Yet the title of this thread is “The Unabomber was right.” Hmmm.
But I think the question is has technology really improved our lives? In the 50s they thought that the wonders of technology would lead to a 10 hour work week. And yet people work longer hours than ever. Sure it’s less physically demanding labor for the most part. But the fruits of our labor are more disconnected from the actual labor itself. I think we also spend less time actually “doing” stuff and more time watching stuff on TV and the Internet.
So for all the wonders of technology, we have produced a society of people who are more physically and emotionally unhealthy than ever.
Pre- and lower- technology people weren’t an any different a situation. Serfs and slaves and peasants and hunters didn’t necessarily want to be doing what they were doing either. We have more freedom not less.
That’s not “technology”; that’s American style capitalism and workaholism. As a culture, America has lost sight of the idea that the point of working is to benefit the worker, that the market is there to benefit the people and not the other way around. We prize work for its own sake, so naturally no matter how technology progresses we work longer hours rather than benefiting from the increased efficiency.
Really? We’re more physically unhealthy than ever? More so than when millions of people were dropping dead of plague, dropsy, tuberculosis, malaria, smallpox, cholera, and typhus?
And we’re more mentally unhealthy than ever? How would we know, since most mental illnesses weren’t diagnosed until recently? Before that people suffered from witchcraft, demonic possession, “nervous prostration”, melancholia, attacks of the vapors, and dementia. And if your kid had ADHD, he was diagnosed as a “brat”.
I agree, Quinn does a pretty good job presenting some food for thought about the paths that culture and technology have taken to get where we are now, and where we might go from here.
IMHO, this is a great book about “anarcho-primitivism” that may be of interest to Scylla. The Wikipedia article provides the 20 premises of the book, which are worth reading if nothing else. Despite my being an alumni of the same university as Jensen, I never knew the guy and was never exposed to his work during my education - although a peer of mine once mentioned him.
Per Spectre of Pithecanthropus, Jensen has argued that written language is probably counterproductive to humanity and the planet.
Regarding physical maladies, I do think that there is a pretty good argument that many of our ailments may be caused by our way of life (pollution, overcrowding, etc). Anecdotal evidence: it is known that the majority of Native Americans died because of European occupation, but not because of direct violence; “Old World Pathogens” is accepted nomenclature for the diseases that caused most of the Native American fatalities. One might wonder why diseases carried by Native Americans didn’t so devastate the European colonists of that era…
And yet, I belive it is far far better than in “the good old days”. At least in Europe, people had no rights. Any king, Caesar, prince, or baron could kill them on a whim with no repercussions. For most people, all they had to look forward to at best, was to be a serf working the fields all day, with no guarantee that the crop wouldn’t fail, or some warlord wouldn’t just take it. Disease wiped out millions. It was a life of poverty. You were either born a noble, or you were property.
We work a set work week, with set hours. We get paid for it. We have leisure time. We don’t have to worry about the Vikings, the Huns, or the local warlord. Most of us never experienced famine and never will. None of us had to deal with the Black Death.
I’d say we have it easy in comparison.
It’s been a leftist position since before there was a “left.” The Noble Savage was a belief of the Jacobins, and the nature-loving romanticism of Rousseau was a reaction against the rationalism of The Enlightenment. It has since been tied to the significant strains of postmodernism and environmentalism of the American political left since the 1960s. As a lefty I loathe these attitudes and their influence, but they represent a significant force from The Population Bomb to opposition to GM food. Kaczynski isn’t asking people to follow his loner individualist primitivism, he’s advocating a revolution to primitive societies.
Which is one of the biggest flaws of the manifesto, that somehow people are locked into postindustrial society, unable to move to the Amazon or Alaska and live a primitive life to their heart’s content. He seeks to deprive people of the freedom to choose technology in order to somehow grant them more freedom.
Does anyone want to research and defend any specific assertion from the manifesto? Perhaps that’s fit for a different thread, because this one seems to be sputtering from one comically wrong assertion to another.
The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was the test of the Unibomber’s thinking. It was a massacre and a disaster. 40 years later Cambodia is still trying to recover from the damage that was done by the Khmer Rouge. Neighboring countries (Vietnam and Laos) that went through terrible atrocities recovered much faster. If, on any level, you can justify what happened as a result of such a philosophy then have at it because 99.9% of the people in the world don’t want any part of it.
Life-span only a century ago was 42 in the US now it’s 77.
AVERAGE life span. That doesn’t mean that most adults only lived until 42, it meant that a lot of people died in infancy. Life expectancy for those who survived to age 5 or so was rather higher. Even in prehistoric times people could live into their 80s.
Oh, well, in that case, sign me up!
Oh, sarcasm. 
Ar-ar-ar-ar-ar.
I was just pointing out a factual error that affects the validity of the argument. Carry on.
At best, it’s a nitpick. In any case, a high infant mortality rate is a fairly good indicator of a society that is kinda icky and unpleasant and I’ll take a 21st-century Liberal Democracy over that by default.
Now, if it was a society that had high infant mortality and free pizza on demand, I might reconsider…
How many miles can you run?
“Physically unhealthy” does not mean “dropping dead from diseases we now have cures for”. It means that taken as a whole, people these days are fatter, have lower stamina, are just generally less fit. Maybe much of that is due to those people whould have just died decades ago. Or it might have more to do with our lifestyle and the food we eat.
And how many brats are now diagnosed with ADHD and subsequently medicated?
You’re right, we probably don’t have accurate mental health statistics. I’d also bet that in a hundred years, our mental health practices would seem as primitive and bizzarre as witchdunking would seem to us. But for all our technology and work-saving devices of convenience, people are as stressed, neurotic and depressed as ever.
Oh I think we definitely have it easier in many ways. I mean the fact that I don’t have to go outside and shit in a ditch is a big plus.
I don’t think it’s realy about one form of society being superior to another. We aren’t going to revert back to an agrarian society. The question is what direction will technology take our society into the future? In the “good ole days”, people never had to worry about getting almost zero physical exercise a day. They did not have the minutiae of their entire lives tracked from birth in databases. Their armies didn’t have weapons that could destroy a city in an instant. The average citizen couldn’t get ahold of a weapon that could kill 50 people in minutes. They didn’t have the capability of completely exhausting a region of resources or contaminating it with toxic materials.
So what will happen to our society over the next 1000 years as we figure out how to manipulate genes or gain the ability to track every movement of every person 24 hours a day or develop computers or robots that can exceed human abilities in hearly every way or simply just become orders of magnatude more efficient at gathering resources and turning them into stuff?
Cited earlier by Superfluous Parentheses, but I just gotta repeat it since no-one else seems to have commented on the best bit:
First, conspecific violence was a prominent part of the demographic profile, accounting for many deaths in all age and sex categories. Most of the adult killings were due to either competition over women, reprisals by jealous husbands (on both their wives and their wives’ lovers), or reprisals for past killings. The criollo-caused killings were motivated by territorial conquest. Moreover, infanticide (especially on females) constituted the highest mortality rate component of all Hiwi conspecific violence. Second, no predation deaths were reported despite attacks by anacondas, Orinoco caimans, and piranhas, and the presence of jaguars in the area. Accidents associated with the active-forager lifestyle were common, but disease was a more important killer, accounting for nearly half of all deaths. This suggests an adaptive landscape in which success in social relations, competitive violence, and disease resistance are paramount.
Smart guys - “let’s kill all the baby girls, then fight because there aren’t enough women.”
Not only that, they killed far more people during wars than actual fighting did. Take whatever level of medicine and sanitation was available at the time, then pretty much remove the sanitation and add in exposure to the elements and living off of the land - which usually meant taking food from the locals. Pestilence and starvation were often left in the wake of armies; the population of the states of the Holy Roman Empire dropped by 15-30% during the Thirty Years War from this. During the US Civil War ~200,000 were killed in action or died of wounds, compared to 388,000 from disease and another 60,000 died in prison camps from disease, poor sanitation, malnutrition, overcrowding, or exposure to the elements. It’s only in the 20th century that combat began killing more soldiers in war than disease and starvation did.
The next 1000 years? I have no idea. We may advance our tech more slowly than we have since the Industrial Revolution, or we may take a huge jump at some point. I see medical care improving (and life spans getting longer - up to some genetic/biological limit), better modes of transport (maybe some improved and more accessible mass transit system), expansion of the scientific knowledge in general. That’s a lot of words saying I think we will keep advancing, but who knows at what rate and in what direction. We will see increased intrusion into private life until it reaches a point where “we” have no choice but to set clear limits, spelled out in law. Then, just as with the excesses of the old industrial “robber barons”, we will see a move back toward some middle ground.
But, remember this - the “old guys” could and did eradicate entire cities, entire civilizations, and entire races. Look at what Rome did to Carthage for a good example. We are the same people, just with different weapons. We have taken our tech to the point where it would have seemed like magic in another time, but we are still the same ourselves.
I think it may often come from past experiences of camping or hiking, or otherwise getting back to nature. We do these things in our leisure as a break from the often overcharged technological world we live in. As a temporary diversion they are certainly pleasant enough, but few people would want to live that way permanently. I know I wouldn’t.
Despite assertions that hunter-gatherers often had copious leisure time, it’s hard to sustain this notion when, in Western civilization at least, the very notion of free or leisure time only came into existence in the context of paid work away from home (see for example The Overworked American, Juliet Schor. 1993). If you’re a kid growing up in a hunter-gatherer society, you may indeed have leisure, but if all your games are along the lines of Find The Berries or Stalk The Rabbit it’s hard to argue that such activities represent true play rather than simply training to be an adult.
What, exactly, do technological advances have to do with oppression of the Amerindians?
And this from a man who allows blimps of terror to fly at will.