{"id":20657,"date":"2016-05-16T11:33:39","date_gmt":"2016-05-16T16:33:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20657"},"modified":"2016-05-16T11:33:39","modified_gmt":"2016-05-16T16:33:39","slug":"of-boomers-and-doomers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20657","title":{"rendered":"Of boomers and doomers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Of boomers and doomers<\/a><\/h3>\n
I suppose this is going over old ground, but I\u2019ve been struck anew recently through various readings and conversations about the nature of techno-utopianism, and the difficulty we seem to have nowadays in breaking out of a boomer-doomer dualism \u2013 that is, either the (rather unhistorical) \u2018boomer\u2019 notion that human rationality, optimism and ingenuity always overcomes the social, economic and biophysical problems societies face, or the (boldly predictive, and therefore also unhistorical) \u2018doomer\u2019 notion that these problems are sure to overwhelm us and destroy civilisation altogether.<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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One such reading is David Rieff\u2019s recent book\u00a0The Reproach of Hunger<\/em>1. There are interesting commonalities between his critique of the now dominant aid\/development paradigm, and\u00a0my own critique of ecomodernism<\/a>\u00a0within environmentalist thought. Given the different (if overlapping) focus and personnel involved, perhaps this suggests quite a generic ideology of techno-utopianism (TU) within contemporary thinking. Rieff\u2019s book has helped me see its outlines more clearly, so with his help here I\u2019d like to describe briefly some of its key elements. Rieff also has some interesting, if frustratingly vague, thoughts on the possibilities for a peasant-focused development paradigm, but more on that another time.<\/p>\n

So here, for your consideration, are seven elements of TU ideology, lightly tossed with a few counter-thoughts of my own:<\/p>\n

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  1. Ideology:\u00a0<\/strong>our first characteristic of TU ideology is that it considers itself to have no ideology, but instead merely a pragmatic focus on solving practical problems (such as climate change or extreme poverty) by using whatever methods demonstrably work. Its\u00a0critics<\/em>\u00a0have ideology \u2013 they are ideologues, partisans, spoilers, whose critiques reflect their own narrow political agendas \u2013 but TU rises serenely above all that.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Of boomers and doomers I suppose this is going over old ground, but I\u2019ve been struck anew recently through various readings and conversations about the nature of techno-utopianism, and the difficulty we seem to have nowadays in breaking out of a boomer-doomer dualism \u2013 that is, either the (rather unhistorical) \u2018boomer\u2019 notion that human rationality, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[5791,13854,13853,8075,603,6199,9738,785],"class_list":["post-20657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-boomers","tag-david-rieff","tag-doomers","tag-ecomodernism","tag-optimism","tag-rationality","tag-small-farm-future","tag-techno-utopianism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20657"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20658,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20657\/revisions\/20658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}