone, and extremely small in number, find themselves gaining techhology and losing other knowledge as they do. Such is the story of human history, arrow makers lost out to the bullet makers, carriage makers to the car makers, and on and on. The knowlege of gas motors replaces the knowledge of harnesses and soon the knowlege of fuel cells and advanced batteries will replace that.

So a post like Deneen's just seems pointless to me.

I am reminded of the German philosophers who similarly remarked concerning modernity and technology:

[Modernity], wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

[Modernity] has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

[Modernity] has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

[Modernity] has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

[Modernity] cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the [modern] epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases [modernity] over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

[Modernity] has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

[Modernity], by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the [modern] mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become [modern] themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

[Modernity] has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of [modern people], the East on the West.

[Modernity] keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.

Well, Your Name, Marx was right about capitalism (modernity). He was a brilliant diagnostician. That doesn't mean he was right about the cure.

@Scott Walker 3:43 p.m: I agree, of course. It is just interesting to see substantially the same cultural critique of capitalism come up again and again in different quarters.

(The school of Marxist thought that affirms Marx's cultural critique of capitalism -- the "young Marx" -- while rejecting his economic and revolutionary prescriptions -- the "later Marx" -- is sometimes called Marxist humanism. There is a very good book by Marshall Berman called Adventures In Marxism that explores some of these themes.)

This appeared in the summer issue of The City, by the way, so it's not entirely new.

Apart from that, I second lancelot lamar's comments.

It's a good thing the lights won't be going out any time soon; it's a malevolent fantasy to think they will.

My grandmother could do just about all the things on this list as well. She spent more than 70 years on a small family farm. Some of the best times in my life were spent there with my grandparents.

She loved the things that technology made possible. Electric stoves, washing machines, flush toilets, pipeline milking machines, silo unloaders, air conditioning. Polio vaccine, antibiotics, novacaine, high speed dental drills. Tractors, hay balers, cars to make it possible to get to and from town, snowplows.

I suspect many of the people whose existence in the past we discuss would be more than happy to trade places if given the opportunity.

To be fair, let's talk about what "we" know now that "they" didn't - knee surgery; neonatal intensive care; air conditioning; refrigeration; sewage treatment plants; a life expectancy twice that of the early 19th century. It slices both ways.

I agree that when systems fail, everybody suffers. You probably could say the same thing back 10,000 years ago, when the big game animals of Europe and the Middle East were disappearing, and a few people were trying some radical experiments with plant cultivation. The culture loss from the switch from hunter/gathering and pastoralism to farming was probably equally troublesome. Those of us who are left survived the transition, but if you believe geneticist Bryan Sykes, not everyone survived (especially the gluten-intolerant.)

It has been pointed out that in primitive cultures in other countries, the natives themselves jump at the chance to ditch their old traditions when electricity, modern machinery, etc. come to their village. This often disappoints sentimental westerners. People often idealize what it's like to live in primitive cultures, except for the people who actually have to live in it.