Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [41]
But the most politically resonant strand of technological skepticism in the post-World War II era has not focused on issues of power, equity, or distribution, but rather on questions of risk to human health and environmental quality. Such risks may be chronic (toxic chemicals in soil and water) or catastrophic (oil spills and nuclear meltdown), but what unifies them are their origins in technology and their diagnoses in science. Indeed, the emergence of health, environmental, and technological risks as galvanizing liberal issues in the late 1960s marked a thorough repudiation of the technological progressivism that sat comfortably in mainstream American politics through the first half of the 20th century.7 This repudiation brought with it a commitment to regulatory intervention as the cure for the ills that technology visited on humans and nature.
At the same time, the foundations for risk-based liberal politics have increasingly lain with science and scientific evidence, as the political agenda for risk has moved from the obvious and palpable (smog, burning rivers, vanishing eagles) to the increasingly invisible and statistical (disappearing stratospheric ozone, small changes in cancer incidences or cognitive function in large populations of people, gradual increases in average global atmospheric temperature).
Science also documents with increasing precision the declining stocks of natural resources, from fresh water to soil to timber to fish, and thus supports a robust neo-Malthusian strand of liberalism. As with the liberal politics of risk, the politics of scarcity is also an expression of technoskepticism, because it declares (oblivious of history) that technological advance and substitution will not be able to keep up with the technology-driven resource depletion that scientists have measured.
The combination of risk- and scarcity-based liberal politics can only give rise to political incoherence, as liberals find themselves, for reasons of risk, opposing new technologies that could help resolve issues of scarcity. An obvious example is opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). While one strand of liberalism has opposed GMOs because of fears about potential health and ecological risks, another strand has insisted that the combination of soil and water depletion, pollution, and population growth is moving the world toward an agricultural productivity crisis — a crisis that GMOs can (and will) help to avert. And, while it may now seem difficult to remember, in the 1970s, the liberal politics of energy was a politics of fossil fuel scarcity. Predicted fossil fuel shortages drove liberal demands for more conservation and energy efficiency — the same technoskeptical demands that are now applied in the context of fossil fuel overabundance, as the politics of energy scarcity transitioned to a politics of climate change risk.
A central theme of contemporary liberalism thus emerges from a reverence for science that increasingly, and with ever-greater precision, documents the problems associated with a technology-dependent society. Meanwhile, the philosophical commitment to technoskepticism hampers liberals from achieving their political and social goals because it constricts their imagination about how to accomplish what’s important, often leading them to focus on small risks to individuals rather than the potential for very large benefits to society that technological advance can bring.
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Against the claims of contemporary liberal technoskepticism is the simple reality that technology has often offered a uniquely effective path to advancing core values that liberals care about.