cultural entertainment's ambivalence towards technology

The recent Disney movie “Tall Tale” has the familiar theme of small family farm
vs. the evil developer buying up all the land, and generally upsetting all the
local community in the name of fistfuls of money and inevitable “progress”.

Is it my imagination or has our popular entertainment always romanticized the
self-appointed preservers of an old way of life as they make their stand
against the behemoth of progress? “Life of Noah Dearborn” is another good one
that has a theme worthy of Wendell Berry. I have the general impression of
many similar movies, but I can’t think of a single movie that portrays the
conquest by industry in a positive light (without themes of collapsing
community, belching smokestacks, drab colors, enslavement of a workforce,
etc.) And yet in our real life apart from entertainment, we vote for industry
with our dollars every time. None of us wants the “inconvenience” of working
any harder than we have to for anything.

So why is it that we so enjoy and cheer for those legendary champions who stand
up against the ubiquitous pressure of ‘progress’? Perhaps it’s entirely
attributable to our propensity to root for the underdog? In that case, are
there any rare cases in history where industry was the underdog, and therefore
its champions get romanticized in popular lore? I can’t think of any, but
maybe some of you can. But what I really suspect is that we have this
collective sense that what we all want and vote for with our dollars as a
culture is quite divorced from that which is best for us. I.e. To
successfully get our own way (which by definition is what we always will throw
our efforts at) is to fail to take the high road in a moral sense, or with
respect to long-term community health.

And it isn’t simply that one side is anti-technology and the other pro. A
better way to state it is that one side wants to keep their bequeathed
technology in a generational stasis (age of apprenticeships and dying in the
same house your grandfather was born in) while the other wants something better
than parents (age of ‘get the heck out of Dodge’, and ‘how anachronistically
quaint to do the same job as dad’)

It seems to me that science has an ideological commitment to the latter side of
this equation even if such is not formally recognized. If our popular
entertainment does romanticize the former side more than the latter, does this
effect spill over into the perceived warfare model of science vs. religion?

--merv
Received on Fri Jun 9 08:26:02 2006