Almadora/Light of the West/Can a Classical Society have Modern Technology?.md

The convenient answer would be yes, because it would mean that nothing must be lost for us to survive and prosper. But can this really be true?

There are many aspects of technology which seem to innately contradict Classical values.

These are:

1. The development of technology is much faster than the development of human nature
2. Technology requires a high rate of specialization
3. The Tower of Babel explicitly warns against trying to unite humanity

These things are all connected. They are ways of describing the same phenomenon.

Everyone today knows that technology is unsustainable. Everyone can feel it. Everyone is waiting for the fall.

" In living close to nature, one discovers that happiness does not consist in maximizing pleasure. It consists in tranquility. Once you have enjoyed tranquility long enough, you acquire actually an aversion to the thought of any very strong pleasure - excessive pleasure would disrupt your tranquility.

One also learns that boredom is a disease of civilization. It seems to me that what boredom mostly is is that people have to keep themselves entertained or occupied, because if they aren’t, then certain anxieties, frustrations, discontents, and so forth, start coming to the surface, and it makes them uncomfortable.

Boredom is almost nonexistent once you’ve become adapted to life in the woods. If you don’t have any work that needs to be done, you can sit for hours at a time just doing nothing, just listening to the birds or the wind or the silence, watching the shadows move as the sun travels, or simply looking at familiar objects. And you don’t get bored. You’re just at peace. "

• Theodore Kaczynski

This is a sentiment echoed in Growth of the Soil, by Knut Hamsen. The main character goes into the forests of Sweden, builds a house, finds a women, and they live simply there together.

However, as the modern era comes, it brings temptation and the Fast Life along with it.

Interestingly, there seems to be a split here between the “mere life” and the “aristocratic life” ideals.

Costin Alamariu discusses this in Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, as well as Nietzche before him.

People whose religion is “nature” but who are terrified of violence or aggression don’t really follow nature. They follow technology, and they rely on it to hold sudden motion at bay.

For them, Industrialization is the only thing that allows “nature” to be a rosy experience.