You may have heard the liberal aphorism, "Libertarians are always half right." Their sometimes obsessive free marketism aside, libertarians can be particularly good at pointing out the flaws and excesses of leftist thinking -- like those that the libertarian You may have heard the liberal aphorism, "Libertarians are always half right." Their sometimes obsessive free marketism aside, libertarians can be particularly good at pointing out the flaws and excesses of leftist thinking -- like those that the libertarian Reason Magazine noted are on full display at the oxymoronic website www.primitivism.com.
"Our site is an exploration into primitivism and related viewpoints from anthropology, Luddism, anarchy and the ongoing critique of civilization," reads the site's heading, just above the image of a Chewbacca-like noble savage. Along with explorations of hairy topics like "Hellhounds, Werewolves and the Germanic Underground," Primitivism.com posts essays on Noam Chomsky, attacks on the Monsanto and Fox corporations, and links to the radical environmental group Earthfirst!, whose magazine publishes a column, titled "Dear Ned Ludd", filled with charming advice on sabotaging genetically engineered crops.
Despite an alarming fondness for Ted Kaczynski -- who is interviewed on the site -- the sentiments expressed on Primitivism.com aren't nearly as distant from mainstream liberalism as they should be. As the July 2001 cover story of the libertarian magazine Reason observes, the site recently hosted a Web interview with the well-known lefty technophobe Kirkpatrick Sale, a contributing editor to The Nation and author of Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age. Sounding a lot like a muck-farming peasant from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Sale explained to Primitivism.com why technology is never neutral: "A progressive nation-state capitalism will produce one kind of technology, a decentralized tribal anarcho-communalism an entirely different kind."
Reason's smart cover piece -- titled "Attack of the Neo-Luddites" by Ronald Bailey -- is dedicated to debunking the scare-mongering practiced by Sale, Jeremy Rifkin of the Foundation on Economic Trends, Vanada Shiva of the India-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy, and others among civilization's discontents. All of these web-literate computer- and automobile-haters convened last February under the auspices of the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), which was holding a "Teach-In on Technology and Globalization." There, all the standard complaints were aired. In essence: Technology, closely tied to corporate consumerism, is being forced upon those who did not choose it; and as a result, a simpler, better way of life is being destroyed. Reason's Bailey calls this event of 1,400 attendants the birth of the "global, organized neo-Luddite movement."
Granted, Bailey's dire proclamation has an element of hyperbole to it. The bashing of environmentalist techno-phobes is a time-honored libertarian leitmotif; you get plenty of it from the Cato Institute and the
Competitive Enterprise Institute
, for example. Still, when it comes to closely related issues of technology and progress, liberals could take a lesson or two from the latest issue of Reason. Ludditism, after all, is finally a deeply conservative impulse, the stark opposite of true progressivism. Indeed, distrust of technology is fundamentally reactionary, rooted in an unhelpful mixture of blind fear of the future and uncritical nostalgia for the past.
Yet as Ronald Bailey's article demonstrates, it's becoming increasingly difficult to separate left-leaning critiques of corporate wrongdoing from knee-jerk condemnations of potentially beneficial technologies. In short, on technology issues liberals concerned about globalization are falling in with Luddites, when instead they should be closer to libertarians. The examples are myriad. Last year, The Nation published an award-winning investigative report titled "The Secret History of Lead" by Jamie Lincoln Kitman, which exposed how corporations like General Motors and DuPont colluded 75 years ago to put lead, a "known poison," into gasoline for a profit. (Lead was only fully phased out of gasoline in the U.S. in 1986.) The revelations provided by Kitman are stunning, but he and The Nation push things much too far. Lead's "secret history," Kitman's article asserts, has contemporary relevance not just because lead remains in gasoline in the third world, but because today "commercial interests ask us to sanction genetically modified food on the basis of their own scientific assurances, just as the merchants of lead once did."
This Ludd-tinged analogy is very misleading. As Kitman reports, in 1985 the Environmental Protection Agency found that an average of 5,000 Americans died annually of heart disease caused by lead before the poison was removed from gasoline. By contrast, the Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin -- hardly a spokesperson for "commercial interests" -- observed recently in the New York Review of Books that "As yet no one that we know of has been poisoned by a transgenic plant." And since Lewontin's writing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that, media circus aside, the accidental release of genetically modified StarLink corn into taco shells had no adverse health effects (those who reported allergic reactions to GM proteins in the food were found to have no symptoms). As in the case of cell phones, there is simply no convincing data to date suggesting that genetically modified foods are dangerous. Granted, these are relatively new technologies that should be studied further. But the Luddite left calls not for research, but for prohibiting new technologies altogether.
The take-home point for liberals is that Kitman's exposé of the history of lead loses some of its credibility because of his weak analogy with genetic engineering. This is just the kind of thing that market-sympathizing libertarian types will seize upon -- and they'll be right to do so. Just because Monsanto is a corporation and happens to be in the genetic engineering business doesn't make genetically modified foods automatically poisonous, or comparable to cigarettes, guns, lead, or other liberal bugaboos. But if you're in the mindset of distrusting corporations and vaguely suspicious of technology, it's easy to jump on the GM-bashing bandwagon -- science notwithstanding.
The Nation is hardly the only example of a left-leaning magazine with technophobic tendencies; Mother Jones has struck a similar note on genetically modified foods on many occasions. But good industry critics in particular need to disassociate themselves from such views, especially from radical activists who oppose genetically modified food on the spooky but illogical grounds that it's "unnatural." Some are already doing so: Michael Jacobson, head of the consumer food-watch group Center for Science in the Public Interest, has leaped to the defense of biotechnology, which he described in the Wall Street Journal last January as, "a powerful tool to increase food production, protect the environment, improve the healthfulness of foods, and produce valuable pharmaceuticals."
And it's not merely the potential health benefits of genetically modified foods. Liberals should side with libertarians on such technologies as a way of undermining the dangerously illiberal localist and traditionalist sympathies of the neo-Luddite bunch. As Reason's Bailey writes:
The neo-Luddite commitment to a radical cultural relativism that privileges primitive, native, traditional, and indigenous cultures puts them in an awkward position because many such cultures practice -- or continue to practice -- customswhich even the most sympathetic neo-Luddite must find odious.
As examples, Bailey cites female circumcision in Africa and India's caste system. These brutal folkways may be just as authentic and indigenous as native eating habits -- but that doesn't make them morally acceptable, or something that those in developed countries should turn a blind eye on. By the same logic, if genetically engineered foods like yellow rice can feed the world's poor, then spreading these technologies may itself be a moral imperative, no matter the harm to traditional ways of obtaining nourishment.
The neo-Luddites don't always seem to revel in the authentic cultures they purport to celebrate. Take Vandana Shiva, whose Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy seems -- at least from its URL (www.vshiva.net) -- to be something of a one-woman show. Lewontin skewered Shiva's recent book Stolen Harvest:
Shiva is what is called a "cult figure" for opponents of GMOs, but her book will give a detached observer more the impression of a cheerleader. She might have used her knowledge of Indian agriculture and her immense prestige among environmentalists to provide a credible up-to-date analysis of the effects of agricultural technology and market structures on third-world economies. Instead, she has produced a conjunction of religious morality, undeveloped assertions about the cultural implications of Indian farming, unexplained claims about the nature of the farm economy in India and how biotechnology destroys it, and unanalyzed or distorted scientific findings.
Ronald Bailey reports that at the IFG conference, Shiva focused on how corporate technologies are a menace to "our cultures, our communities, our rootedness." But Shiva hardly seems very rooted in her own indigenous culture if she's running her own website and traveling to New York to hobnob with Kirkpatrick Sale and Jeremy Rifkin. Indeed, consider this quote from her site:
Diversity is fast moving into the defining metaphor in place of monocultures of the mind. Ecofeminism has emerged as a serious challenge to Cartesian reductionism and the Baconian "rape of nature" as the "masculine mode" of knowing. Globalisation is however threatening to the ecological gains of the past few decades. It is therefore the defining context of our new engagements.
No doubt that's exactly what's running through the mind of the average starving inhabitant of an Indian flood plain. But of course, hungry Indians may not be able to see or comprehend all that Shiva is doing on their behalf. For one thing, they're not likely to have Internet access. And even if they did, they wouldn't get much from Shiva's site because it's written entirely in English. Less than 10 percent of the Indian population can use current information technology software, which is overwhelmingly English dominated, because of the language gap.
And yet Shiva claims to speak on behalf of traditional Indian communities and culture. Such contradictions are strong indicators of incomplete thinking, and they abound in neo-Luddite circles, from Shiva to Primitivism.com. That's because the anti-technology anti-globalization movement is a ball of innuendos and half-baked arguments, most of which are at base thinly disguised emotional appeals. Sure, "natural" sounds good; the word "traditional" is also warm and fuzzy, as are other neo-Luddite nostrums. But if we are to truly grapple with -- and critique -- the process of corporate-friendly globalization, we will need to be able to think, not merely feel.
