Fukushima Earthquake

On March 11, 2011, one of the most powerful earthquakes recorded in Japan and the following tsunami stroke the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station on the east coast of Japan. The massive tsunami flooded the power station, including its backup generator, disabling the cooling water system of the reactors. In the next few days, explosions damaged the station and the explosions of used nuclear rods occurred with radiation released (Yergin, 2011:458-459). Hence, Fukushima disaster was ranked as the level 7 nuclear disaster in the history along with Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The radioactive materials have released into the air and ocean thus aroused the panic in the neighboring countries, including Taiwan (Guardian, Mar 17, 2011). Again, Fukushima

Yet all of the three agree that the political decisions in the industrial/modern age are based upon the economic/technological rationality. According to Beck and Giddens, the technology is not merely a tool for the manipulation or domination, but the expert systems embedded in the modern daily life. People in the modern society have to trust the symbolic tokens and expert system to survive and people in the “developing” or “under developing” societies have been encountered the “globalization of modernity”, no matter they like it or not (i.e. the rise of the sea level). Combing with the welfare state and market economy, the individuals apparently make decisions freely in the advanced capitalism but de facto are constrained by the technical rationality in each subsystems (Beck, 1986; Giddens, 1990). For example, today we could freely choose our foods/appearance in the market (if we have the budget) while most of us do not participate in the debates or decisions regarding the genetically modified organisms, the economic treaties between the nations, the wages in the food industries, and the labor condition in some sweat shop in

Progress, turned into the dogma and projected onto a promising future. Lewis Mumford describes the concept of the progress “…man was climbing steadily out of the mire of superstition, ignorance, savagery, into a world that was to become ever more polished, human, and rational…In the nature of progress, the world would go on forever and forever in the same direction…and above all, much more rich” (Mumford,1934:182).

A good example of the faith in progress could be the book of Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation (2011), in which Cowen “discovers” the “base” of the economic growth is “technological innovation”, and argues that the American economy has reached a historical technological plateau and the factors (e.g. unused lands, returns on education, cheap oil) which drove economic growth for most of America's history are mostly utilized. Finally, Cowen’s political suggestion, or, de-political suggestion is to raise the social status of the [natural] scientists as a motivating