Nature vs. Technology: A Harmful Theme in Advertising

Example: Orange Juice.

Evan Stewart at the Society Pages notes that there's not a single person in this commercial below.

Pictured: Fresh lies are a part of a balanced breakfast.

This is weird, because nice homogeneous orange juice in plastic bottles doesn't spontaneously materialize from fresh, on-tree ripe orange fruits. That most definitely isn't the processing plant where oranges become juice, those oranges didn't pick themselves, and upper management must really be full of itself if it thinks the entire world revolves around it.

And yet, we get a positive feeling from the commercial, anyway. Why is that? Even when it erases hundreds if not thousands of workers, many of them likely migrants, below the poverty line?

And what does this have to do with this blog?

Well, this commercial is trying to tell us a story. It's trying to show us an image of pastoral harmony, uncorrupted by the hands of man. This would be a useless image to try and sell to us if it didn't mean something to our culture. The fact that we understand this image is because it's part of a larger narrative.

The narrative of nature vs. technology, of course.

This commercial implies that it is anti-technology, anti-industry, despite being a product for consumer purchase. It implies that the opposite of this green, unpopulated orchard is some kind of mad science lab, or a concrete-and-steel wasteland, or other harmful cliche of modern industrialization. It names an 'enemy' without saying a word.

Where they make the other orange juice.

However, these oranges that grew in an orchard would not be as large, as resistant to frost or parasites, or as healthy if humans hadn't used technology and scientific methods over hundreds of years of selective breeding and cultivation, and the orchard would be fallow if workers hadn't been employed to tend it, and the juice would never have been delivered if there wasn't a processing plant with machinery to squeeze the juice into bottles.

In nature vs. technology narratives, 'nature' is largely conservative, and seeks to preserve a sense of past and tradition. It is unconcerned with moving forward, only that people have survived before with the old ways in the old environment. This is problematic because there has never been a 'golden age' in human history where tradition has served us well, no one has been oppressed, and we all worked in the goodness of the earth.

This is a migrant worker. He has to feed his whole family on the output of these cows and sheep. This is not a pastoral utopia, this is a peasant who will be stepped on and ignored by his largely feudal aristocracy.

Technology is framed as a more progressive approach, and sometimes also as greedy: seeking short-term gain in spite of long-term destruction of an older system. However, while it is true that western industrial complexes are largely to blame for the damage to Earth's environment, it is also impossible to solve those problems without technology and maintain a similar quality of life. As much as Simply Orange® brand juice seems to despise modernity, I don't see it complaining about the polio vaccine.

I think a good example of this trope that everybody probably knows comes from the ubiquitous Star Wars. At the end of Return of the Jedi, small, furry aliens called Ewoks were able to defeat the futuristic and militaristic forces of the Empire, with nothing but stone-age technology. Because they were good, and the evil Empire was, well, evil, they succeeded, and everyone celebrated thereafter.

No! My futuristic robot walker's only weakness! Big logs!

Nature vs. Technology has new, and startling implications in our modern world. We cannot afford to despise the industry and technology that has been western culture's handmaiden in changing our natural environment. Anti-science and regressive politics are at an all-time high. Now is not the time to erase labor for the sake of peddling 'green' products that really are just more commercial culture in disguise. We have a real problem on our hands, and technology and science are our greatest tools in solving it.

No Ewok, or spontaneously-squeezing orange juice, is going to be able to save us now.