If we really care about humanity, and our fellow creatures, and the future, then all our technologies, like everything else, must be rooted in the “bedrock principles” of Morality and Ecology. Colin Tudge asks what this might imply in practice
There’s a very wide spectrum of technologies, from the humblest of crafts to “high-tech”.
Crafts are ways of doing things that are rooted in humanity’s native ingenuity, and in our power to share and pass on our insights and discoveries. Crafts evolve – and evolution in the end produces the most reliable results. In truth, crafts may be anything but humble. Even the stone axes of the Neolithic age are things of subtlety and beauty, made with enormous skill and with obvious “feel” for the materials. Most of the world’s finest artefacts were and are produced by craftsmen and women without the aid of high-tech, including the great cathedrals, and damask, and galleons, and steel for Japanese swords, and even the world’s first steam engines — and of course the thousand homely things like needles and threads and ceramics and linen and bricks and mortar that have become the stuff of everyday life.
High-tech by contrast is rooted in bona fide science (the kind that develops by posing and testing formally stated hypotheses), and includes computers and lasers and IT that nowadays seem to stretch the laws of physics. Of course, we cannot override those laws but technologies such as the laser and IT are showing us that the laws allow us far more latitude than even the greatest scientists even in the recent past would have thought possible. Indeed, such is the power of high-tech that some in euphoric vein have suggested that we have, in effect, become gods, able to manipulate the world itself to suit our ends, and indulge all our whims. Many in the past, both real and mythical, made the same mistake. The list includes Icarus and Prometheus and Midas and Nero and Caligula, and the various would-be builders of Empires who are conventionally remembered as “heroes” (as Putin evidently aspires to be). But we are not gods or anything like. However much science we do and whatever technical wonders we may invent, we must always fall far short of omniscience and omnipotence.
And yet – and this is the thought to build on: The power that we already have is enough to ensure that we could yet progress towards the Goal (“convivial societies, personal fulfilment, a flourishing biosphere), and so enjoy the sunlit uplands for many millennia to come. But also, of course, all too obviously, we have the power to trash the whole lot. The latter is far easier. Indeed the trashing is well in train, written off as “collateral damage” (“These things happen in war”, said Netanyahu). Or, in modern, corporate accountancy, destruction and misery are filed under “externalities”, and left for others to deal with. Then again, some people evidently enjoy the trashing.
James Lovelock, who framed the idea of Gaia, calculated that even at our worst we don’t have the power to wipe out all life on Earth, and never will. Life itself, like God, or the gods, is bigger than us. Evolution will continue after we are gone. It’s just that we won’t be here to see it, or to take part in it. Perhaps that’s one small crumb of comfort.
I suggest indeed that the biggest problem of our age is to decide which of the plethora of technologies and the infinity of possible policies are most likely to lead us towards the Goal, and which decidedly will not. Which of the options opening before us is most appropriate – if, that is, we seriously want to remain on this Earth in an agreeable form for any length of time. Some people, variously called Romantics or sometimes hippies, tend to assume that craft technologies are always to be preferred. Others are out-and-out technophiles, for whom high-tech per se means progress, and progress is ipso facto good. In practice, people in positions of most influence are wont to be technophiles, precisely because high-tech seems to offer progress, however ill-defined, and progress is what they feel they ought to offer, for whatever reason.
But it’s a mistake to suppose that one or the other – craft or high-tech – is necessarily to be preferred. Sometimes a traditional approach is called for, no matter what gee-whizzery is on offer. Sometimes only high-tech will do. Usually we need some judicious combination of the two – what might be seen as “science-assisted craft”.
Agriculture illustrates the point perfectly. Agriculture is by far the most important thing we do. All our lives depend on it – and the lives of all other creatures too, for if we don’t farm in wildlife-friendly ways the cause of wildlife conservation is severely compromised, if not dead in water. Agriculture is the thing we absolutely have to get right. If we do get it right, then everything else can start to fall into place. If not, then everything else is compromised. Indeed, we might say, our Goal should be to nurture convivial societies, personal fulfilment, and a flourishing biosphere; the whole endeavour be rooted in and guided by the Bedrock Principles of Ecology and Morality; and our Focus should be on Agriculture.
Agriculture should thus be at the heart of all governments’ concerns. But in countries like ours it clearly is not. Defra ranks well behind the Foreign Office or the Treasury. The thing we absolutely have to get right has simply been seen as another way to contribute to GDP, and a not very efficient one at that.
What’s relevant here is that agriculture illustrates as no other human pursuit does the full range of technology from stone-age craft on the smallest scale to the highest of high tech. But although some “romantics” or hippies reject high-tech, and some technophiles take it more or less for granted that high-tech must be good, the divide is nothing like so simple. Sometimes even in the richest countries, when all is considered, a horse-drawn harrow is the best option. Sometimes it’s the poorest farmers in the harshest conditions who have most to gain from high-tech – such as safe, effective and robust vaccines that don’t need too much refrigeration, or indeed the mobile phone.
At present, as is the case in all spheres, high-tech is beginning to prevail in agriculture, and to oust traditional crafts – and for all the wrong reasons. So for example governments like ours and financiers and corporates put their weight behind GMOs and “lab-grown meat” not because they offer the safest and surest route to a better and more secure future but largely because they are high-tech, and flashy, and lend themselves to high-sounding rhetoric; and because they attract enormous investment, and can be and sometimes are extremely lucrative. Furthermore (though this is rarely presented to the world as a selling point) the wealth they generate is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and, as is the way in modern politics and in prevailing economy, it’s the rich, and especially the super-rich, who call the shots.
The technophiles and plutocrats who promote the new technologies so zealously are wont to accuse the detractors of being “anti-science” or “afraid” of science or indeed, the sin of sins, to be “anti-progress”, yearning for a past that never was. But some of the most forceful detractors are very accomplished scientists themselves. To be sure, the technologies behind GMOs are truly wondrous, rightly attracting some of the world’s brightest scientists. Those same sciences and technologies – those of genetics and molecular biology – have enriched the life sciences beyond measure. On the practical front they are lifting medicine into a quite new era, more effective in many contexts than anything we have seen before. Molecular biology too in various forms is of immense and growing value in wildlife conservation (which it would be good to explore in future blogs). Absolutely not should we suppress the science therefore, or some at least of the technologies that the science gives rise to. But whereas, say, GM microbes that produce more effective medicinal pharmaceuticals seem unequivocally beneficial, GM crops and livestock clearly are not.
The same applies to lab-grown meat. It is a wondrous exercize in cell biology which in other guises has enormous potential in medicine. But on the food front, it is just another diversion, albeit attracting huge investment. A little discrimination is called for.
In general, indeed, agriculture right now – and all technology and, even more broadly, more and more scientific research — is driven by the desire and the perceived need to generate more and more material wealth (and to concentrate that wealth in fewer and fewer hands). But if we really care about the state of the world, and its human and non-human inhabitants, and about the future, then, very obviously, that won’t do. If we really care then we need to gear all technologies to the Goal and root everything we do – including all technologies — in the realities of ecology and the bedrock principles of Morality, and especially in the virtues of Compassion, Humility, and the sense of Oneness.
It makes sense too to focus all that we do – including and especially all politics and the economy – on agriculture, because of its obvious seminal importance. To treat it simply as “a business like any other”, a lowly pursuit to be treated as an also-ran, is the greatest of follies. If the bedrock principles of Morality and Ecology, if they were applied, would take the world’s farming in a quite different direction. Those principles would lead us embrace the concepts of Agroecology and Food Sovereignty, which together constitute what I have been calling “Enlightened Agriculture”. The concept of Enlightened Agriculture leads us in turn to favour organic, skills-intensive units, as diverse as possible, as Chris Smaje excellently describes in Small Farm Future. Big business, whether or not it includes GM, leads us towards the complete opposite: high-input, high-tech monocultures on the biggest possible scale, with minimum to zero labour. So long as the oil lasts, that’s the cheaper option – provided we don’t take climate change too seriously.
The kind of thinking that we should be applying to agriculture applies to all technologies. Always we should ask, is this technology really moving us towards the Goal – or is it just getting in the way, or wasting precious time? Is it serving simply or primarily to make rich people richer? Or to increase GDP? Or to keep some powerful leader in power?
Clearly, what the world really needs right now and as a matter of urgency is a fully-worked and ever-developing Philosophy of Technology. “Phil of Tech” should be a major discipline, a standard component of university curricula. Many great thinkers have addressed the issues over the centuries, starting in classical times (and probably long before, though we don’t really know what people thought and felt before they started writing things down). The 19th and 20th centuries brought huge contributions from such luminaries as John Ruskin, William Morris, Mahatma Gandhi, Ivan Illich and E F (“Fritz”) Schumacher (see my interview re Schumacher with Dr Neal Harris). We need to carry on where they left off.
Next time I’ll ask what politics would look like if it was rooted in the bedrock principles of morality and ecology, and geared to the Goal of conviviality, fulfilment, and a flourishing biosphere
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