Reclaiming Progess

by Brandon Keim

The Amish occupy a mythological place in the American consciousness: bonnets and buggies, top hats and horse-drawn plows, farming their fields in severe black suits on hot summer days. To most they are an anachronistic curiosity, clinging to pre-industrial ways like rats to a boulder about to be swamped by the tide.

However, the Amish actually adopted one modern accessory long before many of us — the cellular phone, that ubiquitous symbol of twenty-first century consumer modernity. It turns out that the popular idea of the Amish as dogmatically old-fashioned is a misconception. Instead, the Amish approach technology in a manner more measured and reflective than our own. Promising technologies are used by a few citizens, carefully evaluated, and approved or rejected according to whether they further the values of Amish communities.

It is a mentality we might do well to emulate. This is not to say that we should copy them too closely; in the Amish approach to technology there is much that is unappealing, in particular the rigid subjugation of individual desire to that of the community. But it is a valuable example nonetheless, a reassuring alternative to the seemingly inevitable march of so-called progress.

Interestingly, I learned about the Amish from none other than Wired magazine. Wired was not always a vapid rag dedicated to hawking the new and shiny to the nation’s middle management. It was once a journal less of products than ideas; one of its driving sensibilities was that of unfettered cultural intermingling, accompanied by a belief that progress was not something which funneled you at an accelerating rate into some predetermined future. Instead, progress meant having the ability to choose your lifestyle — not from a narrow assortment of consumer realities, but from the whole spectrum of human experience, so that a tattooed raver dancing the night away and an Amish farmer who disconnected his phone during dinner had more in common with each other than with an office ladder-climber working overtime to afford a bigger television.

Naturally, when the venture capital started to flow, such strange ideas were drowned by the language of profit margins and bottom lines. "Where do you want to go today?" became a slogan for an orgy of corporate commercialism whose wildest conceptions of the future involved Buddhist monks surfing the internet and stylish twentysomethings using cellular phones to send text messages about stock prices and cheese dip. Ideas of progress as encompassing intellectual and social freedom, of technology as perhaps pointing the way off the treadmill of modern consumerism, were abandoned, replaced by the old idea of the future as something narrow and linear in which 'progress' was monopolized by industry and always defined as good.

Nevertheless, the current recession — precipitated by the dot-com collapse and deepened by revelations that the corporate world’s success was largely an illusion — has tarnished the glowing promises of capitalism's ideologues. And just as we now regard with knowing skepticism the solemn assurances of corporate executives and their pet economists, so too should we look with suspicion upon the salesmen of biotechnology, who promise that genetic manipulation will provide simple solutions to the world's dilemmas. Starvation? Disease? Violence? Global warming? Proponents of biotech wish to convince us that these problems can be dispelled in a flourish of test tubes and petri dishes, rather than through honest reflection, careful planning, and hard work.

In this issue, we study how the dangers of reproductive technologies are hidden from women, for whom resistance to eugenics is too often mistaken as a betrayal of feminism. We examine famine in Africa, caused by drought and social chaos, and exploited by biotech agribusiness giants to force open unwilling “markets.” We document how the industry has spent millions of dollars to prevent Oregonians from knowing what they eat; how untested, drug-producing crops have been secretly planted throughout the U.S.; and how small farmers are threatened by the industry’s use of surveillance technologies. In all these cases, the lies of biotechnology’s salesmen are obvious. This does not mean that biotech is intrinsically bad, or holds no promise — but when it is driven by profit, cloaked in propaganda, and sold as a convenient answer to all our problems, it is the precise opposite of progress. We should all be a little Amish sometimes.