More Stuff That Makes Me Want To Cry

Years ago, when the Internet was in its infancy, my brother would badger me about getting on-line. I continued to demur, and one of my reasons was that, from my own exposure (limited to research in grad school, and a bit of floating about here and there), it seemed populated mostly by faux-libertarians, much as my brother is, who are technology enthusiasts, much as my brother is, who are politically ignorant, much as my brother is, who believe that the next invention will end the constant bickering of politics and rescue us from the predicament of our current social and political troubles, much as my brother does.

In other words, the internet seemed to me populated by people much like my brother. One of them is enough, thank you very much.

While this is no longer true, there are still a fair amount of folks floating through the intertubes who earnestly believe that (a) Star Trek is the source of human hope; (b) liberals are really a bunch of technophobic Luddites what with all their moaning about global warming (which is a lie anyway); (c) all we need to do is let engineers have their way - whether they are electrical, chemical, computer, or biological doesn't really matter - and the world will be fixed, not by human acts, but by the next best gadget. It is almost impossible to have a discussion with people like this - trust me, I have to listen to my brother's blathering enough to know how hard it is - because they have no idea, for the most part, what they are talking about outside a very narrow range of topics, say the diagram of an electrical circuit, or the chemical formula for protein synthesis.

A great example of how truly stupid such people are is highlighted here at Sadly, No!, and the original with various comments can be found here.

Brad does a nice job showing how truly inhuman, insipid, and quite out-of-their-minds people who even think like this, let alone recommend it as policy, truly are. Yet, this is the kind of thinking that many on the faux-libertarian right continue to espouse. It is reminiscent of a speech Ronald Reagan gave in which he mused on the possibility of human unification in the face of alien invasion. That's kind of the theme of this movie:

When people take their political cues from the source of The Trouble With Tribbles, you know you are not dealing serious people.

Whether it's Tom Clancy's techno-thrillers, Star Trek's utopianism, or some other science-fiction-based folderol, those who revel in such nonsense miss the obvious point - technology is no more a solution to the problems of social organization than is sociology the solution to the problem of nails sticking out of boards. For the latter you need a hammer. For the former you need politics - that messy, often irrational process whereby human beings negotiate the always-difficult experience of social life. Anyone who would surrender politics to engineers surrenders democracy of autocracy. I would much prefer a messy, irrational politics to the utopias of those who get their political cues from Robert Heinlein.