Technology isn't just gadgets - even if they are bio-gadgets or chemo-gadgets - it's also the wisdom and skill to accomplish useful objectives. In an agronomic system the system itself is a technology. Any system is a technology. Those who disparage technology mislead by omission and misunderstanding. Agriculture is a technology, whatever the details of practice. Opposition to technology is opposition to skill, wisdom, and in the end intellect. It's not so cute when you take a close look.

Perhaps this is an expression of some ancient prejudices.

Techne . . . as distinguished from episteme, is etymologically derived from the Greek word . . . which is often translated as craftsmanship, craft, or art. It is the rational method involved in producing an object or accomplishing a goal or objective. The means of this method is through art. Techne resembles episteme in the implication of knowledge of principles, although techne differs in that its intent is making or doing, as opposed to "disinterested understanding."

In Ion, Plato wrote that techne (in the sense of an art or craft) represented a threat to peace, order and good government for which Reason and Law “by common consent have ever been deemed best.” Aristotle saw it as representative of the imperfection of human imitation of nature. For the ancient Greeks, it signified all the Mechanical Arts including medicine and music. The English aphorism, ‘gentlemen don’t work with their hands,’ is said to have originated in ancient Greece in relation to their cynical view on the arts. Due to this view, it was only fitted for the lower class while the upper class practiced the Liberal Arts of ‘free’ men (Dorter 1973).

The Liberal Arts have fallen on hard times, making it somewhat harder for "gentlemen" to maintain their class distinctions since doing so confirms that they are basically ridiculous. Still, they try to elevate themselves by being selectively anti-intellectual, disparaging some technologies as technologies and pretending that others are . . . well, they don't really say but they use the word Nature a lot, demonstrating their lack of education, wisdom, skill and intelligence.

Oddly, there's a sort of bootleggers and Baptists coalition between would-be gentlemen lacking skill and wisdom, and peasants of the world who lack the benefit of education due to poverty and deprivation. They are equals in their lack of wisdom but only one of them has an understandable excuse. The sickening bit is that the gentlemen live in luxury due to the wisdom and effort of others while the peasants live nasty, brutish and short lives of ignorance and pain.

I think that this is related to some other intellectual pathologies rooted in ancient prejudices. Consider this excerpt from a review of Clifford D. Conner's A People's History of Science.

"GIVE thy heart to letters," an Egyptian father advised his son on a piece of papyrus more than 3,000 years ago, in the hope that his child would choose a life of writing over a life of manual labor. "I have seen the metal worker at his toil before a blazing furnace. . . . His fingers are like the hide of the crocodile, he stinks more than the eggs of fish. And every carpenter who works or chisels, has he any more rest than the plowman?"

Laborers are "generally held in bad repute," Xenophon wrote about 700 years later, "and with justice." Manual jobs keep men too busy to be decent companions or good citizens, "so that men engaged in them must ever appear to be both bad friends and poor defenders of their country."

Clifford D. Conner thinks this kind of snobbery has distorted the writing of history from ancient times to the present, because historians are scribes themselves and it is a clean, soft hand that holds the pen. . .

Even the great scientists honor the great. "If I have seen further," Newton wrote, "it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." At the same time, Newton also stood on the backs of "anonymous masses of humble people," as Conner says, "untold thousands of illiterate artisans." An accomplished army of the anonymous bequeathed him their tools, data, problems, ideas and even, Conner argues, the scientific method itself.

Conner's book works best in the early chapters. Hunter-gatherers and early farmers domesticated plants and animals and gave us corn, wheat, rice, beef, pork, chicken, almost every kind of food we eat. They changed the world more than modern genetic engineers have done, so far.

The point I'd like to emphasize here isn't just that soft handed scribes disparage artisans, or even that they in effect steal their work, but that it's all technology. Even the language spoken and the pens the scribes use are technologies.

Useful analysis of technological innovation is about choosing among available technologies, not opposition to technology. It's not a dirty word as the scribes and gentlemen would have it. Making such choices requires clear headed analysis based in significant knowledge of problems, objectives and available options.

P.S. see Science Class for a tangentially related reference to Conner's work.