George Orwell was an anti-technology crank

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > George Orwell was an anti-technology crank

Polybius91: Jun 4, 2012; Cobrastan is not a real country.

I'd read a fair amount of stuff, but today I started The Road to Wigan Pier and found some views of his that were, to say the least, surprising:

quote:

There is probably no one capable of thinking and feeling who has not occasionally looked at a gas-pipe chair and reflected that the machine is the enemy of life.

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You have only to look about you at this moment to realize with what sinister speed the machine is getting us into its power. To begin with, there is the frightful debauchery of taste that has already been effected by a century of mechanization. This is almost too obvious and too generally admitted to need pointing out. But as a single instance, take taste in its narrowest sense--the taste for decent food. In the highly mechanized countries, thanks to tinned food, cold storage, synthetic flavouring matters, etc., the palate is almost a dead organ.

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In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned foods, aspirins, gramophones, gaspipe chairs, machine guns, daily newspapers, telephones, motor-cars, etc., etc.;

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People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a somnambulist will go on working in his sleep. In the past, when it was taken for granted that life on this planet is harsh or at any rate laborious, it Seemed the natural fate to go on using the clumsy implements of your forefathers, and only a few eccentric persons, centuries apart, proposed innovations; hence throughout enormous ages such things as the ox-cart, the plough, the sickle, etc., remained radically unchanged.

I still admire him a great deal for the stuff he's written about socialism and tyranny, but I was not expecting a guy like him to go full on Old Man Yells At Cloud mode.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2016 03:22

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:38

Polybius91: Jun 4, 2012; Cobrastan is not a real country.

Cicero posted:

This one's particularly funny:

*Looks at tens of thousands of man hours to improve some machine*

"They're barely even trying!!"

I also enjoyed his claim that "the Western man invents machines as naturally as the Polynesian islander swims." To be fair, obviously Orwell didn't have instant access to the amounts of research and history we do. I remember being interested when I learned, though, how coming up with ways to efficiently do things and save labor isn't remotely unique to the modern West, rather than something pretty much every society has been doing throughout history. Or even people, what with multiple primates and corvids having been observed to develop tools on the fly.

fspades posted:

Thanks for your observation that a celebrated writer and intellectual of 20th century was not toeing the line with the goonsensus of technological optimism, OP.

My title was admittedly a bit provocative, but that doesn't mean I'm not hearing the other side's arguments.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2016 03:43

Polybius91: Jun 4, 2012; Cobrastan is not a real country.

Juffo-Wup posted:

Well, I think of all the historical moments when it might be reasonable to give a little technophobia a pass, 1937 probably ranks pretty high.

E: to clarify, advances in military technology (machine guns, artillery, etc.) was supposed to make a European war unthinkable - instead, it practically just cut down a generation of young men, and then the Western world was immediately plunged into the sort of desperate poverty that industrial production was supposed to eliminate through unprecedented surplus. Watching these things result in the rise of fascism in Germany must have painted a very bleak picture of the 'progress' that Europeans had convinced themselves was inevitable.

Fair point. The situation in pre-WWII Europe was hardly one that painted technology in a good light. It was more of the nature of his arguments I found odd, how he said stuff like how only a sick society would want telephones and food preservation destroyed all sense of taste.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2016 04:03

Polybius91: Jun 4, 2012; Cobrastan is not a real country.

As long as we're posting the stuff from Orwell we like, I can't read this one without thinking of the right-wing media:

quote:

�One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting�It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.�

# ¿ Mar 24, 2016 19:37

Polybius91: Jun 4, 2012; Cobrastan is not a real country.

my dad posted:

Technological progress is pretty cool.
Being wary of what it'll end up being used for is pretty wise.
gently caress tech-fetishists.

Yeah, I'm not gonna disagree with you here, but there's a degree of difference between wanting technology to be used responsibly and saying that nobody in a healthy society would want telephones.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 04:11

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 00:38

Polybius91: Jun 4, 2012; Cobrastan is not a real country.

TomViolence posted:

Have you considered that his rantings and musings might have been hyperbolic or perhaps made in jest? I mean he also goes on about fruit juice drinkers ruining socialism and I'm not sure if I'd take that literally.

Yeah, admittedly it's very possible they were. I guess I might just be jaded, because I've been on the internet long enough to see way too many people voice completely outlandish views without a hint of irony or even awareness that what they're saying might not be well-received.

quote:

EDIT: As much as Orwell laments the onward march of technology, it seems more like wistful reminiscence of commonplace things that were lost or set aside along the way. Particularly with regards to food, it would seem, and who can really blame him for that in an era when tinned and packaged foods were by all accounts pretty terrible. Industrialised society was and still is dehumanising in many respects, much more so in his day. More anecdotally, I live in a rural setting most of the time and it's quite discomfiting to visit an urban area and not see a scrap of green, sometimes for miles. Modernity is pretty jarring, even now.

I agree this is a legitimate problem. I would like it if cities incorporated more community gardens and parks.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2016 04:53

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > George Orwell was an anti-technology crank