Thoughts on the nature/nurture divide in both pro- & anti-tech circles?

The shift from prehistoric small groups to pre-modern large-scale civilisations has almost always been a shift from communities with an egalitarian structure to social inequality and despotic rule.[183] The fact that we still live with extreme social inequalities in wealth, power and status seems to have been the inevitable price to pay for social evolution towards complex large societies. But was it truly inevitable? There are growing doubts about the oversimplified narrative that humans throughout the Pleistocene lived in scattered small groups organised in an egalitarian way.[184]

The anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow have warned against falling for the allure of these kinds of simplifications,[185] and recent research shows that even back then, tens of thousands of years ago, there was a plethora of social structures that were more entrenched, larger and politically more unequal than previously assumed. The popular narrative of the shift from egalitarian tribal societies to large inegalitarian societies prepares us to accept that this shift – and the forms of social inequality and political domination that came with it – was inevitable and had no alternative. What appears to be a sober description of the historical course of events is actually an ideologically charged narrative designed to suffocate our political imagination.

In fact, according to Graeber and Wengrow, we humans have always lived in all kinds of conditions and, regardless of climate and group size, in all kinds of socio-political arrangements. We have always been conscious political actors who would not allow ourselves to be put in an ‘evolutionary straitjacket’;[186] some micro-societies were familiar with strict hierarchies and despotic exploitation; and the inhabitants of some impressively large indigenous communities of North America with tens of thousands of members made fun of the lack of self-r espect shown by the French and English who had just arrived in the New World, cowering in front of their social superiors and kissing their boots. Some societies were familiar with leaders or chiefs, but they were understood to have a serving role; other groups moved effortlessly – depending on the season – between radically divergent political structures, and were free masters of their own destinies during the summer months of abundance, but in the barren winter months would at any given time temporarily subject themselves to the necessary evil of a political sovereign.

The existence of different varieties of socialisation over the course of social evolution is not surprising. The real question is why we are stuck today: why do material inequality and political hierarchy seem to have no alternative, and feel non-negotiable to us? Graeber and Wengrow rightly point out that thinking about political alternatives is always worthwhile; what would we miss out on if we agreed with Francis Fukuyama that the liberal-democratic-capitalist compromise was the end of history, and the only remaining serious candidate in the competition of political systems?[187]

Yet even if we manage to throw a spanner in the works when it comes to simple stories of progression from small and equal to big and unequal, and show that human history has always been a history of intense political plasticity and social variability, in which we largely shaped our coexistence ourselves, could modern large societies really exist without inequality and domination? Perhaps this is precisely the reason why it seems as though we are stuck now: we really are stuck, and beyond returning to radically simpler forms of living – with their own particular blend of romance and harshness – it is very unlikely that developed societies can be organised without considerable socio-political stratification.

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[183] Flannery, K. & Marcus, J. (2012). The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire.

[184] Singh, M. & Glowacki, L. (2022). Human social organization during the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the nomadic-egalitarian model. Evolution and Human Behavior, 7(22).

[185] Graeber, D. & Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

[186] Ibid. p. 96.

[187] Fukuyama, F. (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.

Plus, here's a quote from The Unabomber and the origins of anti-tech radicalism:

Kaczynski’s idea of maladaptation also differs in a crucial way from Ellul’s. For Ellul, the mismatch between human beings and modern technology is socio-cultural. The problem with ‘technique’ is that it ‘dissociates the sociological forms, destroys the moral framework, desacralizes men and things, explodes social and religious taboos, and reduces the body social to a collection of individuals’.[53] Chase interprets Kaczynski too as a ‘cultural primitivist’, comparing him to the ‘countless contemporary writers, from the Harvard social philosopher Lewis Mumford to Ellul himself, [who] warned that technological progress threatened the future of culture’.[54] However, unlike the cultural and economic critics of technology whom he might have encountered at Harvard, Kaczynski is not particularly concerned with the breakdown of traditional communities or ways of life. Although he acknowledges that ‘rapid change and the breakdown of communities have been widely recognized as sources of social problems’, he ‘do[es] not believe they are enough to account for the extent of the problems that are seen today’.[55]

If Ellul and Mumford are cultural primitivists, then Kaczynski is a ‘bioprimitivist’. He argues that human beings are biologically maladapted to life in a technological society: ‘We [i.e. FC] attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved’.[56] Over hundreds of thousands of years, ‘natural selection has adapted the human race physically and psychologically’ to a ‘spectrum of [natural] environments’.[57] But the Industrial Revolution has drastically altered these environments in the span of a few generations. Kaczynski thinks the mismatch between our hunter-gatherer genes and our technological environments is responsible for many common pathologies, including ‘depression, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, spouse or child abuse, insatiable hedonism, abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, [and] eating disorders’.[58] Whereas Ellul’s idea of maladaptation is socio-cultural, Kaczynski’s is evolutionary-psychological. The difference between Ellul and Kaczynski thus marks the distinction between cultural primitivism and bioprimitivism.

Kaczynski often couches his idea of maladaptation in his bespoke psychological terms, which have no parallels in Ellul’s thought. He argues that human beings have an innate need for ‘the power process’: ‘in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals’.[59] The goals that Kaczynski has in mind are basic, biological goals related to survival and reproduction. The power process is the process of using one’s own physical and mental power to satisfy one’s own biological needs.[60]

Since many people in modern society can obtain the necessities of life without serious effort, they try to satisfy their need for the power process through ‘surrogate activities’, or activities that are ‘directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward’.[61] These include hobbies, sports, art, and most importantly for Kaczynski, activism and science. However, ‘for many people, maybe the majority, these artificial forms of the power process are insufficient’.[62] Our maladaptation to the technological society thus results from the fact that this form of society cannot satisfy our biologically rooted psychological needs.

In sum, Ellul’s ideas constitute the core but by no means the whole of the Manifesto. Kaczynski’s systemic understanding of technology, his idea of maladaptation, his critique of leftism, and many of his finer points are derived from The Technological Society. But Kaczynski modifies and supplements Ellul’s ideas under the influence of evolutionary theory and modern psychology. In particular, the ideas of biological maladaptation, the power process, and surrogate activity are not derived from Ellul.

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[53] Ellul, The Technological Society, op. cit., Ref. 10, p. 126.

[54] Chase, A Mind for Murder, op. cit., Ref. 15, pp. 97–98. On neo-Luddism, see Steven E. Jones, Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism (New York: Routledge, 2006).

[55] ISAIF ¶53.

[56] ISAIF ¶46.

[57] ISAIF ¶178.

[58] ISAIF ¶44.

[59] ISAIF ¶37.

[60] ISAIF ¶40-41. See also Kaczynski, ‘Reflections on Purposeful Work’, 1978–1979, later parts 1981–83, Labadie Box 65.

[61] ISAIF ¶39.

[62] ISAIF ¶64.

Finally, here's a quick table of authors on different sides of the divide:

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