The following is an excerpt from Kirkpatrick Sale’s forthcoming book “Human Scale Revisited: A New Look at the Classic Case for a Decentralist Future” (Chelsea Green, May 2017):

There is no such thing as a society without technology. Homo erectus and Homo sapiens for nearly two million years had the hand-axe, a small, simple, beautiful, and extremely useful tool that could butcher animal carcasses, slice off the meat, and crack open the bone for the nutritious marrow. (The fact that it remained essentially unchanged for all this time suggests that, unlike our own, these societies had a settled social order, were highly cohesive and cooperative, and did not feel any individualistic need to innovate, change for the sake of change.)

The question is not of eliminating technology but of deciding what kind of technology should prevail, which of society’s values should it express. For there is no such thing as neutral technology—rather it comes with an inevitable logic, bearing the purposes and priorities of the economic and political systems that spawn it. Thus a reporter for Automation at the dawn of the computer age could praise a computer system as “significant” because it assures that “decision-making” is “removed from the operator [and] gives maximum control of the machine to management”—a system, that is, that turns the user into a soulless factotum without any power and assures that management retains power to itself, quite what our manufacturing world desires.

A violent empire guided by the principles of capitalism will surely develop technologies that heedlessly wrench resources from the earth in service to a few corporate and financial interests that are protected and nurtured by the political systems that they have commandeered to their ends. It seems fairly clear by now, as we have seen, that these technologies—more powerful and more rapacious than the world has ever known—will end by extracting and consuming so much of those resources, so alter the systems of atmospheric balance and oceanic tolerances, that it will diminish or destroy most of the surface and many of the marine species within the near future. These technologies have been developed to permit the human species to devote itself to every deadly sin but sloth, particularly pride, and it has done so with great skill, ingenuity, and speed. An alternative technology is clearly necessary, one based upon the human scale, in the sense both of being designed for and controlled by the individual and of being harmonious with the individual’s role in the ecosphere.

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In an important but generally unnoticed phenomenon, just such a movement has arisen in the last fifty years, starting only in the 1960s and still evolving today, and it has created, tested, and proven an amazing array of soft technologies. Called variously “appropriate,” “green,” intermediate,” or “alternative,” it satisfies the basic criteria of a human-scale technology as set out by the wise Kentucky essayist Wendell Berry in the 1980s: a new tool, he says, should be cheaper, smaller, and better than the one it replaces, should use less energy (and that renewable), be repairable, come from a small local shop, and “should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.” To which need be added only two other crucial standards—that those family and community relationships embrace all the other species, plants and animals alike, and the living ecosystems on which they depend, and that they be considered, as the Irokwa nation has expressed it, with the interest of the next seven generations in mind.

There is one other good way of assessing human-scale technology, as expressed in a sage axiom of the British philosopher Herbert Read: “Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines.” Far from serving an apprenticeship, modern industrial society works to enslave nature, for the benefit of humanity (or some small part of it), and regards mastery over it as ordained.