e-Portfolio for Giacomo Brusco

ROUGH DRAFT PAPER 4

The thing that always amazed me the most about going to the moon was time. See, on the Earth we measure time, we feel time thanks to the passing of day and night, thanks to the fact that the Earth orbits around itself at a constant speed. You don’t have that same feeling on the moon – you don’t have day and night. On the moon, our first colony in space, we have exported our culture, our technology, our time. We just use Greenwich’s time. That’s why you really don’t know what time it is unless you have a watch with you.
That’s what I was doing, that afternoon: I was wondering what time it was, in the Lunar Sands Casino. The casino was almost empty, that day: everybody had already left for the Earth earlier that morning, to go back to their jobs on Monday. Since the Earth was rising on the horizon, I had gone to the top floor of casino to get a better glance of the spectacular view. Watching the Earth made me wonder – as I already mentioned – about what time it was. So, I started looking around to see if anybody had a watch with them. In the back of the room there were too men standing, who were clearly in the middle of a quite but animated debate. One of them had a watch, but I didn’t want to interrupt them. On my left, a middle-aged, slim woman sitting by herself. She did not have a watch, but she seemed so absorbed in her thoughts that I wouldn’t have dared talk to her anyway. Finally, on my right, sitting on an elegant, red armchair, there was an old man, with white hair and a long white beard. He was all focused on this huge electronic watch on his arm. He was just perfect, I thought. “Excuse me, sir, do you happen to know what time it is?” “5:37 pm,” he answered. A brief silence followed – he clearly wanted to continue the conversation, he just didn’t know what to say. He probably just said the first thing that popped up in his head. “The Earth is wonderful today, isn’t she?” “Beautiful indeed,” I replied. “I’m David, by the way. Nice to meet you,” he added. “Giacomo. Nice to meet you too.” We reached for each other and shook hands.


Three Quotes from "Break Through"

- "Global Warming is as different from smog in Los Angeles as nuclear war from gang violence"

- "billions of dollars in new investments are pouring into the clean-energy sector, and even major players in the old energy economy see the opportunity and are positioning themselves to take advantage of it"

- "The politics born of material poverty cannot speak to post-material insecurity"



PAPER 3 - DRAFT 2

Earth, today, is inhabited by 6.7 billion people, and growing. Some countries, like China, have already limited the number of children that each couple is allowed to have. How would you feel if, in a near future, you were told that you could not have as many children as you want, because there wouldn’t be enough food for them? Some scientists have predicted that within a few years the Earth’s carrying capacity will be reached, meaning that human population will not be able to grow any longer, for it will not have enough resources to do so. Opponents of this argument, instead, say that the only factor that limits demographic growth is really how much people want. In his essay “Sustainable abundance, or Ecological Crisis?”, David Nye says that “Nature is not outside of us, and it does not have fixed limits. Rather, its limits are our own.” (Nye 108) Nye’s argument is convincing, but it has one flaw: it gives for granted that collectivities are able to limit themselves when it comes to consumption. But in fact, are they? This is what we will try to establish in the following paragraphs.

In his essay, Nye takes a historical approach to the problem of the Earth’s carrying capacity, and its relation to technology. He points out how many political ideologies born during the times of large technological development in the West – such as liberalism and Marxism – advance the theory that, if managed correctly, technology can give mankind infinite prosperity. During these times of growth, only counter-cultural movements opposed the advancement of technology: Nye gives the examples of Thomas Carlyle and Henry David Thoreau as representatives of such movements. It is only “with the energy crisis of the early 1970s,” says Nye, that “people other than counter-culturists became interested in . . . alternative energy sources.” For, it seems, we are running out of energy. Pointing out the many estimates that have been done regarding the Earth’s carrying capacity and how greatly they differ from one another, Nye concludes that carrying capacity is a mere “social construction”, and that there is no real maximum number of humans that the Earth can support – there only are limitations to their standards of living.

Having a humble life, living in peace and harmony with each other, without excessive material possessions, is a very nice principle to live by. But is it really applicable to the masses? Nye cites Carlyle and Thoreau as supporters of this idea, but in truth this opinion dates back to much older times. In Hellenistic Greece, philosopher Epicurus wrote these words to his friend Menoeceus:

“We regard independence of outward things as a great good, not so as in all cases to use little, but so as to be contented with little if we have not much, being honestly persuaded that they have the sweetest enjoyment of luxury who stand least in need of it, and that whatever is natural is easily procured and only the vain and worthless hard to win.” (Epicurus 130)

In fact, we can see this approach to life in many pieces of literature through the years – from Buddhist writings, to the Bible, to Saint Francis’s “Canticle of the Sun.” While one may or may not agree with the ethical principle of having a humble life, one will have to recognize that ethics is not politics. Politics – not ethics – is what drives collectivities; we can trace this idea, too, well far back in time: Niccolò Machiavelli was already speaking of it in his book “The Prince”, first published in 1513. It is pretty evident that any person who wants to live a humble life can do so; but if all that matters to the Earth’s carrying capacity is how much people want, the real question is whether collectivities – not individuals – will ever have finite desires.

Nye points out that in some cases people are already using more energy-efficient ways to live their lives. For instance, talking about the fact that many Americans use pick-up trucks and sport-utility vehicles, which are not fuel-efficient at all, he notices this:

“Europeans have long been accustomed to smaller automobiles and higher taxes on gasoline, which encourage alternative forms of transport. Many rely primarily on mass transit and bicycles and live in compact cities . . . Such countries have a standard of living as high as in the United States, but use only half as much energy per capita.” (Nye 105)

But did Europeans actually decide to have high taxes on gasoline and to live in compact cities, or did it just happen to be that way? According to Eurostat, the EU has a population density of 113 people per km², while the USA has, according to the CIA Factbook, has a population density of 31 people per km². This, together with the fact that European cities have developed in much older times than American ones, accounts for the fact that they are much more compact. Second, oil taxes in EU countries derive from the fact that Europeans import most of its fuels from Russia and Northern Africa, whereas the US produces much oil of its own. Furthermore, European social-democracies have higher taxes than the laissez faire-oriented US for just about anything. Did Europeans choose to be more energy-efficient, or did they just happen to be?

Economic historian Carlo Cipolla, in his book “The Economic Decline of Empires,” argues that “Reasonableness and self-control are not common virtues . . . while there is a minimum of human needs below which human life is impossible, there is practically no upper limit to human desires.” (Cipolla 4-5) According to Cipolla, growth of consumption without an adequate growth of production would be one of the reasons that cause empires to fall. Nye may as well quote Thoreau’s teachings that “rather than constantly expand one’s desires, it [is] better to simplify material life to make time for reading, fiction, and close study of nature,” but what really matters is the infinite desires of the masses. Nye gives the examples of the Netherlands, and the fact that the Dutch stopped pumping water out of the sea as proof of the fact that people can refuse technological progress. But the decision to stop “stealing” land from the sea came not from the spontaneous will to have less, but rather from the certain knowledge that it would bring to worse material conditions.

Nye makes a very good point saying that the Earth’s carrying capacity only depends on what we want from it. Although, he gives for granted a particular, that human kind would be able to stop having material desires, which is not so obvious after all. By saying that “carrying capacity is . . . a social construction” Nye implies that humans deliberately decide to want more or less – but is it really that way? Introspection would be a reliable source of evidence for individuals, but for big groups of people we would need to have more empirical and statistic data. Since there was never a real occasion in history where people deliberately decided to have lower standards of living for the only purpose of having more children, we cannot really know what is going to happen until we actually reach the situation in which human population will not be able to grow because of scarce resources. All that we can do, really, is sit and wait.

WORKS CITED

Eurostat website: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/eurostat/home/

The CIA Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html

Cipolla, Carlo M. The Economic Decline of Empires. Oxon, Routledge Library Editions: Economic History, 1970

Epicuro Lettera sulla felicità. BUR Biblioteca Univ. Rizzoli, 2007

Nye, David E. Technology Matters: Questions to Live With. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007

VIDEO UPLOAD


As my video about the effect of technology of work, I decided to post not a documentary-like video but this famous scene from the movie "Modern Times". The film, directed, produced, and interpreted by Charlie Chaplin, portrays the desperate conditions in which people lived during the Great Depression. In his movie, Chaplin lets the public understand that he believes that a major part of the Great Depression was caused by the efficiencies of modern industrialization. I think this video is extremely valid to our day for its unique representation of how the employment of more and more efficient machinery in the workplace makes people feel smaller and more insignificant.



ROUGH DRAFT OF PAPER ONE

The philosophical debate between a free universe and a necessary one has been going on for millennia without a conclusive answer. From Democritus’ atomism to Aristotle’s Metaphysics and his concept of final cause, from Spinoza’s Ethics and pantheism to Leibniz’s monads, there have been plenty of theories that have tried to prove either that man is the master of his destiny, or that he is but an insignificant piece in a bigger, pre-determined game. The evolution of human culture, knowledge, and thought has possibly brought more new questions than new answers. The Industrial Revolution, for example, and its consequent rapid social change have suggested to some thinkers that technology is what determines changes in human life.

This view, called technological determinism, is expressed by transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson in his poem Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing. Emerson says that “things are in the saddle, and ride mankind”, and that ultimately the unstoppable pace of technology “doth the man unking.” [1] Emerson gives a pessimistic idea of technological determinism: he thinks that technology will develop independently from human will, and that this will eventually drive humanity to a state of slavery under the machines. He believes that technology “runs wild,” and that this will eventually overthrow mankind from its position of king of nature.

Nevertheless, technological determinism can also be seen under an optimistic point of view. Many social scientists believe indeed that technology is nothing but a possibility for better standards of living. In the introduction to his book The Economic Decline of Empires, Dr. Carlo M. Cipolla suggests not only that the development of better standards of living necessarily happens, but also that it must and will get broader and broader into society: “It can generally be assumed that improvements in standards of living are initially experienced by small and relatively privileged circles, but the process is bound to extend eventually to progressively larger sectors of the population.” [2] Cipolla gives us a much different view of technological determinism: technological development is bound to happen, but it will improve the quality of life of all mankind. Even though this is with no doubt a form of determinism, it is well far away from Emerson’s anti-technological pessimism.

The idea that technologies control human and social changes has become very popular in the last two centuries, but not universally accepted. Some thinkers, such as David E. Nye, believe that man has full control over technology, and that in fact humanity could arbitrarily decide to stop using some technologies. To support his thesis, in his essay Does Technology Control Us? Nye points out several examples in history in which a population has successfully decided to refuse a specific part of technology.

The first of Nye’s examples is the case of the abandonment of guns and fire weapons by the Japanese. The Japanese had adopted guns from the Portuguese in 1543, but their government deliberately decided to isolate the country and abandon fire weapons as Japanese warriors found little symbolic value in them. Guns “re-entered society only in 1853, when Commodore Perry sailed his ships into Japanese waters and forced the country to open itself to the West.” [3]

Nye refuses the idea that technology is an independent force, arguing that such opinion would be “nonsense”, as “no technology is, has been, or will be a “natural force.”” [4] Another example cited by Nye is the abandonment of the wheel in North Africa. Nye points out clearly that the decision to stop using the wheel was purely in the name of material convenience: northern-Africans preferred using their traditional means of transportation, the camel, rather than adopting the wheel, as the cost of maintaining roads and watering the horses and the oxen with which wheeled carts were dragged was much greater than the benefits obtained from these practices.

The Amish community is a living example that supports Nye’s thesis. The Amish “do not permit any device to be used before they have carefully evaluated its potential impact on the community.” [5] Nye argues that the careful analysis of these and other examples “tends to undermine determinism, because it reveals the importance of particular individuals, accidents, chance, and local circumstances.” [6]

In a sense, I agree with both Nye’s and Cipolla’s argument. Technology does improve our standards of living: if choosing what is better for us means that we are bound to make that choice, than every decision would be pre-determined. Man is a rational animal that always tries to get as many benefits as possible from its surrounding environment. What is then the real difference between making a convenient choice and being determined to make that choice? The only actual distinction between these two options is that in the first case we are free to make harmful irrational choices, while in the second one we are not.

Only in one of the three examples I listed was the decision to abandon a technology dictated by material interest. The other two examples are demonstration of irrational behavior. In the first case, the decision to abandon guns might have seemed good to the Japanese ruling class at first, but it ended up submitting the country to western imperialism. While in the second case, the Amish’s decision to refuse technology is based on faith, not on reason. These two examples reveal that human beings are indeed free to make choices that are not necessarily aimed at bettering their well-being. The fact that humans are able to make irrational choices means that they actively make those choices, which means that such choices are not pre-determined.

Nevertheless, we are rational animals who tend to make rational choices. It follows that the majority of mankind will keep making rational choices, developing and adopting new and more comfortable technologies. For, as long as new technologies will be advantageous to adopt, the rational choice will be to adopt them – and this is indeed what will happen, for, again, it is natural for human beings to choose what is better for them.

WORKS CITED

Cipolla, Carlo M. “The Economic Decline of Empires.” Oxon, Routledge Library Editions: Economic History, 1970

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing.” (1846) Early Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York, Boston, Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, 1899

Nye, David E. “Technology Matters: Questions to Live With.” Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007

[1] Excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Ode, Inscribed to William H. Channing” (1846)

[2] Cipolla page 3

[3] Nye page 17

[4] Nye page 19

[5] Nye page 18

[6] Nye page 28