![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robots and fundamentalism
Jul. 30th, 2019 08:32 amI was born in 1957, raised in the 60s and 70s, a time when the face of right-wing discourse in America was the erudite William F Buckley Jr, when even the stridently anti-intellectual Spiro Agnew could display a creditable vocabulary as a matter of course. Education was valued, then, as were knowledge, reason, critical thinking. Looking back, it seems that the powers that be supported this, because there was a perception that skilled, intelligent workers were needed to run the massive new technological infrastructure of capitalism in the 50s. Everyone knew that you needed a good education to get a good job. And the intellectual demands of "a good job" seemed to be steadily increasing. It was an unfortunate side effect of education that it also gave one the critical power to question the powers that be, and the social unrest of the 60s and 70s arose from this.
I was also raised in a Fundamentalist Baptist church. At the time, my bubble didn't allow me to recognize this, but Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism were a quaint, remote corner of society's religious life at the time. The church taught me that it valued faith above reason, that at times "making sense" needed to be ignored. But even then, it never questioned the value of learning, of being able to think: it strove to strike a balance instead.
It was in the 80s, with the rise of automation and computers and industrial robots, that the powers that be began to see that an educated populace was of less value to them. Highly skilled work was being done by machines. Whatever work remained that needed to be done by people, didn't need to be done by very intelligent people. By this century, these trends kicked into high gear.
And now we live in a time when the political right routinely seeks to underfund and slash education and science. The insights of science and knowledge are ignored or "debunked", where fifty years ago they were respected and sought out. And at the same time, Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism have risen to a position of political power, supporting the new status quo by taking the position that critical thinking, the ability to reason, is in fact a social and moral evil that should not be taught. There is an unspoken assumption that the innovations needed to maintain our technology will somehow take care of themselves. That they were the work of rare geeky geniuses who somehow always managed to claw their way to the top anyway, so surely they will continue doing so.
Machine production and the service economy don't require people who can think critically. The most that can be gained by teaching them to, is people who will question and criticize the powers that be. So let's cast that as a social evil, and phase it out.
I was also raised in a Fundamentalist Baptist church. At the time, my bubble didn't allow me to recognize this, but Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism were a quaint, remote corner of society's religious life at the time. The church taught me that it valued faith above reason, that at times "making sense" needed to be ignored. But even then, it never questioned the value of learning, of being able to think: it strove to strike a balance instead.
It was in the 80s, with the rise of automation and computers and industrial robots, that the powers that be began to see that an educated populace was of less value to them. Highly skilled work was being done by machines. Whatever work remained that needed to be done by people, didn't need to be done by very intelligent people. By this century, these trends kicked into high gear.
And now we live in a time when the political right routinely seeks to underfund and slash education and science. The insights of science and knowledge are ignored or "debunked", where fifty years ago they were respected and sought out. And at the same time, Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism have risen to a position of political power, supporting the new status quo by taking the position that critical thinking, the ability to reason, is in fact a social and moral evil that should not be taught. There is an unspoken assumption that the innovations needed to maintain our technology will somehow take care of themselves. That they were the work of rare geeky geniuses who somehow always managed to claw their way to the top anyway, so surely they will continue doing so.
Machine production and the service economy don't require people who can think critically. The most that can be gained by teaching them to, is people who will question and criticize the powers that be. So let's cast that as a social evil, and phase it out.
