Are you my mother? Techno-propaganda in children’s literature

Voted as one of the most popular picture books of all time, P.D. Eastman’s 1960 classic, Are You My Mother, has an insidious—and blatantly obvious—message for young readers about the intrinsic beneficence of industrial technology. My parents were big Dr. Seuss fans, but not so much with Eastman, so I somehow missed reading this until my daughter inherited her own mother’s well-worn copy. I assume that it is now part of my granddaughter’s library.

Here's a nice youtube version. Propaganda always seems more easily digestible with an accent.

Briefly, it’s a story about a young bird that falls out of the nest and goes in search of its mother.  It runs into a variety of creatures, a cat, a hen, a dog, and a cow, among others, and asks them the question that is the title of the book. Things are looking pretty bleak for the little bird when it runs into "the snort," a giant, red, noisy, smoke-billowing mechanical creature (a steam shovel). The bird hops onto the toothy bucket of the machine and nervously asks it the question of the day. The machine responds by snorting loudly and carrying the by-now completely terrified bird up into the air and then drops it gently back into its nest, where the bird’s actual mother returns momentarily with a juicy worm for breakfast.

There are two related take-home messages here:  first, machines may look scary, but they really have our best interests at heart; second, mechanical technology (more specifically, technology that we don't personally comprehend) is how our problems get solved. 

The next generation of genetic modification or nanotech or weapons systems or crowd control technology may look scary, but it really has our best interests at heart.  

We are lost. We have lost track of our true home, and with it, contact with our authentic human nature. But there is a technological cure, an innovation just around the corner that is sure to make everything better. The next corporate digital distraction is sure to pick us up and sweep us right back to where we belong.    

Egoist anarchists and other mythical beasts

A great review of the book Enemies of Society here: 

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20130318182318655

The book is a collection of pieces that highlight “the egoist side” of the anarchist “family tree.” 

I haven’t read the anthology. And frankly, after reading the review, I’m not sure that I really want to. But the collectivist/egoist distinction is an interesting one.

I have always had a problem with the whole idea of old-school collectivist anarchism. The more socialistic versions seem to be an attempt to have and eat the same cake, to have voluntary and egalitarian participation while simultaneously retaining the ability to systematically structure human activity, as if it would be possible to equally partition the benefits of industrial technology and at the same time maintain the essential inequality of the industrial process itself. Anarchistic collectivism is possible, perhaps, but not without abandoning all technology more complex than simple craft.   

As for those folks on the egoist side of the anarchist family tree: I strongly suggest giving them a blood test. I think for the most part you’ll find a bunch of illegitimate Hobbesian red-in-tooth-and-claw bastards. The kind of self-serving individualism being offered by most of these “egoists” as a mode of social (dis)organization is a pathological reaction to the isolating effects of civilization, and in no way consistent with our evolved human design as social primates.

The low-tech lifestyles of our egalitarian foraging ancestors and our still extant but rapidly disappearing hunter-gatherer brothers and sisters seem to be ideal models of collectivist modes of living that also qualify as anarchistic. No bosses. No arbitrary social hierarchy. Free and voluntary association. 

On personal risk

An anonymous poem (?) found scrawled on a scrap of paper in a used bookstore:

Participation is a form of tacit approval. 

But rebellion is risky. 

At some point, the stakes get high enough to offset the risks. 

At some point continued participation becomes too risky—what price the loss of your soul? 

But between those two poles of personal risk lies a large gray wasteland, a foggy desert of self-doubt and self-loathing where one can get lost for an entire lifetime.

Granny git yer gun: an anti-civ thought experiment

The specter of public mass shootings by heavily armed psychopaths is not going to be reduced by stricter gun laws. If the goal is to reduce the fear and misery of living in the kind of society in which school kids and moviegoers and random drum majorettes and babies getting a diaper change in the backseat and [insert media example du jour here] can be shot dead at any moment, then a better option might be to arm everyone, without exception, from the moment they are old enough to pull a trigger.

[Disclaimer: Although I own guns, I am not now, and never have been, a member of the NRA (Neurotic Redneck Association? Nut-less Republican Ass-wipes?)] 

A thought experiment:

Suppose that, starting at the stroke of midnight tonight, all laws making murder with a gun a crime were eliminated forever. Anyone could kill anyone else for any reason without fear of legal repercussion. And further, suppose that instead of regulating people’s access to firearms, we made it so that everyone everywhere had the option of packing a loaded weapon at all times.

It would be chaos, of course, a total bloody mess. Paranoia and fear would be the order of the day. And there would very quickly be a whole lot of dead people. 

Here’s the "thought" part of the thought experiment:

Why? 

What is it about the nature of our society that it would immediately disintegrate into total chaos (or, at least, everyone has been led to believe that this would happen) if not for the active presence of an enormous corpus of laws and policies and regulations—and heavily armed systems of enforcement sanctioned to administer overwhelming violence to potential violators?

The Bushmen of the Kalahari don’t have any official courts of law. Nor do they have any law enforcement officers. Nor do they have anything that really corresponds to the idea of a law. Instead, they have traditional "expectations" with respect to how people should treat each other.

One group in particular also has a lot of poison arrows. In fact, just about everyone has them. And if someone wants to commit murder, it is extremely easy to do and the chances of getting caught are close to zero. And even if you are caught, you have little more than potential social disapprobation—and maybe a vengeful widow—to worry about. Despite this, community life is generally peaceful and highly congenial.  Although murder happens now and then, it is exceedingly rare.

There are, of course, numerous differences between civilization and an authentic human lifestyle that might account for this. But they all converge on the simple fact that in a hunter-gatherer band each person has direct access to the resources—physical, technological, and social resources—necessary for full involvement in community life. Individual people have very little in the way of power to restrict, direct, regulate, or otherwise control access for anyone else. 

Civilization, by definition, is a collection of systems of mediation in which an individual’s access to resources to satisfy his or her own needs is systematically regulated and controlled by other people, a tiny minority of whom are granted immensely greater access. If everyone were given equal access, and the power to dispatch anyone who tried to obstruct that access, civilization (and especially the tiny minority who now enjoy disproportionate access) would evaporate overnight. 

   

The end of civilization would mean the end of weapons manufacturing plants and, with time, the end of anything more powerful than poison arrows. But more than this, it would mean a return to modes of living based on direct-access, and with them, a loss of much of the need for weapons in the first place.  

Another deathbed conversion

A recent story in the Guardian tells of an interview with infamous anarchist and GMO activist, Mark Lynas,  who recently decided that his past life was based on a lie, and that not only are GMOs really not the evil things that these whacko environmentalist-types are making them out to be, they are in fact the best thing since sliced bread (no doubt we’re talking industrial white bread made with nutritionally-sterile bleached flour that has to be artificially enriched).

It is interesting that this story popped up right after Whole Foods has decided to make information available about which products on its shelves do and do not include GMOs.

But even more interesting to me is how the Guardian article might be used as a case study for how discussion about any innovative technology is invariably biased in favor of corporate interest in a way that downplays—or completely ignores—the potential dangers. 

First off, there are thousands of ways that organisms are being genetically modified, and hundreds of purposes to which these modifications are directed (the vast majority of which are guided solely by considerations of corporate profit). Despite this, the discussion of "GMO" is limited to those specific genetic alterations that have a potential positive benefit for humanity as their driving purpose. The article talks about fighting global hunger and malnutrition through the development of “golden rice” which has been modified to contain high amounts of beta carotene, for example. But there is no mention of the mass production of sterile seed, or the widespread distribution of this seed to developing countries where the use of these impotent Frankensteins force local farmers into corporate dependency. Nor is there any discussion of the untested long-term health consequences of GMOs for humans or livestock or birds—or honeybees.

It is the nature of all technological change that for every improvement there will be negative consequences that cannot be predicted ahead of time. But the evaluation of any new technology is invariably focused on the specific set of problems the technology has been designed to solve. The set of problems that innovation brings into existence can be entirely external to this evaluation process even when the problems are well known. For example, the evolution and proliferation of virulent strains of bacteria as a function of antibiotic innovation has in no way slowed the development of even more powerful antibiotics. 

Back to the flip-flopping anarchist. I can’t decide whether this story is a simple anecdote about an intelligent and passionate writer who discovered a way of selling more books (50 Shades of Derrick Jensen), or if his present pro-GMO stance results from  simple ignorance about the limits of science, a story of yet another victim seduced by the myth that technology is a mode of human progress.

The seeds of an ungovernable revolutionary culture

This is a densely written piece (yeah, I know, I’m one to talk!), but well worth the effort:

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/silas-crane-authoritarianism-and-self-creation

Our most durable chains are those we have forged ourselves. For every latent threat, for every overt constraint, for every subtly coerced act of compliance, there are a thousand unnoticed—and unrecognized—acts of voluntary submission.  

And to submit to a democratically-crafted bureaucratic arrangement is no less an act of self-denial as to fall prostrate before a scepter-wielding despot.     

Drug of choice

There are only two kinds of people in the world: those remaining indigenous who are still living an authentic human existence, hunter-gatherers, and the rest of us, agriculturalists. (Note that global industrial civilization, for all of its layers of mediation, for all of its mechanical separation and distortion, is an agriculturalist lifestyle, and ultimately grounded in the dirt of domestication.)

The recreational drug of choice in hunter-gatherer communities is usually some form of hallucinogen.  Hallucinogenic compounds are rarely addictive because they typically don’t operate on the dopamine-based reward circuits of the brain. By stark contrast, the drug of choice for agriculturalists is invariably an addictive agent that directly targets the reward circuits: almost always a pain-reducing soporific such as alcohol or opium, but occasionally a behavior-increasing dopaminergic substance such as cocaine or amphetamine.

Two things here:

First, why is it hunter-gatherers tend to prefer perception-expanding agents over feel-good chemicals?

Second, what is it about a domestication-based lifestyle that lends itself to drugs that target the brain’s reward circuits? And why is it that the drug of choice for agriculturalists is usually an experience-blunting analgesic agent?