Gary Lynch <bookworm@EXECPC.COM> replied to Allen Briggs
<briggs@PUMA.MACBSD.COM>:
>> Secondly, Quakers are not anti-technology.
>
>Definitely not, but I've seen that assumption before,
The Quakers are more likely to pay attention to the question "What are
people for?" (The phrasing is from Vonnegut's _God Bless You, Mr.
Rosewater, or Pearls Before Swine_. And, incidentally, Vonnegut's _Player
Piano_ (also in a rare paperback as something like _Utopia 57_) was the
first novel to consider technologic unemployment.)
>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.
(Pretty sure it's "Amish".) The Shakers were very much for *simplicity*,
but definitely not "Luddites". The bandsaw was invented by a Shaker woman.
>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).
BINGO
>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.
Right again.
Neil Rest
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:37 PDT