Embracing Modernity

It obvious Donavan is a luddite, of the same branch as primitivist anarchists John Zerzan and Kaczynski. He blames all of society’s ills on technology, as well as anticipating Americas decline, which is a liberal thing to do. Being ‘right-wing’ on some issues doesn’t change the fact he is ideologically aligned with the anti-technology left. But what about republicans who are skeptical of technology, modernity and free market capitalism? Yes, they are called paleocons or traditional cons, but if your message (anti-technology, anti-modernity, Americas is in decline, capitalism sucks… etc) is indistinguishable from what the left is preaching, you’re a liberal as far as I’m concerned. Yes, beyond the five-minute mark he is right about feminism but, as this blog shows, you don’t need to be anti-technology and anti-free markets to be anti-feminist and anti-welfare. Also, a lot of this video doesn’t agree with empirical reality. The overwhelming evidence is that America is not incline and that its economic power has only strengthened in recent years, especially since 2008. Look at how much the dollar, S&P 500, and bond market have surged – or how the Forbes 400 list keeps getting richer, or how foreign capital is pouring into America, or the recent breakthroughs in technology and physics, or how America’s most prestigious universities and tech companies have become the envy of the world, inundated with more applications than they can ever hope to fill. Then look at the rest of the world: the Euro down 30% in the past year alone. The Brazil Real and Turkish Lira are down 15%, just this year alone, against the all-mighty Greenback. If there is ‘decline’, it’s certainly not in America and it’s not in China; it’s in Europe, Russia, and elsewhere. If your ability to reason and perceive reality is occluded by personal biases and wishful thinking, then you will be wrong most of the time, as Mr. Donavan is. Why can’t we have a debate with actual evidence and data, and leave the fantasy at the door where it belongs. Finally, if you believe the The Way of Man is the superior way, wouldn’t you want man to succeed to his fullest cognitive potential, creating great technologies and empires, not languishing in caves in a post-apocalyptic world, vulnerable to the whims of nature? And don’t you have faith that men, being that they are responsible for the vast majority of innovations throughout history, would not let or want modern civilization to collapse and would take active measures to delay such a collapse, as humans are the only species capable of contemplating abstract concepts such as fate and mortality? Perhaps modernity is borne out of the innately human desire to avoid death and seek abundance, so humans are wired to invent? So even if everything does come crashing down, as Mr. Donovan wants, civilization would inevitably congeal because that is what humans are biologically programmed do, to reassemble the pieces and start anew, or quoted by author Robert M. Pirsig:

“But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.”