## Metadata - Author: [[Langdon Winner]] - Full Title: The Whale and the Reactor - Category: #books ## Highlights - Nothing in Western philosophy—or in all of human experience for that matter—suggests that we can arrange the good and the bad in simple lists. If one pursues an ideal of justice far enough, for example, it may well begin to conflict with one’s own best notion of freedom. By affirming policies compatible with local culture, there is no guarantee that one will promote more democratic politics. Neither the intricacies of theory nor the evidence of historical practice gives us any reason to believe that the ideals of self-sufficiency, community, safety, diversity, efficiency, and the like can be easily gathered under one umbrella. ([Location 1408](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082QP78WM&location=1408)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - A recurring fantasy in industrial society expects relief from this thoroughgoing estrangement in the coming of a new technological system. In 1924, for example, Joseph K. Hart, a professor of education, extolled the liberation electricity would bring. “Centralization,” he wrote, “has claimed everything for a century: the results are apparent on every hand. But the reign of steam approaches its end: a new stage in the industrial revolution comes on. Electric power, breaking away from its servitude to steam, is becoming independent. Electricity is a decentralizing form of power: it runs out over distributing lines and subdivides to all the minutiae of life and need. Working with it, men may feel the thrill of control and freedom once again.” ([Location 1788](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082QP78WM&location=1788)) - Tags: [[aqua]] - The ecological persuasion, in both its survivalist and deep ecology versions, has challenged an idea long prevalent in Western culture, an idea that portrays nature as an object of control and source of wealth. The alternative model now proposed holds that nature be seen as a system, an incalculably intricate, delicately balanced aggregate of interdependent parts and processes. Offering this idea as a true picture of the world, the ecologist may tend to forget that the model is itself a human creation, an abstract representation of certain kinds of phenomena. ([Location 2460](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082QP78WM&location=2460)) - We encourage people to become competent in a particular professional field, especially those concerned with inquiry into natural phenomena and the manipulation of material reality. At the same time we allow a scandalous incompetence in dealing with the fundamental, recurring questions of human existence: How are we to live together? How can we live gracefully and with justice? Questions of this nature are not, as some teachers like to tell their students, “soft” ones as compared to the “hard” research questions of science. They are as “hard” and as challenging as any that science could hope to tackle. They are, furthermore, eminently practical, involving the combined practice of ethics, politics, and technology. ([Location 2919](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082QP78WM&location=2919)) - More and more the whole language used to talk about technology and social policy—the language of “risks,” “impacts,” and “trade-offs”—smacks of betrayal. The excruciating subtleties of measurement and modeling mask embarrassing shortcomings in human judgment. We have become careful with numbers, callous with everything else. Our methodological rigor is becoming spiritual rigor mortis. ([Location 3154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082QP78WM&location=3154)) - If, as Arendt argues, “the lost treasure of the revolution” involves small, local democratic groups able to affect larger national political outcomes, then the obvious challenge is to start building and invigorating these bodies again. Salvation of a now-fading democracy is readily at hand, I would argue, if only that path were to be chosen. ([Location 3469](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B082QP78WM&location=3469))