Technopoly and the New Animal Genocide

As any Berkeley professor can tell you, animals rights activists are getting more violent by the nanosecond. But, given certain recent events, I’m beginning to contemplate what President Obama once said: “[D]oing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence.” Perhaps animal rights activists are, for the first time in their angry lives, on to something.

The coming animal genocide is already being foreshadowed in zoology. And the justification appears to be tough economic times. This is known as the “starve the beast” tactic, pioneered by philosopher of rights Leo Strauss, later developed into its modern form by Richard Weaver. While politically it’s a Machiavellian brilliant move, it’s morally dispicable. But Zoology isn’t the only field where we can see that a storm is coming. Bird Studies has also issued some ominous omens, corroborated by everyone. But this is just where it starts to get interesting.

chitty

My more sophisticated readers will have read enough Neil Postman to know that our society is basically run by Technopolists. Professor Postman coined this term, and it refers to those whose primary modus of operandi is that technology not only be used, but more or less worshiped as mankind’s salvation. Sound silly? It may have back in the 1980’s when technology was largely fictional, but now it is a reality realer than realness itself. Combine the disturbing facts about birds with the recent development of flying cars, and you might begin to get the picture. Never mind the primitive out-of-date propaganda we’re sending out kids, innovations like flying cars are the wave of the future. And these innovations have a one-to-one correspondence with the animals they are replacing. Using Bayes’ Calculus a la cartes Richard Swinburne, it is enormously improbable that this is just coincidence.

Of course, as Professor Postman warned us, technopoly comes with a price. And the genocide against animal life has consequences both dire and ironic.

Looks like Postman’s “childhood” isn’t the only victim in this race to the technopological finish line; the entire animal kingdom is going down with it.