Message-ID: <970105064342_37135595@emout14.mail.aol.com> Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1997 06:43:43 -0500 From: mailto:EUNSteve@AOL.COM> Subject: Re: The critics of the West and its technology To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
In a message dated 97-01-04 18:06:44 EST, mailto:gberlind@CRL.COM (Gary Berlind) writes:<< ***After lurking silently these many months, I just want to say three cheers for JC and Brett for their clarity, frankness, and understanding of this most important of issues. I hope that Dr. Eskow and others who haven't yet started to doubt what they're doing take a good close look at this opposing viewpoint, and/or read some books along the lines of Gerry Mander's "In the Absence of the Sacred" or Chellis Glendinning's "My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization.">>
Gary, perhaps the my time for true confession has come.
I started to doubt many years ago.
I began my community development career as a fashionably leftist anticapitalist crusader, determined to help the world be saved from the evils of the West and the profit system.
It was not till I went to such places as Tanzania , and saw what that great and good and wrongheaded man Julius Nyrere had done to his country, and went to the Soviet Union, and worked elsewhere in the world where antimarket theories and trendy Marxisms and such agencies had spread death and destruction, that I began to doubt.
I have read the Mander you cite, and his Four Arguments. . .", and I've read Glendenning, and most of the neo-Luddites, including the most entertaining of them, in my view--Kirkpatrick Sale.
I always enjoy the Luddites: they use computers and modems and the world's most advanced computer technology--as you, Gary, are doing--to summon support for the abolition of Western technology.
That is of course the standard Western intellectual's way of absolving him or herself of guilt: he or she lives in the West, drives a car, has a computer and word processor which is used to write diatribes against Western technology.
Wouldn't that , Gary, fit the definition of hypocrisy?
Now I'll read anything you suggest if you re willing to read some things that might challenge your present position?
Have you read Michael Novak at all? He , like me, began as a creature of the left, and his first books, were socialist tracts.
He has become a doubter: he doubts your faith, Gary.
Try, if you can take it, his "Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.: And "Does it Liberate?" which is a critique of liberation theology. (He is a Roman Catholic theologian.)
Try Peter Berger,Gary: his Capitalist Manifesto, for example. Better: read his Pyramids of Sacrifice, which is about development in Latin America.
Steve Eskow
Dr. Steve Eskow, President The Electronic University Network 288 Stone Island Road Enterprise, FL 32725 407.321.8770;Fax:407.321.4861 January 4, 1997