Francis Fukuyama also pointed out both World Wars as the moment when many people began to distrust progress and technology—something he labeled “techno-pessimism.”
I believe I see traces of this type of pessimism deeply embedded in our culture. For example:
militant environmentalism, which advocates for reducing the human population to some low number, ie. 500 million. Often call humanity a scourge or virus.
many types of primitivists. For example, the character of Tyler Durden from Fight Club describes his vision of a humanity freed from modernity as hunter gatherers drying meat on the remnants of highways.
personifying the planet, eg. “Mother Earth”, leading to a one-sided view that anything humans do causes suffering to the planet.
I sort of believe that all these ideas are tied together by the Christian roots of the US/EU culturespace. In that faith, Man and Nature are wholly separate with Nature existing wholly to delight and serve Man. And in the ideas listed above, humans are seen as apart from nature, even unnatural and wrong, and most of those ideas have a utopian feel to them in how they put forth a vision of a kind of garden of Eden on the condition of destroying technology.
Francis Fukuyama also pointed out both World Wars as the moment when many people began to distrust progress and technology—something he labeled “techno-pessimism.”
I believe I see traces of this type of pessimism deeply embedded in our culture. For example:
militant environmentalism, which advocates for reducing the human population to some low number, ie. 500 million. Often call humanity a scourge or virus.
many types of primitivists. For example, the character of Tyler Durden from Fight Club describes his vision of a humanity freed from modernity as hunter gatherers drying meat on the remnants of highways.
the recently trendy idea of “degrowth”.
personifying the planet, eg. “Mother Earth”, leading to a one-sided view that anything humans do causes suffering to the planet.
I sort of believe that all these ideas are tied together by the Christian roots of the US/EU culturespace. In that faith, Man and Nature are wholly separate with Nature existing wholly to delight and serve Man. And in the ideas listed above, humans are seen as apart from nature, even unnatural and wrong, and most of those ideas have a utopian feel to them in how they put forth a vision of a kind of garden of Eden on the condition of destroying technology.