A while back I commented on the myth of the Beautiful People and today I want to look at what I consider to be a similar idea, the yearning for a life less technical. This can be in relation to the Beautiful People myth, an extension of anarcho-primitivism, or just the general belief that life would be better if we’d just get our wooden shoes in the machinery and step away from all this needless technology crap. You see, I just think that’s stupid.

Life was definitely simpler when we were more primitive. We didn’t worry about how we were going to pay the late fees on our DVD rentals. No, we had simpler things to worry about, like massive plagues and famines that would periodically wipe out large portions of the world population. We didn’t worry about whether or not vaccinations would cause autism in our children, they were already severely brain damaged from malnutrition and the Scarlet Fever. Yes, it was a better time. Or was it?

It’s easy to look whimsically back at the past (or at reruns of Little House On The Prairie) with nostalgic wonder. But they tend to remind us of something far from the reality of the situation, which was anything but ideal. But going on and on about things like child labor or disease is an obvious thing we all know about, and isn’t what I want to talk about. I’d rather focus on the reality of our situation.

There are billions of people on earth. Literally, billions. I didn’t make that number up. It’s on the internet. That’s a lot of mouths to feed, not to mention a lot of malaria to diagnose, a lot of babies to pull out of mommies, and a lot of shivering people to get through a winter night. One of the grand benefits of technology has been the ability for us to grow in population as far as we have. Moving back to these simpler times? Yeah, that’d be pretty much the same as handing out a death sentence on a huge number of those people.

I don’t want to speculate how many people on the planet rely directly on technology to survive, but I’m definitely one of them. I live in a part of the world not known for it’s ease of living. We get cold in the winter, there really isn’t a lot of year round food, and the people who were indigenous to the region spent the better part of their lives tracking buffalo to survive, a food source that has long since been near extinction, and certainly could not sustain the million-plus people living in my city. I’m not a fan of this “die of exposure while starving” plan. I think it’s stupid.

It is our embracing of technology that has enabled us to thrive. And it is our continued commitment to technology that ensures we’re not done thriving yet. We are learning how to control food sources in ways never even considered before. We are finding new ways to harness energy in healthier ways. We are finding out how to take advantage of the resources of not just the planet we live on, but the planets surrounding us. We are moving ever closer to the ideal of being a type one civilization. These are things to be embraced. So the next time you see someone who says that things were better when infant mortality was higher, when all energy consumption meant destroying vegetation, and when crop failures meant everyone suffered, flick them in the forehead. I don’t know if it will work, but it will be immeasurably gratifying.

Jim