> Secondly, Quakers are not anti-technology.
Definitely not, but I've seen that assumption before, and I've got
a few thoughts on it. I hope this isn't too far off the list topic
(I do talk about Sharers at the end of the message ;-).
Quakers are often confused with Shakers and with the Amish (or is
it Omish, as you spell it?), though. I believe that the Shakers
are more-or-less anti-technology. I think it's true that many
Quakers believe in simplicity, though, and those tendancies conflict
with embracing consumer technology and buying gadgets to keep up
with the neighbors or to simply have the gadget for the sake of having
it (which seems to pervade the computer industry).
There are also arguments that consumerism, etc., is (in the long
run) pro-corporate, anti-human, a strong contributor to class
division, etc., and is therefore condemnable. This could be
construed as anti-technology since our current technology does
seem to imply a large corporate/manufacturing complex. That's
a different issue, though.
I thought that the Sharer technology was incredible. Using plant
and biotech to construct just about anything that they wanted to.
Definitely not metaltech, but the Sharers were doing things that
modern science can not come close to and it was certainly presented
as a science, not as mysticism or some such.
-allen
--
Allen Briggs - end killing - briggs@macbsd.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:37 PDT