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Industrial Wants
In a wonderful speech from 1961 at the University of Colorado, J. Robert Oppenheimer, physicist and atomic bomb creator, talked about human perception. He noted,
“In every extension of knowledge we're involved in action and in every action we're involved in choice and in every choice we're involved in a kind of loss, the loss of what we didn't do. We find this in the simplest situations. We find it in perception where the possibility of perceiving is coextensive with ignoring many things that are going on. Meaning is always contained with the cost of leaving things out.”
A year later, in his seminal book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan explains how this fundamental human trait defined the print revolution of Gutenberg and resulting technology development of the Industrial Era. He writes, “It was the Gutenberg method of homogeneous segmentation, that evoked the traits of the modern world. ...It is the method of the fixed or specialist point of view that insists on repetition as the criterion of truth and practicality.”
The division of labor and ceaseless repetition defined the Industrial Era and its organization in return defining the processes of decision making. McLuhan notes “the mechanical laws of the economy applied equally to the things of the mind with Adam Smith declaring,
“In opulent and commercial societies to think or to reason comes to be, like every other employment, a particular business, which is carried on by a very few people, who furnish the public with all the thought and reason possessed by the vast multitudes that labour.”
This segmentation of thought, organization and action proved amazingly productive in the development of industrial society, yet hazardously insufficient in understanding how specific technologies impact the much more complex human organism, its larger social organization, and the greater ecological systems they are part. This segmentation and the resulting “cost of leaving things out” remain acutely problematic as we grapple with the impact of two centuries of industrial technologies on the earth's ecological systems.
The climate question exemplifies our inability to perceive beyond segmentation, to look at things with a greater systems perspective. Just focusing on climate inhibits our ability in necessarily dealing with the greater environmental picture, contradictorily impeding the ability to deal with the climate issue itself. A great example of this is the idea of electrifying car culture as a segmented method to meet the challenges posed by climate. A recent excellent Vox piece on Norway's push to electrify car culture shows not only the limitations of such segmented thinking, but how it also precludes an ability to anticipate the situations arising from such policies.
The piece titled, “Why Norway — the poster child for electric cars — is having second thoughts,” states
“Over the last decade, Norway has emerged as the world’s undisputed leader in electric vehicle adoption. With generous government incentives available, 87 percent of the country’s new car sales are now fully electric, a share that dwarfs that of the European Union (13 percent) and the United States (7 percent). Norway’s muscular EV push has garnered headlines in outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian while drawing praise from the Environmental Defense Fund, the World Economic Forum, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. “I’d like to thank the people of Norway again for their incredible support of electric vehicles,” he tweeted last December. “Norway rocks!!”
The last statement alone should raise deafeningly loud alarm bells. The piece describes the problems with Norway's success, of their “rocking,” including “Eye-popping EV subsidies have flowed largely to the affluent, contributing to the gap between rich and poor in a country proud of its egalitarian social policies.” Unfortunately, concern for the greater environment still remains, especially in the US, greatly confined to a rather small group of people, over represented by those who for decades have shown little interest in the problems of wealth distribution and the innumerable adversities derived from excessive wealth concentration. Global environmental understanding needs to be tied into, not segmented from, the great inequalities that came with industrialism.
This inadequacy of industrial segmentation for addressing the greater environment is best exemplified by the automobile. Ownership of the automobile has always been a very small segment of the global population, most especially concentrated in the United States. Today with 4% of the global population, the US burns 20% of the oil supply, the majority of which is use to fuel American car culture.
Looking at climate through the segmented perspective of the automobile is simply insufficient. The nut of the article refreshingly states,
“The EV boom has hobbled Norwegian cities’ efforts to untether themselves from the automobile and enable residents to instead travel by transit or bicycle, decisions that do more to reduce emissions, enhance road safety, and enliven urban life than swapping a gas-powered car for an electric one.”
The ability to do differently requires not an industrial segmented view of life, but one more encompassing, a perspective that looks to restructure industrial society — physically, economically, politically — and maybe most importantly a radical revaluation of values. Industrial transformation occurred not simply through technology but with the mass production of wants. The greatest critic of the 20th century, who ironically died in 1900, wrote in The Dawn, “Perhaps people would then recollect that they had accustomed themselves to many wants merely because it was easy to gratify them it would be sufficient to unlearn some of these wants!”
A transcending of industrialism requires not simply going forward but backwards. To do so requires desegmenting society, transcending the increasingly segmented identities of popular culture and most importantly the individual’s dominant, though little recognized, identity as a 20th century industrial production cog and incessantly catalyzed consumer. In part, identity segmentation can be supplanted by an egalitarian understanding of the whole of humanity as equals in our dependence on this very small planet and meaning primarily provided by our relations with each other.