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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 15, 2012
Escargot
While I am not entirely against progress - for instance, progress toward sanctity strikes me as a desirable thing - I am against most forms of progress on offer in the public do-main, and pretty much everything that is labelled "progressive." The word reaches my ear as it would that of a patient, hearing a doctor's prognosis on the advance of some hideous cancer.Thus, contra correspondents who say I am some sort of "libertarian" or "neo-conservative" - or "laissez-fairy" as one of the wittier opined - I am not merely against "government interference in the free marketplace." The terms "fascist" or (more modestly) "Falangist" don't quite capture my position either, for all such supposedly "extreme right" causes are founded upon my twin bêtes noires: bureaucratic socialism, and jingo nationalism. "Mediaeval Catholic" gets closer to the nerve. I was reading, the other week, someone named "Mark" lecturing me on some blog about medieval backwardness; about how, in my critique of modern repetitive labour, I failed to appreciate the drudgery of life in preceding ages. Standard, schoolroom clichés about the Middle Ages were scattered through his remarks, as if they might come as news to me. But my technophobic point was missed: that the wage-slave on an office or factory assembly line is abstracted from nature, and access to joy, in a way the ox-driving, row-planting feudal peasant could never have been. That longer life is preferable to shorter, I accept along with the rest of my species. I even prefer pleasure to pain. But those are essentially quantitative considerations, where-as I was making a qualitative observation. Alas, "progress," in the form of an encroaching, desiccated, secular materialism, appears to have prevented many readers from following this. Let us construct our formula in paraphrase of our former prime minister, W.L.M. King. "Not necessarily Ludditism, but Ludditism if necessary." Or call it, "situational Ludditism," as another blogger does. For this week's example, we turn to England, where the "Conservative" government (note sardonic quotes) announced it is going ahead with the "HS2" high-speed rail link between Birmingham and London. By travelling at speeds up to 400 kilometres per hour, it will cut travel time between the two towns, around the year 2026, at a cost to the British taxpayer of only a few trillion pounds. The current estimate is actually 33 billion, but as Tory voters all along the indicated route riot Ludditically against the destruction of their precious countryside, more of the thing must be put under-ground, at an additional cost of something like 150,000 pounds per cubit. And . well, everyone knows about government cost estimates. I'd been following the controversy through the corner of my eye, reading all the standard arguments for technology from the adepts of "progress." Britain is arguably lagging behind France and/or Germany in several isolated areas of transportation statistics! This spells ruin for British economy and trade! Solution: a high-speed rail link that will get the managerial classes to their appointments in London half-an-hour quicker, provided their journey originates in Birmingham. To which one is tempted to reply: this is England. You can walk from Birmingham to London. I have done it myself. Maybe some ox-carts for the oldies, and a quick horse carriage for the first-class mails. But no, they had to build one of those noisy, filthy railways, circa 1838. And they are still not satisfied! We've had proposals for high-speed rail links in Canada, too. Fortunately the advocates confront Canadian politicians who have be-come stone-faced to white-elephant schemes. We should take pride in being the only G8 country that, God willing, may never dig this particular kind of bottomless pit. Do you know that, around the turn of the last century, there were people who were implacably opposed to the legalization of automobiles? And do you know that their dark prognostications about a future in which these "mechanical horses" had proliferated have been fully vindicated? For sanity we turn, as if by tradition, to Greece. A feature item in The New York Times focuses upon a couple in Chios, now raising edible snails for export. Urbanites before-hand, with some technical agricultural training, they discerned the writing on Athenian walls. So, apparently, have many other Greeks who, in the face of that country's fiscal meltdown - all of it triggered by "progress" of some sort - have been clearing out of the cities, or making preparations so to do. The young are flocking into agricultural and maritime training colleges. Those not heading back to the land, point out to sea. It is a wonderful story of human adaptation, which incidentally applies whether technology is moving backwards, or forwards. I am unconvinced by any of the environmentalists' arguments for human-caused "global warming." But I pray for global warming, all the same, for it would be a real boon to farmers. And as for those Greeks, good luck, and God bless you! And I really hope those Germans like your snails! David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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