[rogerhb]

There have been lot's of debates about who to blame for our predicament. Whether it's socialism, communism, imperialism or capitalism.

What if the Levellers were right and it was industrialism that was the problem afterall? Despite being alerted to the problem we've been going down the wrong way for two hundred years?

[elroy]

Who are the levellers and what is their claim ?

[JustinFrankl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rogerhb', 'T')here have been lot's of debates about who to blame for our predicament. Whether it's socialism, communism, imperialism or capitalism.

What if the Levellers were right and it was industrialism that was the problem afterall? Despite being alerted to the problem we've been going down the wrong way for two hundred years?

[Jake_old]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') think the "ism"s are merely window dressing we attach to human behavior. I think that what has driven our obscene growth has been merely human biology, desire, and intelligence. We see. We want. We figure out how. And those with the most resources have the most say about how to proceed.

Once upon a time there was an immediate limitation to how much we could get or take from the planet: other tribes, with similar needs, wants, and ability. Once, we all kept each other in check. Now, we don't.

Now, what will keep us in check is the limited resources available on the planet, and the checking won't be pretty.

Our problems did not begin with industrialization. They began 10,000 years ago when we decided to no longer be kept in check by other tribes and by available resources, instead deciding to assimilate or annihilate other tribes and by making more resources available. Our problems began with "civilization".

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('elroy', 'W')ho are the levellers and what is their claim ?

[azreal60]

Justin's words echo a published author named daniel quinn. I recommend his books to anyone who cares to listen, as they are among the most influential in my life. They are well written, and are not only among the most informative but also probably the best stories i've ever read. Trust me, read them, you will be very much enlightened.

The only other time i've heard the term the levellers was in reference to a fictional group in a david weber novel. He used them as a terrorist group, so i doubt the reality and the fiction have much in common.

[DigitalCubano]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JustinFrankl', 'O')ur problems did not begin with industrialization. They began 10,000 years ago when we decided to no longer be kept in check by other tribes and by available resources, instead deciding to assimilate or annihilate other tribes and by making more resources available. Our problems began with "civilization".

[nth]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('DigitalCubano', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JustinFrankl', 'O')ur problems did not begin with industrialization. They began 10,000 years ago when we decided to no longer be kept in check by other tribes and by available resources, instead deciding to assimilate or annihilate other tribes and by making more resources available. Our problems began with "civilization".

[donshan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rogerhb', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('elroy', 'W')ho are the levellers and what is their claim ?

[rogerhb]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')hat, at any rate, was the first attack on textile machines by men who called themselves followers of General Ludd, who would convulse the countryside of the English Midlands for the next 14 months -and would go down in history, and into the English language, as the first opponents of the Industrial Revolution and the quintessential naysayers to odious and intrusive technology.

[untothislast]

Sadly for the Luddites, their name has come to be used as a term of abuse, for anyone who stands in the way of (usually) technological change.

Their position, as independent spinners and weavers working from home, was that there was no point having a machine which did the work of 50 men - if it meant throwing 50 men out of work. A very sensible viewpoint, you might concede.

The whole point about 'progress' is that it often isn't. It's change for the sake of it - usually imposed by people who see a better way of channelling a greater proportion of available wealth in their own direction.

Sadly, the Luddites couldn't win, and a few generations down the line, their descendants were the near-starving wretches populating mill-town slums.

The moral of the story, is that technological 'progress' is only to be encouraged when it brings the maximum amount of comfort and happiness, to the greatest amount of people. Otherwise, why not just leave things the way they are?

[freelight]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('DigitalCubano', ' ')...kind of left me pondering fatalism: could all of this happen any other way? Surely, certain events could have transpired differently, but could the evolution of civilization really happen in a different manner? If this were an experiment that we could run time and again, would the technological aspects and global reach of human civilization look more or less the same at this point in time?

[ubercynicmeister]

The best author to have ever written about the vagaries of Industrial Civilisation was one JRR Tolkien, who wrote in his essay "On Fairy Stories":

As for old age, whether personal or belonging to the times in which we live [ie: the 'old age' of the human race] it may be true, as is often supposed, that this imposes disabilites. But [that] is in the main an idea produced by mere study of fairy-stories. ... The Study may indeed become depressing. It is easy for the student to feel that with all his labour he is collecting only a few leaves, many of them now torn or decayed, from the countless foliage of the Tree Of Tales, with which the Forest of Days is Carpeted. It seems vain to add to the litter. Who can design a new leaf? The patterns from bud to unfolding, and the colours from spring to autumn were all discovered long ago. But that is not true. The seed of the tree can be replanted in almost any soil, even in one so smoke ridden ( as Lang said) as that of England. Spring is, of course, not really less beautiful because we have seen or heard of other like events: like events, never from world's beginning to world's end the same event. Each leaf, of oak, and ash and thorn, is a unique embodiment of the pattern, and for some this very year my be the embodiment, the first ever seen and recognised, though oaks have put forth leaves for countless generations of men.
....

Fantasy is made out of the Primary World, but a good craftsman loves his material , and has a knowledge and feeling for clay, stone and wood which only the art of making can give. By the forging of Gram cold iron was revealed; by the making of Pegasus horses were ennobled; in the Trees of the Sun and Moon root and stock, flower and fruit are manifested in glory.

...

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all.
...

[To pick] a trifling instance: [a failure] to mention (indeed not to parade) electric street lamps of mass-produced pattern in your tale is Escape (in that sense) . But it may, almost certainly does, proceed from a considered disgust for so typical a product of the Robot Age, that combines elaboration and ingenuity of means with ugliness and (often) inferiority of result. These lamps may be excluded from the tale simply because they are bad lamps; and it is possible that one of the lessons to be learnt from the story is the realisation of that fact. But out comes the big stick: 'Electric lamps have come to stay', they say.

Long ago, [GK] Chesterton truly remarked that, as soon as he had heard anything 'had come to stay', he knew it would be very soon replaced - indeed regarded as pitiably obsolete and shabby.

'The march of Science, its tempo quickened by the needs of war, goes inexorably on...making some things obsolete, and foreshadowing new developments in the utilisation of electricity': an advertisement. This says the same thing only much more menacingly. The electric street-lamp may indeed be ignored, simply because it is so insignificant and transient. Fairy stories, at any rate, have many more permanent and fundamental things to talk about. Lightning for example. The escapist is not so subservient to the whims of evanescent fashion as these opponents [of fairy-stories, of escape]. He does not make things (which it may be quite rational to regard as bad) his masters or his gods by worshipping them as inevitable, even 'inexorable'. And his opponents, so easily contemptuous, have no guarentee that he will stop there: he might rouse [the populace] to pull down the street lamps. Escapism has another and even wickeder face: Reaction.

Not long ago, I heard a [Professor of Oxford] declare that he 'welcomed' the proximity of mass-production robot factories, and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic, because it brought his university into 'contact with real life'.

He may have meant that the way [humans] were living and working in the twentieth century was increasing in barbarity at an alarming rate, and that the loud demonstration of this in the streets of Oxford might serve as a warning that it is not possible to preserve for long an oasis of sanity in a desert of unreason by mere fences,...I fear he did not. In any case, the expression 'real life' in this context seems to fall short of academic standards. The notion that motor cars are more 'alive' than say, centaurs or dragons is curious; that they are more real than, say, horses is pathetically absured. How real, how startilingly alive is the factory chimney compared with an elm tree: poor obsolete thing, insubstantial dream of an escapist.

And if we leave aside for a moment 'fantasy', ...it is after all possible for a rational man , after reflection to arrive at the condemnation, implicit at least in the mere silence of 'escapist' literature, of progressive things like factories, or the machine guns and bombs trhat appear to be their most natural and inevitable, dare we say 'inexorable', products.

Why should we not escape from or condemn the ...Morlockian horror of factories? They are condemned by even that most escapist form of literature, Science Fiction. These prophets often fortell (and many seem to yearn for) a world like one big glass-roofed railway station. But from them it is as a rule very hard to gather what men in such a world-town will do.They may...play with mechanical toys [ie: cars] in the soon cloying game of travelling at high speed. To judge from some of these tales they will still be as lustful, vengeful and greedy as ever, and the ideals of their idealists hardly stretch further than the splendid notion of building more of [these world-towns] of the same sort on other planets. It is indeed an age of 'improved means to deteriorated ends'.

There are other things more terrible to fly from than the noise, stench ruthlessness and extravagance of the internal-combustion engine. There are hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice, death."

JRR Tolkien, 1938

The above seem to be the first foreshadowings of something like "Peak Oil" and it's implications. It should be noted it was written before the Second World War.

[rogerhb]

How about

Technology increases entropy by wasting what it replaces
Rinse
Repeat

[aldente]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JustinFrankl', '
')Our problems did not begin with industrialization. They began 10,000 years ago when we decided to no longer be kept in check by other tribes and by available resources, instead deciding to assimilate or annihilate other tribes and by making more resources available. Our problems began with "civilization".

[JustinFrankl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('DigitalCubano', 'I')'ve also been thinking along those lines, which has kind of left me pondering fatalism: could all of this happen any other way? Surely, certain events could have transpired differently, but could the evolution of civilization really happen in a different manner? If this were an experiment that we could run time and again, would the technological aspects and global reach of human civilization look more or less the same at this point in time?

[JustinFrankl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rogerhb', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')hat, at any rate, was the first attack on textile machines by men who called themselves followers of General Ludd, who would convulse the countryside of the English Midlands for the next 14 months -and would go down in history, and into the English language, as the first opponents of the Industrial Revolution and the quintessential naysayers to odious and intrusive technology.

[katkinkate]

Redundant comment.

[CARVER]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JustinFrankl', '.')..
The original problem never included significant consideration of "what will we do with the people whose jobs are no longer needed because of these machines". And failing to address this ended up coming back to haunt us.

[Doly]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JustinFrankl', '
')It appears, unfortunately, that "civilization" and all of its inherent problems may be here to stay. Since civilization's underlying modus operandi seems to be "consumption and growth", our species is likely in only the first stage of a cyclical boom and bust scenario. Following the bust, we will likely just pick up where we left off, until the next bust. Lather, rinse, repeat.