Doomsday! (A note on technological change)

The other night I found myself drunkenly rambling to a friend about the movie Doomsday, which was this horrible cross between Mad Max, 28 Days Later, and Escape from New York. Laughably terrible. My brother and I got drunk, persuaded our younger brother to drive us to the theater, and spent the first 15 minutes of the film emphatically growling "DOOMSDAY!!!" at each other.

Anyway.

I wrote a few weeks ago about generational balances of power - I'm starting to wonder whether ours has been royally screwed over by our parents' profligate generation. The wealth has been delivered to them; the debt payments will be paid by us in an age of accelerating economic uncertainty and mass climate change.

Admittedly, I am a pessimist about most things. However, climate scientists are apparently more so:

Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than two degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with four degrees. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.

This, at any rate, was the repeated whisper at the climate change conference in Copenhagen last week(1). It’s more or less what Bob Watson, the environment department’s chief scientific adviser, has been telling the British government(2). It is the obvious if unspoken conclusion of scores of scientific papers. Recent work by scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, for example, suggests that even global cuts of 3% a year, starting in 2020, could leave us with four degrees of warming by the end of the century(3,4). At the moment emissions are heading in the opposite direction at roughly the same rate. If this continues, what does it mean? Six? Eight? Ten degrees? Who knows?

Earlier, I also wrote about the limits to capital. One of those, a quite important one, is an ecological limit. Any economic system will not survive if it over-exploits the resources it relies upon. Growth becomes impossible once cannot sustainably extract more resources. (Interestingly, that's proving true even for the new immaterial terrain: The Internet's expansion may soon be limited by its power consumption.)

If the grim climate change predictions are correct, we are already over-exploiting our atmospheric resources. If we keep emitting CO2 at the current rate, the planet will warm to a catastrophic degree.

There are two options, really. The first: Reduce the amount of carbon we produce by reducing the amount of stuff we produce and do. This will essentially worsen living standards for most people - moreso if populations continue to increase.

The second: Change the way we produce and do things to be more carbon-efficient. This would entail rapid, massive technological change, and the obsolescence of most existing machines.

I am reminded of Telephus, king of Mysia, who was wounded by Achilles. The wound would not heal, so Telephus consulted an oracle who advised him (in characteristically obscure oracular form) that "he that wounded shall heal". Achilles proved to be no hope; Odysseus reasoned that the spear that smote Telephus may heal him. And so it did.

We are now in the position of Telephus. Industrial and technological change have gotten us to this point, and now we have to rely upon it to solve the problem. (Like Achilles, the wielders of the "spear" - the political and economic elites who have benefited from industrialization - refuse to raise their hands to heal the wound.)

Technology, in short, must be bent to environmentally and socially progressive ends. Consider Susan Buck-Morss's account of the Soviet romance with technological modernization. She notes that "Lenin thought he could import capitalist forms of labor without their exploitative content. ... Assembly line production does not feel different to the sentient body simply because the worker is socialist." (Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 104.)

Although the Soviet experience was distinct, Buck-Morss points out that technology itself is not simply neutral matter awaiting political or economic direction. Rather, technology constitutes a relationship between man and man and between man and nature. She quotes Walter Benjamin:

The mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education above all the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery, if we are to use this term of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relation between nature and man.
(Benjamin, 1926, from Reflections, p. 93.)

Currently, our technology demonstrates a vicious relationship between man and nature: Exploitative, extractive, polluting, and despoiling. If we continue using it, it will worsen the problems that it has already caused. While coal-fired power plants, strip-mining, slash-and-burn agriculture and the SUV have wounded the planet, we cannot seriously expect them to extricate us from the climate change mess.

Buck-Morss comments that Leninist-Stalinist industrialization led to horrendous human and environmental damage partly due to its uncritical acceptance of capitalist industrial methods. She writes:

Socialism necessitates a totally new relationship to nature. The technology of capitalism will not do to realize its aims. Capitalism organizes the exploitation of nature for private gain. Exploiting labor power is one part of this process, but not the whole. And just as capitalism will not pay for the reproduction of labor power (the social welfare bill) unless compelled to do so by state taxation, it will not by its own volition pay for the reproduction of the forces that it consumes so voraciously. Lenin was wrong to believe that technology is nothing more than the embodiment of objective science, hence value-free. Technology is the material manifestation of human beings' relationships with nature and among themselves. (Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 118.)

The good news, therefore, is that while we cannot rely upon current technology, we do not need to write off technology tout court. As tempting as it is to attempt to revive Ned Ludd and Captain Swing for the postmodern age, we need to develop different technologies (i.e. different relationships to nature and among ourselves) rather than simply smashing everything with a motor. We need to reforge the spear that wounded us before we can be healed by it.