Philosopher views

HIGH TECHNOLOGY IS IMMORAL AND WRONG

1. TWO MORAL PROBLEMS EXIST WITH HIGH-TECHNOLOGY

Kirkpatrick Sale, author, Secretary of the E.F. Schumacher Society, interviewed by Kevin Kelly, WIRED, June 1995, page 167.

Quite apart from the environmental and medical evils associated with them being produced and used, there are two moral judgments against computers. One is that computerization enables the large forces of our civilization to operate more swiftly and efficiently in their pernicious goals of making money and producing things. And, however much individuals may feel that there are industrial benefits in their lives from the use of the computer (that is to say, things are easier, swifter), these are industrial virtues that may not be virtues in another morality. And secondly, in the course of using these, these forces are destroying nature with more speed and efficiency than ever before.

Kirkpatrick Sale, author, Secretary of the E.F. Schumacher Society, interviewed by Kevin Kelly, WIRED, June 1995, page 167.

There is no question that jobs are created, so long as an economy can keep growing. But it’s not the technology, or it’s only indirectly and accidentally the technology, that creates them. It’s warlike, empire, government expansion, resources exploitation, ecological exhaustion, consumption, and the manufacture of needs. Today, in the second Industrial Revolution, it’s just as it was back in the first. The technology itself simply does put people out of jobs.
3. WE MUST OPPOSE EVER-ADVANCING TECHNOLOGY

Kirkpatrick Sale, author, Secretary of the E.F. Schumacher Society, interviewed by Kevin Kelly, WIRED, June 1995, page 167.

Those of us who oppose may be easily accommodated by this society, since society has no fear that we’re going to have the effect that we desire to have. But it is possible for individuals to act out, either alone or with colleagues and neighbors, their opposition to certain technologies. This has been done in many instances - from nuclear power to the Dalkon shield. We can as individuals say, This technology is wrong and harmful and we ought to act against it. That technology over there seems at the moment not to be wrong and harmful, so we can either use it or not as we wish. I urge people to take a clear-headed look at what is in front of them, and not to feel guilty if they reject something, and to be able to say, with a rational explanation, This is wrong, I will not myself buy into it, and I would urge others not to buy into it for the following reasons.
4. A HUMAN-SCALE ALTERNATIVE COULD USE CURRENT BENIGN TECHNOLOGIES Kirkpatrick Sale, author, Secretary of the E.F. Schumacher Society, HUMAN SCALE, 1980, page 39. Moreover, the human-scale future can take advantage of current technology, which for the first time in human development permits the creation of smaller units without sacrificing any of the clear benefits of modern living--in fact with healthier and more congenial settings, one could reasonably expect, and with greater access to material comforts for more people. Provided it was kept on a small scale and made simple, safe, and controllable, modern technology could be used without the all the perils that accompany it on a large scale; though both are the products of contemporary advances, there is a qualitative difference between a desktop calculator and the space shuttle, or between solar collectors and nuclear plants. This allows for the first time an answer to the nagging question that has been thrown up to proponents of egalitarian societies since the time of Plato--But who will collect the garbage?--the implication being that the trash removers are always accorded the lowest ranks of any society. Simple. Putting already developed technology to appropriate use, it is now possible to have community garbage-collection systems that channel wastes from homes and shops on pipelines feeding into a community recycling center, where they may be automatically sorted to type and sent to separate compartments to be processed by simple machines and to be made available again in the form of usable raw materials. And not only is that an egalitarian solution, it is a communitarian and ecological one as well.

PEOPLE INHERENTLY WILL TRY TO DECENTRALIZE

1. HUMANS INNATELY CRAVE DECENTRALIZATION

Kirkpatrick Sale, author, Secretary of the E.F. Schumacher Society, PUTTING POWER IN ITS PLACE, edited by Judith and Christopher Plant, 1992, page 22.

A similar kind of decentralism, a recurrent urge toward separatism, independence, and local autonomy rather than agglomeration and concentration, exists in human patterns as well. Throughout all human history, even in the past several hundred years, people have tended to live in separate and independent small groups, a “fragmentation of human society” that Harold Isaacs, the venerated professor of international affairs at MIT, has described as something akin to “a pervasive force in human affairs.” Even when nations and empires have arisen, he notes, they have no staying power against the innate human drive toward decentralism. “The record shows that there could be all kinds of lags, that declines could take a long time and falls run long overdue, but that these conditions could never be indefinitely maintained. Under external or internal pressures--usually both--authority was eroded, legitimacy challenged, and in wars, collapse, and revolution, the system of power redrawn.”

Propaganda of the nation-state to the contrary, once you begin to re-read history with an attention to this persistence of the decentralist impetus you begin to see everywhere that the existence of the anti-authoritarian, independent, self-regulating, local community is every bit as basic to the human record as the existence of the centralized, imperial, hierarchical state--and far more ancient, more durable, and more widespread~