5 Agrarian Philosophy of Technology: A Response to Critics

摘要

It is both a pleasure and honor to respond to such thoughtful critiques as have been provided by Aiden Davison, Erland Marald, and David Nye. I would like to begin by noting that Marald and Nye may take me to have a more substantive commitment to agrarianism than I would want to endorse. My view is that philosophical isms arise in a dialectical space of action and confrontation. Although they are discursive patterns that are articulated and advocated consciously and intentionally by actors, they emerge from unreflective practice and habit and are shaped in response to the rhetoric and activity of others. As Horkheimer and Adorno wrote in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment and Marcuse wrote in One Dimensional Man, the dialectical logic of a given era is impoverished when epistemic norms foreclose the possibilities of critical challenge and response. My claim in The Agrarian Vision is that our debate over sustainability has been impoverished by repression and erasure of agrarian ideals (and related virtue-talk) that were a commonplace for people living a century or two earlier. We need to recover them, but not so much to live through them as to regain our ability to question environmental truisms in a manner that leads somewhere new.