True Technological Progress Requires the Defeat of "Progressives"

The time is over-ripe for asking questions about technology--not about whether it may be pressed to produce yet more miracles in medicine, physics, transportation, communication, and the rest, but about whether we human beings are likely to acquire enough maturity (or are capable of doing so) to sort the significant from the frivolous, the benign from the risky, the humane from the degrading. In other words, progress from here on out depends not so much upon the sublime alchemy of turning dust to gold as upon the blunt moral gambit that we can keep showers of gold from rusting our collective soul.

At the moment, many of us in large cities are walking around in masks. Our technology has crowded us into urban environments where travelers who can't distinguish between a bacterium and a planarium rocket from country to country in sealed conveyances for a holiday weekend, their health compromised by poor diet and a sedentary habit of living, their system over-medicated by liberally prescribed antibiotics. The swine flu crisis is itself symptomatic. We are wallowing in artificial, finely engineered blessings, and they threaten to become a curse. We never have enough of ease, of amusement, of travel, of speed: we push them all to the limit until, suddenly, we reel above some abyss or other never viewed before by our species. Having cured one plague, we rush to the next. The grandaddy of all plagues, for that matter--the bubonic plague--resulted less from poor sanitation than from ambitious importation of exotic merchandise into densely populated areas on the promise of a fat profit. We have a long history of spoiling modest prosperity by lusting after the moon's green cheese or the rainbow's pot of gold.

As technology makes us conceive more energetic ambitions, so it also fits blinders upon our imagination. Once sailors had advanced in the science of navigation, reaching foreign shores became the only means of amassing wealth. Now that the Internet and cell phones have "connected" us in a great "web", anything less than global community seems a step back toward rubbing two sticks for a fire. The notion that government exists to bind the social web's outermost strands more "harmoniously" (read "inflexibly") passes unquestioned: people in Peoria should have the same rights, breaks, taxes, wages, textbooks, and health care as people in Miami or LA or Butte or Steamboat Springs. As late as 1990, I should guess, such an inclusive and intrusive view of government would have been indignantly rejected by a whopping majority. Now we placidly bow before federally meted punishments, in the form of taxes, for smoking a cigarette, driving an SUV, or heating our domicile.

The relation between technology, the market, and politics is therefore of the first importance in determining our future. If we continue to respond to mass-marketing and to accept centralized rule, then eventually--and sooner rather than later--decisions about whether we may bring a handicapped fetus to term or grow tomatoes in our back yard or refuse to have a colonoscopy will be made for one and all by a remote, faceless commission of "experts". If, on the other hand, we were to insist, in a resurgence of independence, that different communities be allowed to run different existential experiments, then technology and the human spirit might still blossom side by side. What if a certain metropolis established no-drive zones and constructed everything on the scale of the human footstep? What if another allowed residential sections to raise livestock under sanitary conditions? Another might design buildings specifically to harness solar power or the wind--and another might ban all taxes and raise money only by soliciting voluntary contributions. This would be real change rather than the claptrap we've been sold by a new administration of old-school liars--and it would require a decentralization of power, to which our "progressives" will never consent.

Personally, I wouldn't care if San Francisco mandated that all marriages be gay or if the state of California legislated that its representative Miss be a Lesbian. Let a given community be as progressive as it likes within the ample confines of basic decency. If people are only allowed a choice, they will sooner or later pass a collective verdict--and a reflective one--on any option under the sun. (N.B.: Could it be that the Act Up crowd would NOT want its own city or state precisely because its behavior would no longer be shocking to bourgeois bystanders?)

Presently, a certain amount of freedom from county to county or state to state remains on paper. Such diversity, however, is largely an illusion. Federal agencies readily bully and blackmail subordinate jurisdictions into compliance. Lawyers keep innovation in the courts for so long with such flimsy justification that only the vastly wealthy can fight off the plague of gnats generated by subpoenas. We have already centralized ourselves into a straitjacket. Some believe that our last best hope might be to break up the union and watch the pieces come back to life.

I have heard of far worse ideas. Why bother preserving a union whose leaders advocate a global economy, apologize far and wide for the nation's history, and are delivering as fast as possible our national destiny into the hands of international tribuals? As long as Texans and Arizonans are to have no southern border, maybe they should create and enforce a northeastern one.