From Satori to Silicon Valley
by Theodore Roszak
Copyright 2000 by Theodore Roszak. All rights reserved.
Reversionaries and Technophiles
I should explain how I am using the term "postindustrial"
here. I mean it in the sense that would supposedly place us permanently
beyond the chronic the instability of
boom and bust, the waste of life and resources, the injustice
and brutality. In its postindustrial phase, our society would
not simply have matured but transcended, reaching that point where
our technological genius would at last have freed us from the
tyranny of getting and spending, compulsive productivity and frantic
consumption, mass manipulation and military necessity, so that
we might live a fully human life. "Postindustrial" indicates
a stage of moral, not economic, growth.
That utopian goal has been with us since the first appearance
of the Dark Satanic Mills. But in the western world, the vision
of our postindustrial future has been polarized between two very
different scenarios: that of the "Reversionaries" and
that of the "Technophiles."
For the Reversionaries, who trace back to John Ruskin, William
Morris, Prince Kropotkin, and the Romantic artists generally,
industrialism is the extreme state of a cultural disease that
must be cured before it kills us. It is a stage of pathological
overdevelopment in the history of human economy from which a healthy
technology -- usually seen as some form of communitarian handicrafts
-- will have to be salvaged once the industrial system has reached
the point of terminal inhumanity. The Reversionaries are what
Paul Goodman would have called "neolithic conservatives."
They look forward to the day when the factories and heavy machinery
will be left to molder, and we will have the chance to return
to the world of the village, the farm, the hunting camp, the tribe.
This would lead us to a life close to the soil and the elements
that needs only simple and communal pleasures to find fulfillment.
This is the route that, for example, Stephen Gaskin chose for
himself and his followers when they left the Experimental College
at San Francisco State University in 1971.
Through the middle and later sixties, Gaskin, a former assistant
to San Francisco State Professor S. I. Hayakawa, had been teaching
a "Monday Night Class" in the student-financed and controlled
Experimental College. When the class began to draw some several
hundred students, it moved for a brief period to Glide Memorial
Church in downtown San Francisco and identified itself as a "religion,"
with Gaskin as its guru. Finally in late 1971, Gaskin organized
a mass exodus via bus caravan that made its way to a 1700 acre
farm in Tennessee. The philosophy of the settlement was simple
living and "guaranteed good karma." Some have identified
Gaskin's following of reconstructed urbanites as "voluntary
peasants." Gaskin puts it this way:
What we are really into is making a living in a clean way.
I guess farming is about the cleanest way to make a living. It's
just you and the dirt and God. And the dirt -- you can't make
friends with an acre of ground and get it to give you an "A"
like in college or something. If you make friends with it, you
have to put work into it, and then it'll come back and feed you,
it'll really do it. But you can't snow it or anything like that
-- it's going to be real with you. (Resurgence, No. 59,
Nov.-Dec., 1976, London, p. 12.)
The result of Gaskin's philosophy in application was to be
one of the few long-term communitarian ventures to come out of
the sixties. By dint of hard work, fraternal sharing, and minimal
consumption, The Farm managed to prosper into the 1980's on a
regimen of soybeans and natural childbirth.
Over against this stratagem of radical withdrawal and reversion,
we have the technophiliac vision of our industrial destiny, a
modem current of thought that flows back to Saint-Simon, Robert
Owen, and H. G. Wells. For these utopian industrialists, as for
Buckminster Fuller after them, the cure for our industrial ills
will not be found in things past, but in Things To Come. Indeed,
it will be found at the climax of the industrial process. What
is required, therefore, is not squeamish reversion, but brave
perseverance. We must adapt resourcefully to industrialism as
a necessary stage of social evolution, monitoring the process
with a cunning eye for its life-saving potentialities. As we approach
the crisis that threatens calamity, we must grasp these opportunities
as they emerge and use them to redeem the system from within.
The way out of our dilemma is to tunnel fearlessly through until
we reach daylight.
One recognizes at once the familiar Marxist pattern of history
in this vision. As against the utopian visionaries who would abscond
from industrial society, Marx insisted that the logic of history
had to be worked through in its proper phases: from feudalism
to capitalism, from capitalism to socialism, from socialism to
communism. But one also notices that in Fuller's foreshortened
version of the philosophy, we are dealing with the views of a
technician, not a political economist. In sharp contrast to Marx,
Fuller was a sociological illiterate. There is simply no political
context to his thought. Instead, where Marx deals in class conflict
and political power, Fuller offers us . . . inventions. That is
what the industrial system produces. Its inventions are simply
to be appropriated by clever engineers like Fuller and used to
save the human race. The inventions make possible things the capitalist
owners cannot envision. But mavericks like Fuller, purporting
to stand outside the system, recognize these possibilities and
hasten to take advantage of them. As Fuller put it:
The individual can take initiative without anybody's permission.
Only individuals can . . . look for the principles manifest in
their experience that others may be overlooking because they
are too preoccupied with how to please some boss or with how
to earn money. . . .The individual is the only one who could
think in a cosmically adequate manner. (Robert Snyder, Buckminster
Fuller, An Autobiographical Monologue/Scenario, New York,
St. Martin's Press, 1970, p. 38)
Thus, these "individuals" outsmart and outflank the
high and the mighty, who, one is left to conclude, simply surrender
to their superior insight.
What is an example of such a clever gambit? Well, Fuller was
a man of one example, the invention he always fell back on to
prove every point: the geodesic dome, on which he held the patent.
Had not advanced engineering and industrial technology made this
stupendous invention possible? And was not the whole history of
the world going to be transformed by the dome? QED.
There was a cult of the geodesic dome during the sixties. It
began with the popular dome books of San Francisco architect Lloyd
Kahn, who was converted to domesmanship by Fuller when the inventor
came to the San Francisco Bay Area. Thanks to Kahn's books and
The Whole Earth Catalog, the hope sprang up that communities
of domes might blossom overnight outside major cities -- like
barbarian encampments embodying the new postindustrial culture.
(As far as I'm aware, the closest approach to that goal was Drop
City near Trinidad Colorado, a "weed patch commune"
whose several funky structures were rigged up out of salvaged
junk from the nearest city dump.) The dome quickly became more
than an architectural eccentricity; it came to symbolize a new,
worldwide style of shelters which combined the values of simplicity,
economy, durability, communalism, and whose tetrahedron units
had (so Fuller insisted) tapped the deep geometrical logic of
the cosmos.
Fuller's followers were quick to take his claims for the dome
at full value. As one of the founders of Drop City pronounced:
To live in a dome is -- psychologically -- to be in closer
harmony with natural structure. Macrocosm and microcosm are recreated,
both the celestial sphere and molecular and crystalline forms.
Cubical buildings are structurally weak and uneconomic. Corners
constrict the mind. Domes break into new dimensions. They help
to open man's perception and expand his approaches to creativity.
The dichotomy between utilitarian and aesthetic, between artist
and layman is broken down. (Bill Voyd, "Drop City,"
in Theodore Roszak, ed. Sources, New York, Harper &
Row, 1972, p. 276)
Another dome missionary proclaimed:
Soon domed cities will spread across the world, anywhere land
is cheap -- on the deserts, in the swamps, on mountains, tundra,
ice caps. The tribes are moving, building completely free and
open waystations, each a warm and beautiful conscious environment.
We are winning. (Hugh Gardner, Children of Prosperity,
New York, St. Martin's Press, 1978, p.37)
Now there were a number of problems with domes. Most of them,
even those built in the deserts, the swamps, the mountains, had
to have their struts and shafts and connectors, their plywood
and fiberglass, shipped in from some distant industrial metropolis.
And none of them were all that much cheaper or easier to build
than a Quonset hut or a Butler barn. And most of them leaked,
unless they were shielded by a vast and fragile plastic skin,
again imported from the metropolis. And none could be insulated
unless they were sprayed or coated with an industrial chemical.
And none of them in style or structural substance ever bore any
respectful relationship to their locality. Indeed, the dome was
designed by its maker to be placeless, meant to be plunked down
anywhere from the Arctic to the tropics as an assertion of the
global industrial dominance. But none of this seemed to matter
to the dome enthusiasts; by virtue of Fuller's intoxicating rhetoric
and boundless optimism, the dome was seen as an icon of our social
salvation.
Fuller was not alone in extrapolating the technophiliac
vision of postindustrial history There were others, each of whom
became, at some point, a countercultural favorite. There was Marshall
McLuhan, who saw the electronic media as the secret of building
a new "global village" that was somehow cozy, participative,
and yet at the same time technologically sophisticated. There
was Paolo Soleri, who believed that the solution to the ecological
crisis of the modem world was the building of megastructural "arcologies"
-- beehive cities in which the urban billions could be compacted
into totally artificial environments. There was Gerard O'Neill,
who barnstormed the country whipping up enthusiasm for one of
the zaniest schemes of all: the launching of self-contained space
colonies for the millions. For a few years, O'Neill became a special
fascination of Stewart Brand and The Whole Earth Catalog (later
The Co-Evolution Quarterly). In each of these cases, one
sees the same assumption brought into play: the industrial process,
pushed to its limit, generates its own best medicine. Out of the
advanced research of the electronics, plastics, chemical, and
aerospace industries, there emerge solutions to all our political
and environmental problems.
Contents
Some Afterthoughts in the Year 2000
From Satori to Silicon Valley by Theodore Roszak
Copyright 2000 by Theodore Roszak. All rights reserved.