Reply #90: Response...

[IrateCitizen]

Since you're the one claiming that we can have a technological society at "equilibrium with nature, that doesn't pollute, where resources are shared freely," it appears that the onus is upon you to cite large-scale examples of where such civilizations have existed in the past. My point is simply that there are no such large-scale civilizations that survived. Perhaps the closest possible example would be the Indus Valley Dravidian society that existed before the migration of Indo-Europeans to India (see Mohenjo-Daro). Then again, that society was essentially conquered and absorbed by the Indo-Europeans that found their way through the Khyber Pass into India, so I'm not certain how it serves as a long-term example of what we should aspire toward.

You said:
I do not think that our tools or our innovative aspects necessarily need to result in the damaging effects it has had, and I ascribe those damaging effects to the exploitation of humans by humans.

The exploitation of humans by other humans is a side-effect, not the main cause. The main cause, as I pointed out earlier, was the drive of humans to survive. We have done this by making food production more efficient, which in turn frees up more people to engage in job specialization. Of course, the distribution of food surplus to those people not engaged directly in food production necessitates centralized authority of some type. The ultimate example of this is our current system, in which only about 2% of the population is employed as farmers -- and the rest of us are employed in other occupations. Without a centralized distribution network, a lot more of us would have to become farmers or we would likely starve within a short time. Just imagine what your community would be like if the grocery store didn't get any deliveries for a month....

You said:
But you know darn well that the more open desimination of knowledge and information was the real precursor to the boom of industrialization, and that indeed, the exploitation of those people by others (the nobels and warrior classes) had to keep a fine balance between people being educated and people being knowledgable. For instance, the art of ceremics was kept secret for some time and at one point ceremics by weight were more valuable than gold itself.

First, don't put words in my mouth. Industrialization came about because of fossil fuels, not because of greater dissemination of knowledge. Without fossil fuels taking the place of human and animal labor, there would not have been an industrial revolution even close to the scale that actually happened.

Second, the increased dissemination of knowledge and information was the result of movable type printing. The one invention that spurred the modern world and undermined the power of noble lords (and the Catholic Church in Europe) was the printing press. For a more detailed explanation of this phenomenon (and how it led to the feudal nobility's decline and the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie), I recommend Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities and Juergen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. At least in medieval Europe, the nobility and Church were completely unable to stem this tide -- the printing press bypassed all traditional means of communication -- and even when they succumbed to this tide they sowed the seeds of their own destruction.

As to the example of ceramics, it is nothing new in history. Shang China kept bronze casting secret from the people not just for the purpose of protecting a source of wealth, but keeping weapons out of the hands of the peasantry.

Lastly, to return to the notion of fossil fuels replacing human and animal power, it is an interesting historical correlation that occurred between civilizations that developed a democratic or republican form of government and the practice of human slavery. In ancient Greece, citizens were free to discuss and debate public affairs because they had slaves laboring on their behalf. Same thing for republican Rome. And we all know how widespread slavery was in the United States at the time of its founding. It's also interesting that the abolition of slavery occurred at the same time that those countries practicing slavery were making the transition to fossil fuels as a source of power. What I mean here is that we didn't so much as get rid of slavery per se as we replaced human slavery with the equivalent of fossil fuel slaves. Given the inevitable decline of fossil fuel supplies throughout the world, I cannot help but wonder if that will see a return of chattel slavery in order to provide a source of energy....