Pages RAIN April 1982 matic" compromises with the political technologies of governmental and quasigovernmental agencies that nourish the very technologies they profess to oppose. The recent emphasis on “limits to growth" and "appropriate technology" is riddled by the same ambiguities that have imparted a conflicting sense of promise and fear to "high technology." I must emphasize again that terms like "small," "soft," "intermediate," "convivial," and "appropriate" remain utterly vacuous adjectives unless they are radically integrated with emancipatory social structures and communitarian goals. Technology and freedom do not "coexist" with each other as two separate "realms" of life. Either technics is used to reinforce the larger social tendencies that render human consociation technocratic and authoritarian, or else a libertarian society must be created that can absorb technics into a constellation of emancipatory human and ecological relationships. A "small," "soft," "intermediate," "convivial," or "appropriate" technical design will no more transform an authoritarian society into an ecological one than will a reduction in the "realm of necessity," of the "working week," enhance or enlarge the "realm of In equating "living well" with living affluently, capitalism has made it extremely difficult to demonstrate that freedom is more closely identified with personal autonomy than with affluence, with empowerment over life than with empowerment over things... freedom." In addition to subverting the integrity of the human community, capitalism has tainted the classical notion of "living well" by fostering an irrational dread of material scarcity. By establishing quantitative criteria for the "good life," it has dissolved the ethical implications of "limit." This ethical lacuna raises a specifically technical problematic for our time. In equating "living well" with living affluently, capitalism has made it extremely difficult to demonstrate that freedom is more closely identified with personal autonomy than with affluence, with empowerment over life than with empowerment over things, with the emotional security that derives from a nourishing community life than with a material security that derives from the myth of a nature dominated by an all-mastering technology. A radical social ecology cannot close its eyes to this new technological problematic. Over the past two centuries, almost every serious movement for social change has been confronted with the need to demonstrate that technics, "hard" or "soft," can more than meet the material needs of humanity without placing arbitrary limits upon a modestly sensible consumption of goods. The terms of the "black redistribution" have been historically altered; we are faced with problems not of a disaccumulation but of rational systems of production. Post-scarcity, as I have emphasized in earlier works, does not mean mindless affluence; rather, it means a sufficiency of technical development that leaves individuals free to select their needs autonomously and to obtain the means to satisfy them. The existing technics of the western world—in principle, a technics that can be applied to the world at large—can render more than a sufficiency of goods to meet everyone's reasonable need. Fortunately, an ample literature has already appeared to demonstrate that no one need be denied adequate food, clothing, shelter, and all the amenities of life. The astringent arguments for "limits to growth" and the "life-boat ethic" so prevalent today have been reared largely on specious data and a cunning adaptation of resource problems to the "institutional technics" of an increasingly authoritarian State. It is social ecology's crucial responsibility to demystify the tradition of a "stingy nature," as well as the more recent image of "high" technology as an unrelieved evil. Even more emphatically, social ecology must demonstrate that modem systems of production, distribution, and promotion of goods and needs are grossly irrational as well as antiecological. Whosoever sidesteps the conflicting alternatives between a potentially bountiful nature and an exploitive use of technics serves merely as an apologist for the prevailing irrationality. Certainly, no ethical argument in itself will ever persuade the denied and underprivileged that they must abdicate any claim to the relative affluence of capitalism. What must be demonstrated—and not merely on theoretical or statistical grounds alone—is that this affluence can ultimately be made available to all—but should be desirable to none. It is a betrayal of the entire message of social ecology to ask the world's poor to deny themselves access to the necessities of life on grounds that involve long- range problems of ecological dislocation, the shortcomings of "high" technology, and very specious claims of natural shortages in materials, while saying nothing about the artificial scarcity engineered by the corporate capitalism. Anything that is not renewable is exhaustible—this is a philistine tmism. But confronted by such tmisms, one may reasonably ask: When will it be exhausted? How? By whom? And for what reason? For the present there can be no serious claim that any major, irreplaceable resource will be exhausted until humanity can choose new alternatives—"new" referring not simply to material or technical alternatives but above all to institutional and social ones. The task of advancing humanity's right to choose from among alternatives, particularly institutional ones, that may yet
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