From: J. Hughes (jhughes@changesurfer.com)
Date: Tue Jun 26 2001 - 08:34:59 MDT
http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/webfeatures/2001/06/mooney-c-06-22.html
Libertarians are Right!
When It Comes to Promising Technologies Like Genetically Modified Foods,
Liberals Need Stranger Bedfellows
Chris Mooney
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 -- customs which 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.
Chris Mooney
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Dr. J. Hughes
Changesurfer Radio
www.changesurfer.com
jhughes@changesurfer.com
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