5.4 Transformative Subjugation and Conformity
We have transformed all of physical reality into a giant testing site and then attempted to discover predictable patterns of behavior that can be exploited over and over in such a way as to advance our control over the forces of nature. The more successful we are at imperializing our environment, the more secure we feel. Rifkin.
It is this obsession with power, dominance and control, which gives rise to a covert moral tension between the political objectives of engineering pedagogy on the one hand and the moral purpose of environmental education on the other. The reliance on ‘power epistemology’ as the dominant model for the technoloization of nature has created a scientific discourse which has subjugated the importance of the ethical issues surrounding the building of the Three Gorges Dam, while in turn securing its long term utilization. Appreciation of this point makes it easier to discern why the noble efforts by some to think environmentally and in qualitative value terms about the Project have been severely marginalized and eventually superseded by technologically disposed instrumentalism. Let us examine this point more closely.
The unbridled lust for technological development and the urge to alter the environment using it has led almost ineluctably to catastrophic disruptions to the rhythm of the earth’s reproductive capacities (Laura & Cotton, 1998). Nature in the Epistemology of Power Paradigm has come to be seen as malleable in accord with the purposes of vested interests, when the achievements of technology make it possible to enlarge man’s capabilities for planetary exploitation (Forbes, 1968; Kompridis, 2009; Oliver-Smith, 2010). The roots of the environmental crisis in contemporary society have been repeatedly traced to educational system sustained by a array of scientific knowledge driven by western culture’s obsession with power and control (Laura & Cotton, 1998 & 2010). This obsession is widely spread across the world and adopted by developing countries such as China. Put more simply, knowledge equals power and power is expressed through technologies of dominance and control. Appeals to knowledge/truth are subsumed as instruments of domination and suppression (Goldman, 1999). The outcome of this form of knowledge is what Laura calls the theory of ‘transformative subjugation’. The typical expression of the subjugation of nature perhaps is the ‘taming’ of rivers through dam construction (Oliver-Smith, 2010). The process of transformative subjugation reflects the fact of the use of scientific knowledge and the technologies to convert living things into chemicalized, inert, lifeless, and dead things to gain total control of nature by enhancing the human capacity to predict its behavior (Laura & Cotton, 1998 & 2010). The hydraulic characteristics of a dammed river are predictable and calculable since the operation mode of a reservoir behind the dam is periodic and fixed. We are promised normalization, security and happiness through science and technology. In the case of TGDP the presumption is that rational control of nature, based on the assumption of technological supremacy can mitigate if not reverse the negative impacts of displacement and other environmental problems (Gellert & Lynch, 2003). When they fail, this failure is only seen justify the need for more of utilities which technology can provide (Goldman, 1999). In this sense, technology and artificial social structures around us become the tools utilized vastly by us to expand our power over nature and over each other (Patterson, 2001). Technologization is the process through which we transform the living world around us by reconstructing it in ways which ensure that it is easier to dominate, subjugate, expropriate and thus control. And herein lays the problem. To make it easier to know the world by dominating it, we subjugate it to our technological reconstructions which make it more predictable. By transforming the living world into an increasingly inert, chemicalized, artificial, lifeless and dead environment, the easier it is becomes to control what can be done with the transformations. The more synthetic we make our reconstructions of the world; the easier it is to ensure that the things of our making are as predictable as possible and under our control. We assess the use of new technologies and their societal and political implications for the environment and human society, without a sufficiently deep understanding of those principles (Cross & Price, 1996). Technology and ideological control for the sake of human advantage traditionally depends upon recasting the face of the earth and the structure of the society in a form which makes their trace of motion predictable in order to suit our needs and interests. It is depicted by Laura’s expression ‘transformative subjugation’ (Laura & Cotton, 1998 & 2010).
Since mankind has changed much of the natural world by adding a layer of artificial civilization on top, our interaction with nature has been confined largely to our repeatedly attempts to use the power of technology to control and actually shape it by reconstructing it at will (ibid). “Our perception of the world is increasingly shaped by the artificial environment we inhabit” (Mander, 1999, p.206), which Mencius (Mencius, Ch.11: Gaozi I, quoted in Epstein, 1999) expressed the similar point of view back 1000 years ago:
Even in ancient times people took for granted the degraded state of the environment and did not realize the beauty and richness that been destroyed. Protecting it takes constant vigilance. Likewise protecting our own nature takes constant vigilance and this is the job of ethical education. But awareness of what is innate and good can be uncovered in everyone.
This being so, we have also substantially confused the human purposes of transformative subjugation by way of the technologies of science (Patterson, 2001; Oliver-Smith, 2010). Part of the covert rationale for the technologization of nature is that technology will transform the world in such a way that it becomes progressively shaped to suit our every purported need. It is in this sense that we, as a culture, are “capable of manipulating, domesticating, remolding, reconstructing, and harvesting nature” (Murphy, 1994, p. 5; also see Oliver-Smith, 2001, p.45).
The use of technology dates back to the days long before written history were recorded in order to make surroundings more adaptive to us (Laura & Chapman, 2009). The use of simple tools made by natural resources and the ability to control fire enabled prehistoric humans to have a modicum of control over their environment. We invented the wheel and the combustion engine to allow us to travel far and fast, we extend daytime by lighting the night. We adjust the indoor temperature by deploying the technologies of heat or air conditioning; we prolong the shelf-life of our food by the addition of preservatives, and we chemically fertilize the soil and engineer genetically seeds to make plants growing faster, bigger and more resilient for transport. Recent technological developments such as information technology allow us to communicate freely on a global scale. The ancient way of life depending upon the actual periodicities of nature is gone forever.
Within the artificial environment we built up for our own convenience, even the least powerful among us can enjoy more devices than they possibly need, along with more reproductive success than the Earth will be able to tolerate for much longer. The concerns of permanent alteration of our biological nature became more serious along with the pervasiveness of the technologization of in the modern world (Kompridis, 2009). We have become infected not by “responding to the rhythms as manifest in the periodicities of nature, but as manifested in the patterns of our technology which reflect the way in which we see and treat nature” (Laura & Marchant, 2002, p.199). Personal and collective power is no longer needed in the same way to pursue the original purpose of survival instincts. The exercise of this power over our environment has largely become a function of our egos, consciousness and emotions, expressed through the filters and distortions of our individual or collective world views (Patterson, 2001). The technologies we have used to control the environment has now come paradoxically close to controlling us. Our categories of self-reflection and humility have jettisoned us all into another dimension of technological utopia (Laura & Marchant, 2002; Kompridis, 2009).
Over time, the survival advantage of transformative subjugation over nature has been, in many ways, extended to exercise the advantages of power over our fellow humans (Patterson, 2001). For example, the head of a traditional Chinese family established his personal power over the other family members. By indoctrinating family members to behave in an orderly social structure, the Confucius texts helped to organize the foundational elements for society. By controlling nature and other fellow humans, we have developed illusions of sense of secure about our dominance over nature to which we are only minimally entitled (Laura & Cotton, 1998; Laura et al. 2008)
5.4.1 Confirmation and Assimilation
Massively systematic transformation of living things into lifeless things satisfied our unbridled appetite for domination and control, and survival instinct for security and predictability through of application of science and technology. This is a process of assimilation, which leads to staggering conformity. Dynamic systems consisted of living organisms can constantly alter, adapt, interact and engender diversity, just as we are not able to find exactly the same leaves in the nature — they are different in color, size, texture, and shape (Glenn, 2004). Whitehead, and later John B. Cobb, Jr. both brought up the notion that “the universe is not composed of inert matter but is instead a continuous series of events or interactions; in other words, a process” (Nash, 1990, p.107), which echoed the Daoism’s idea of nature being in flux, everything is “to be spontaneous, to be genuine, not to be artificial” (Chen, 2010, p.10). This explained the difficulties of prediction and control of the behaviors of living things (Laura & Cotton, 1998). In order to overcome this unpredictability, the menacing process of transformative subjugation technologically converts and reduces the things of nature with their own intrinsic value, into forms in which such value and integrity is either diminished or destroyed (Laura & Cotton, 1998; Laura et al., 2008). Only by doing so, we can achieve certainty the security we seek without having to pay the price of epistemic sacrifice, as in the case of the TGDP. Just as we have synthesized the world of nature (Laura & Chapman, 2009). Through “restricting candidates for knowledge, forswearing modes of justification, reordering epistemic priorities, and revising cognitive values” (Elgin, 1996, quoted in Kasman, 2003, p.20), certainty is nevertheless successfully achieved, while uncertainty is allegedly ruled out (Kasman, 2003). It is certainty that makes predictability possible. Since we impose concepts on dissimilar objects, both the “decision stakes” and “system uncertainties” can be high (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1993; Kolstø, et al., 2006). For that reason, an epistemology of certainty and confirmation has been widely revered (Glenn, 2004). As a result, to see the world in terms of concepts and ideas, rather than in terms of the uniqueness of each thing is preferable to most people driven by the survival instinct, who can then extend the power they have to control their surroundings with some assurance of security (Glenn, 2004).
Not only does the Chinese State exercise physical control over its territory, but it also expands the process of transformative subjugation to the inhabitants on its territory by imposing “a process of standardization and simplification on including common measurement, language, codification, and mapping” (Oliver-Smith, 2001, p.61-62). A significantly reduced and synthesized cultural, social and economic environment is less complex and easy to be controlled by the State. This transformation by reduction of characteristics of a diverse society is “compatible with the industrialized forms of production that form the basis of current development models” (Oliver-Smith, 2001, p.6). The concept of “assimilation and absorption”, as C. Smith (1996) termed, is clearly expressed in whole developmental process of the large infrastructural projects as it may close off old economic opportunities and social spaces, while it creates another one similar to the mainstream economic forms and socio-cultural interaction models (Smith, 1996; Gellert & Lynch, 2003; Oliver-Smith, 2010). “Evolution toward urban life” is a typical example for economic and cultural assimilation and absorption (Goldman, 2001). That is why the rural migrants created by the mega development projects are encouraged to participate in the national economy through their own urban base (Goldman 2001; Gellert & Lynch, 2003). This being so, the relatively simple rural culture and life patterned with a low level of technology invention is bound to give way to “a culture with superior technology and higher quality of life” (Oliver-Smith, 2001, p.62). Furthermore, given the barely hidden cultural and political characters of assimilation and absorption through development projects, the State expands its further control over local people and territories through the creation of formalized communities, which are well-established and fit nicely in the larger national bureaucratic structures (Scott, 1998; Oliver-Smith, 2001). Merging in larger systems means a “transformation from autonomy and self-sufficiency to dependency” (Tainter, 2007, p.365).
5.4.2 Power/Knowledge Failure
Man’s violence toward his surroundings is just as sinful as his violence toward his fellows (Engel, 1970, p.227).
One can only be a philosopher to feel that traditional epistemology has gone wrong in many ways in which epistemic practices and exercise of social power are intertwined (Kusch, 2009) due to the unbridled human nature for control (Patterson, 2001). Not only has there been an adverse impact on human health from the artificial highly synthesized and conformist environments but the nature of human spirit and the creativity of the human mind have changed with it. The teaching of environmental science in school is presented as a set of concepts “as though they were inevitable, rocklike formations that have existed for all time” (Ma & Brakel, 2006, p.523). To recognize the fact that scientific thinking is historically, socially and contextually situated, substantial opposition is imperative. Modernity’s enshrinement of technology is the arbiter of reality, and the panacea for all our ills, while at the same time ignoring the value of local knowledge based on a variety of sources. Both deep reflection of teaching and lived experience reveals that the rejection of socially-constructed knowledge in dam projects can and will result in the unbalance of cost-benefit distribution (Oliver-Smith, 2010).
Whether the power of technology and scientific knowledge has genuinely advanced our mastery over the environment is a moot point in the overall scheme of things. Ironically, the discourse of power can be turned around to be used against power. What seems to me clear is that the power of technology and knowledge has not ultimately made us more secure. Dominating and controlling nature could results in in very destruction and dissolution of the real world, leaving us with a degradation of the environment, and ultimately of ourselves (Laura & Cotton, 2010). We rely on technology to dominant the natural world by tailoring it closely to human needs. ‘The conqueror role,’ claimed Leopold, “is eventually self-defeating” (Nash, 1990, p.77). The more we seek to control nature, the more transformed and artificial it becomes. We technologize our lives to make it complex unnecessarily instead of choose living simply as Daoism suggests. We gain more and more power through the discourse of transmission, but at the same time the reinforced power we gain during the process of transformative subjugation detaches us from nature. And the repression of nature has finally reached a point at which nature starts to fight back (Laura et al., 2008). The most serious and neglected aspects of the environmental crisis confronting us today is the declaration of nature’s revenge (Laura & Cotton, 2010). Foucault observes that “[d]iscourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it” (quoted in Bruguier, 2008, p.66). The problem is not just the obvious one of environmental degradation the much discussed depletion of water and soil, despoiling of rivers and lakes, destruction of the ecosystem and the extinction of wildlife. What we are endeavoring to bring into bold relief is that the very real environmental crisis confronting the world globally, such as global warming, radiation pollution, and over population. This is a discourse far more subtle and relates to the philosophy of nature to which we have unwittingly been committed by virtue of the concept of knowledge we embrace (Laura & Cotton, 1998 & 2010).
The problem is, that preoccupied by the obsession for power and dominance, technological intervention has been permeated so deep in everyday life that it will continue to be fundamentally alienating and destructive. For example, you have to press a couple of buttons, you can get to talk to a real person over the phone when you try to get a commercial service. Nowadays the traditional interpersonal direct interaction is largely displaced by social media network ― touch and text are our main channels of communication. Technology reshapes our everyday life, to make ourselves infinitely strong, yet paradoxically, in the end, it has made us infinitely weak, dependent and therefore on the very brink of extinction (Laura & Marchant, 2002&2006; Laura et al., 2008; Fifield & Donath, 2008). The ever increasing lifelessness of transformative subjugation robs us of the source of our strength and our health. Disconnected from the earth, the integrity of the human spirit is diminished. Not unlike Heracles defeat of Anteus by lifting his feet off the surface of the earth, we let ourselves be displaced from nature by corrupting the quality of its authenticity. We have indeed been bequeathed the power of giants, but we are giants who are blinded to the lifelessness of the world we have fabricated for ourselves, the same giants demand us checking our email so many times a day. Driven by the insatiable appetite for power, the form of knowledge we have selected and the techno-tyranny we have created to “propagate in our educational institutions shapes, informs and conditions the form of technology” by way of which we deconstruct and synthesize the natural world (Laura & Marchant, 2002, p.38).
We have thus far established that the knowledge we transmit in our schools and by way of our institutions is conditioned and shaped by our obsession with power, both its form and application will reflect that obsession. If what we claim to know is covertly defined by the capacity of what is known to secure us the power to control and dominate, then the orthodox view that knowledge is neither good nor bad in itself can be exposed for the illusion it is. Far from being neutral, every piece of information which is accepted as knowledge is designed covertly to provide some advantage of control over everything that might affect our lives. In the light of the power presumption as a primary motivating factor in determining what we accept as knowledge, there is already a built-in or conceptually endogenous bias within education in favor of an epistemology of control and subjugation. This being so, the philosophical idea that what makes knowledge ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depends simply on how one uses it, betrays a conceptual distortion of a far subtler truth. Deeper reflection reveals that when knowledge is itself substantively defined by the preoccupation with power, the obsession with power and control which motivates it is the very value which the concept of knowledge itself covertly propagates. This being so, every application of that form of knowledge will serve the aim of knowing, only in so far as it guarantees some measure of control. Our view is the price we pay for this measure of control is alienation, dehumanization, depersonalization and the ecological desacrilization of nature. For whenever we apply this power-motivated theory of knowledge as a traditional innovation, the technology will transform the things to which it is applied into other things which are more readily controlled by virtue of the nature of the transformation. The direction of technological transformation in the name of predictability as the measure of power and control will involve the reconstruction of living or dynamic systems into chemicalized highly inert, lifelessly regimented ones. The impact of such transformations upon our world, upon our health and our spiritual and mental well-being has yet to be fully appreciated. The argument here stands as a salutary reminder that we have as a culture inadvertently let our schools and many of our institutions become the state-sanctioned vehicles for the cultural transportation of an ideology of power and control, thereby enshrined as a fundamental value presupposed by the kind of knowledge we both seek and teach (Laura & Cotton, 1998 & 2010; Laura & Marchant, 2002 & 2006; Laura et al., 2008). We are a culture which has come to think that technology can make everything better, without fully appreciating the extent to which increasing levels of technological development only make things worse. The rub is that many of these things are the really important things the things that make life worth living. Because we are distracted from the task of living simply as Daoism promoted, we think the only way we can live is complexly. So we technologize our lives as a self-fulfilling prophecy of our power to complicate our lives unnecessarily. The paradox is that while technology may appear to have given us the power to walk as kings upon the earth, we have failed to recognize that it has made us into giants without vision, into kings whose rule is over a kingdom of inert and lifeless things. We have become kings so bedazzled by the glitter of technology that we have become blinded to the things that really matter, in the things we have left behind (Laura & Cotton, 1998 & 2010; Laura & Marchant, 2002 & 2006; Laura et al., 2008).