Podcast: John Michael Greer: The God Of Technological Progress May Well Be Dead

[Binkie The Clown]

As we often state here at Peak Prosperity, the narratives we hold are immensely important. The stories running our heads influence everything from our beliefs to our values to our actions.

Which is why it's so dangerous when a society clings onto a narrative that is no longer serving it well, a narrative divorced from reality.

This week, Chris and John Michael Greer address the global faith in inexorable technological advancement as a cure-all to every predicament we face. In many ways, it's become the dominant religion of the 21st century. Sadly, there are a growing number of threats for which 'improved' technologies actually exacerbate the risks (particularly in regards to depleting critical resources) -- but society refuses to acknowledge this, as it runs counter to the tech-as-savoir meme so many are pinning their hopes on:

[cantbeserious]

1. JMG - The Burden Of Denial

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-burden-of-denial.html

It occurred to me the other day that quite a few of the odder features of contemporary American culture make perfect sense if you assume that everybody knows exactly what’s wrong and what’s coming as our society rushes, pedal to the metal, toward its face-first collision with the brick wall of the future. It’s not that they don’t get it; they get it all too clearly, and they just wish that those of us on the fringes would quit reminding them of the imminent impact, so they can spend whatever time they’ve got left in as close to a state of blissful indifference as they can possibly manage.

I grant that this realization probably had a lot to do with the context in which it came to me. I was sitting in a restaurant, as it happens, with a vanload of fellow Freemasons. We’d carpooled down to Baltimore, some of us to receive one of the higher degrees of Masonry and the rest to help with the ritual work, and we stopped for dinner on the way back home. I’ll spare you the name of the place we went; it was one of those currently fashionable beer-and-burger joints where the waitresses have all been outfitted with skirts almost long enough to cover their underwear, bare midriffs, and the sort of push-up bras that made them look uncomfortably like inflatable dolls—an impression that their too obviously scripted jiggle-and-smile routines did nothing to dispell.

Still, that wasn’t the thing that made the restaurant memorable. It was the fact that every wall in the place had television screens on it. By this I don’t mean that there was one screen per wall; I mean that they were lined up side by side right next to each other, covering the upper part of every single wall in the place, so that you couldn’t raise your eyes above head level without looking at one. They were all over the interior partitions of the place, too. There must have been forty of them in one not too large restaurant, each one blaring something different into the thick air, while loud syrupy music spattered down on us from speakers on the ceiling and the waitresses smiled mirthlessly and went through their routines. My burger and fries were tolerably good, and two tall glasses of Guinness will do much to ameliorate even so charmless a situation; still, I was glad to get back on the road.

The thing I’d point out is that all this is quite recent. Not that many years ago, it was tolerably rare to see a TV screen in an American restaurant, and even those bars that had a television on the premises for the sake of football season generally had the grace to leave the thing off the rest of the time. Within the last decade, I’ve watched televisions sprout in restaurants and pubs I used to enjoy, for all the world like buboes on the body of a plague victim: first one screen, then several, then one on each wall, then metastatizing across the remaining space. Meanwhile, along the same lines, people who used to go to coffee shops and the like to read the papers, talk with other patrons, or do anything else you care to name are now sitting in the same coffee shops in total silence, hunched over their allegedly smart phones like so many scowling gargoyles on the walls of a medieval cathedral.

Snip ...

[Demeter]

2. The god of technological progress

has been banished by the GOD OF PROFITS!

There shall be no progress, unless THE GOD OF PROFITS gets his due. Useful technology will be banned or suppressed, if it interferes with profits. Medicine will be denied, if it interferes with profits. Renewable energy, recycling, dissemination of knowledge and knowledge itself...

So, don't sneer at technology. Sacrifice a bankster every Spring in the most brutal way possible, and watch the God of Technology arise from the dead.

[daleanime]

4. Have to go at a much faster pace then that....

if you want results.

[leveymg]

3. The J-Curve applies here. Relative privation and strife sets in when expectations aren't met.

The J-Curve was a concept developed in the 1950s to describe "the crisis of modernization" then sweeping the developing world. Now, it works just as well to describe the crisis of the post-modern world.

In the early 21st Century, we're coming off the greatest sustained period of broad technological advance since the inventions of fire and the wheel. The 20th Century brought effective medicine, the green revolution, electronic communications, the automobile, cheap jet air travel, the birth control pill, mass produced consumer goods, and the deterrent to major wars brought by the development and international spread of the atomic bomb.

How do you follow that? Answer: we can't, and because our expectations are based upon that perfect wave of anomalous improvements in human condition, today we're all now becoming disillusioned or looking for some cultural stability or someone to take out our frustrations on. We're already seeing masses of people reverting to cultural conservatism and religious fundamentalism. Others are ready to rebel and tear down elites who continue to benefit disproportionately.

The result of an engineered clash of these groups is mass slaughter as elites try to divide, suppress, narcotize or displace onto scapegoats this inevitable violent worldwide uprising. Of course, that's a viscious downward cycle as the costs of policing civil strife and destruction mount, delaying and crowding out other investments that might otherwise have been made.