Re: the intuitive being denigrated in this culture, notice how when rational thought leads to an erroneous conclusion, that is forgivable and is in fact "just how science works". If an intuitive thought leads to an erroneous conclusion that is an example of laughable naiveté.
Well, the Great Reset is of course proposed by the WEF, who are the sugar daddies of the Machine's advance. Klaus Schwab is like the Wizard of Oz, only more charmless.
If nothing else, the robot lawnmowers can help us to remember that "all flesh is as grass" ... a statement that really makes sense in its context in Isaiah 40, where God withers the empires, exposes the futility of technologically driven religions, gives power to the faint, and tends his flock like a shepherd. Thanks for another great essay.
Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? Immensely relevant. Here is a flavour that this article reminded me of: "On Labor Day and Memorial Day weekends we travel for miles on these roads without seeing another vehicle, then cross a federal highway and look at cars strung bumper to bumper to the horizon. Scowling faces inside. Kids crying in the back seat. I keep wishing there were some way to tell them something but they scowl and appear to be in a hurry, and there isn’t..."
Superb post. I suppose the big arising question would be: is writing (already a form of artificial and collective intelligence) and even language and all tool use in fact also ‘the machine’? But these things define our very humanity, from the outset a ‘supplementation’ of nature. Was Mumford not really arguing for a de-mythicised machine, a machine subordinated to better myths, better gods, more truly human goals? Therefore for a kind of embedded machine rather in the way that Karl Polanyi wanted an embedded market? A subordination of technology and its selective use, not its abandonment as that would mean abandoning the human as such? That might differentiate him from Agamben’s apparent apocalyptic refusal of the cultural as such. John Milbank
Many thanks John, and it is very good to have you here.
I wrote a book a couple of years ago called 'Savage Gods', which was an exploration of precisely that question: is writing a part of the machine? Is it more of a trap than a liberation? You are right of course that writing is a technology, and that our use of technologies defines us. However, Mumford claims at the beginning of his book that we are not 'tool using animals' so much as 'storytelling animals.' He is adamant that it is not our ability to create 'technics' which makes us unique so much as our ability to create myths to embed them in.
But can the machine be embedded? I doubt it, myself. It has its own telos, I think, and we no longer really control it. Haven't we spent years trying to embed the Machine within certain stories, from communism to socialism to liberalism, only to see it break free of them? I think that the more frightening possibility (and Kevin Kelly wrote about this approvingly in his book 'What Technology Wants') is that the Machine is already controlling and remaking us. Perhaps it has always done this.
This does imply that the Machine can't be subordinated. But maybe we can distinguish between a tool and a technology, and between a technology and the Machine itself. I hope we can talk more of this as these essays go on.
Thanks very much Paul. Will look at that book. Agree with final sentence: maybe tool and technology need not be part of machine. And that means yes seeing word and language as more primary than tool though I think tool was also there from the outset. Bernard Stiegler interesting on this as you likely know, building on Leroy-Gourhan, who had a rather teleological view of evolution influenced by Teilhard. Both suggest rather as you do that technology from the outset has made us as much as the reverse. That implies humans can’t really control technology: it truly is a diabolical god. But is there a religious alternative that I would call ‘the theurgic’? What I mean is that if we allow that words and artefacts are making us as much as we make them because really and truly this is divine mediation (thus statues and books have been taken as sacred) then it is precisely ritual that tends to contain the machine. Perhaps Chinese geomancy in the past was an example of that, or the way the Neolithic sculpting of the landscape clearly had a ritual character? Of course to the degree people worshipped terrible gods of power this only promoted the machine as with the pyramids, but the more it is allowed that the divine is good, loving and peaceful then the more we can be open to tempering ritual influences through our very exercises of poesis and techne? In Christian terms that would mean that all our making must be subservient to the mass as with medieval cathedrals. Somehow we have to turn our whole culture (or a new one) now more radically into a cathedral?
The Eucharist heals the world.... (and the feast of Corpus Christi was the intrusion of the Machine - manufacturing a product that could be abstracted from the meal-context - into the human-shaping ritual). Thank you for the reference to Agamben by the way, I hadn't come across him before but he seems extremely interesting.
Broadly I agree. De Lubac showed that Eucharistic transformation got disconnected from the making of the church as the body of Christ in the layer Middle Ages. In that sense it became an extrinsic machine of miracle controlled by the clergy. But am not so sure that Corpus Christi was *necessarily* implicated in that. It more follows in a stronger sense as expressed by Aquinas of the ‘material’ reality of treansubstantiation. One could see the CC feast as the attempt to extend the reading of everything eucharistically: to transubstantiate the entire world as it were.
Mumford points out at one point in his book that modern machine society valorises the breaking of at least seven of the ten commandments. I often idly wonder whether what I am calling the Machine might fit the description 'Anti-Christ' quite well. But that's for another time!
Jonathan Geltner has a fascinating comment below which is worth reading. In Christian terms, it seems important that Jesus neither justified nor rebelled against the Machine of his time, the Roman empire, but 'sidestepped' it. In that sense, it is probably true that we need a culture the shape of a cathedral; but it is probably true also that this culture can't encompass 'the world'. That is to say we can't oppose the Machine and seek its replacement at scale. We probably have to start very small with rebuilding a sacred culture from the ground up - as the early church did, in fact.
Ultimately, Jesus failed to even sidestep the machine and was willing to be killed by it. Same with Socrates in his own way. I think about the saying, "My Kingdom is not of this world", to which Jesus adds, if it was of this world, "my servants would fight" to get him released. (John 18:36). This is key.
I can imagine in saying "this world" Jesus making a sweep of his hand and referring to narrowly the Praetorium and more broadly to the power of Rome (or even more broadly to "Rome" perhaps). In contrast to the world kingdom, in the kingdom of heaven, one does not fight but is willing to die at the hands of those who do fight for supremacy. Resist not evil.
If this is correct, I find myself balking at the very notion. I am greatly outmatched against the machine and the powers it wields. I, for one, have no place to escape to. No place to hide from it. I certainly don't want to die as a lamb led to the slaughter. But isn't that what we are asked to be ready to do? Even willing to do?!
To pivot back to Socrates, if philosophy is learning how to die, how much more so is the path of Religion, particularly Christianity? Yes, to die to the ego, to self, to ambition, etc., but certainly not only that? At least any Christianity that is a handmaid to the Lord rather than the handmaid to the machine.
Sometimes, perhaps uncharitably, I see a lot of the Benedict Option-style handwringing about the admittedly ominous changes in the culture, to be a desire for comfort and security and happiness which we were never promised. To the contrary!
So maybe it isn't about defeating or even sidestepping the machine but learning to die and to go about our work, worrying not for tomorrow.
I think it is quite wrong, at least from a Christian *theological* viewpoint, to speak of Jesus as failing in any regard. I meant his teaching sidesteps the Machine: he directs his disciples neither to flee it nor to fight it — nor to serve it.
As to what God does with the Machine, up to and including the sacrifice of his only begotten Son, the entire Christian point, I take if, is that grace or providence turns apparent evil to good—without rendering it any less apparently evil. Ignominious death on the cross (state execution) becomes the “reign from a tree.” These are ultimate mysteries, not to be parsed in reductive sociopolitical terms. And you are absolutely right that comfort, whether physical or cultural (for lack of a better term), is the last thing the Christian is to expect or desire. Whoever would save his life will lose it. Take up your cross... This is why I think asceticism is the key, or one of the keys, to a way forward from the “end of history.”
Very well said. Thank you for the clarification. You are right, "Failed" was a bad word choice on my part. Better said, perhaps, that Jesus freely chose to face the worst the machine could dole out.
Bumping an old thread is to break internet taboo, and so to emulate The Machine (yikes) but just some stuff off the back of your passing ‘Anti-Christ’ coda.
When we get down to the civilisational/metaphysical status of Machinehood etc. in these comment threads, I can’t help but feel we’re finally getting at the real questions.
Illich thought we needed something like ‘a new theology of the Anti-Christ’ and then promptly leaked it—almost despite himself it seems—in Rivers North of the Sea. Stemming from it, the point I want to make is that I don’t think you can claim any metaphysical entity as the Anti-Christ (or even just as Anti-Christic) well.. until after Christ showed up. Now that’s not to get frisky with John 1 but—and I think Illich and Ellul’s positions are strong on this—it’s the advent of the Messiah at his historically contingent moment that sets in motion metaphysical machinery (pun intended?) that then precipitate whatever the hell (pun intended) Anti-Christ is.
The Messiah is new and (following Illich) his very effect is to open new possibilities for The Machine. Possibilities only open for the Principalities and Powers to start wielding on AD civilisations as it were. Something about is has been new, something about it’s western form is unique. And that has to A. be accounted for and B. change the centre of gravity of this story I think.
Your friend R.S. Thomas talks about how “Over us the planes build / The shifting rafters / Of that new world / We have sworn by”, it would be satellites now I guess, but I must admit I find the vision John gives above of perhaps our bright overhead tracks being somehow, impossibly, redeemed into the rafter of a far more glorious cathedral quite beautiful.
And as Ellul kept saying, the biblical God—the God of the only near-east religion with an urban paradise—seems to make a very definitive point of taking our idolatrous Babylons and deciding he can redeem even them into into an Eternal City.
Absolutely. Responding to Christs way of things locally . Thanks Paul for putting words to whats going on around us. I'm already thinking how I can stop worshipping the machine ! Appreciate your essays and (learning new words !) 😀
It reminds me of a story I heard a long time ago from a magician about summoning demons to do your work. He said they are very effective but when they deliver your result it comes with a problem. Another demon has to be summoned to deal with it. The demon delivers but another problem ensues which requires another summoning and so on. The question in the end is who is summoning whom?
Hi Paul, I certainly would agree with all of your listed 'characteristics' of the 'machine'. I would venture another, and I would describe it as the movement towards a truly global labour market, requiring the deconstruction of barriers to movements of labour. This essentially economic imperative, is assisted by a cultural/ethical 'superstructure' of an antagonism to the nation state, national borders,national identity, and even in many cases the national tongue if it is seen as a barrier to 'progress'. The latter process is exemplified here in Ireland, with the withering away of Irish as a spoken language over the last 200 years. This characteristic of a truly global labour market, of course is connected intrinsically, over time, to the erosion of real wages, the 'gig economy', and further enhances the power of the increasingly 'supra-national' corporations and global 'trading blocs'.
I feel you may be in danger of creating a machine of your own with this story, which seems very Marxian at root, and apt to give rise to fear and resentment and anger in your readers. There's a simpler account. Human beings desire happiness, the satisfaction of their needs and the removal of various forms of uneasiness, including that of excessive labour. Pursuing this desire, institutions (states, markets, technology, companies, etc) arise, which are the product of human action if not human design. Their virtues and flaws are reflections of the human flaws that went into the making of them, with their roots in those desires. All we have to do if we dislike the "machine" that has arisen as a result of our desires and actions is to desire and act differently. It's as simple and as impossibly difficult as that! (Am loving your series of essays by the way and look forward to future installments.)
Well, in some ways that's not so far from the story I am telling here. But it doesn't take seriously the question of power. Marx was right about that - and though I am no Marxist, and never have been, what that strand of the left has provided over the last century or so is a clear eyed understanding of how power structures are built and maintained, which those on the 'right', very generally, tend to overlook or gloss.
For example, you say:
'Human beings desire happiness, the satisfaction of their needs and the removal of various forms of uneasiness, including that of excessive labour. Pursuing this desire, institutions (states, markets, technology, companies, etc) arise ...'
I'll be exploring this a bit more next time, but this isn't an accurate picture of why Machine societies arise. Mumford's example of Egypt is a good one. The 'megamachine' of ancient Egypt did not arise because institutions came about to make the people happy and content. It arose because those in power wanted to create vast monuments, epic cities and sophisticated economies which benefited themselves, and in order to do that they instituted mass slavery and a kind of proto-Fordism. The same happened in England in the industrial revolution. These systems did not arise to make the ordinary folk happier. They arose to agglomerate power for elites, and often impoverished the people as a result.
As Mumford pointed out, these power structures are as ancient as human societies, and are indeed a manifestation of our various virtues and flaws. But they're also self-perpetuating, and at this point the Machine has a direction and even a mind of its own, I think. We certainly do have to desire and act differently, as I said at the end of the essay. But that in itself is not going to be enough to prevent the ongoing agglomeration.
Thanks for your reply and I look forward to your future explorations of these issues (in particular what in addition to human action will be required!)
A more recent book on my stack (yet unread) that continues Mumford from what seems to be a more (non-marxist) leftist perspective is Fabian Scheidler's "The End of the Megamachine: A Brief History of a Failing Civilization". I hope to get to it soon.
From what I can tell it is entirely consistent with what is being discussed here. Central is the question of hidden ideologies of power and the destruction caused by the infinite accumulation of capital, which Scheidler puts at the heart of our system.
The very human desire to be free of want and need, not so much as and end in itself but as a precursor to the final liberation of the soul, the path to utopia, the stairway to heaven? There's a lot in that Stuart and it's not just a Marxian delusion.
Christ said, in the unutterably beautiful Sermon on the Mount: I know you have need of these things but seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. The message is clear; this is your priority, the good the true and the beautiful, seek that and the material will follow. The assumption that the material will lead to the divine, absurd as it sounds when you put it like that, is sadly dominant.
The Tower of Babel, monument to a powerful elite or an attempt to build a bridge to heaven. Is there something of that in our struggles (beyond mere survival). Is there something of the Tower of Babel in the "Machine"
Here's a chilling poem by Marx, perhaps the ultimate expression, the final fulfillment of that desire; God completely usurped by man.
Fascinating. I've been thinking a lot about Babel lately. It looks like the story of the Machine told in different language. It really is as old as Mumford said.
If - and I agree that it is - it is the story-making that is foundational, then the essential need is to attend to the stories, and the nature of the stories. That is, stories have *rules* - and we are into the multiply overlapping realms of Jung's archetypes, myth-making, magic, mystery traditions and so on. I know you know all this - which is why I shall keep recommending Neil Gaiman's Sandman sequence (or, to a lesser extent, American Gods). It is a story about the nature of stories (and therefore where gods come from - gods not God), and to a great extent it explores the nature of the rules of storytelling. If it is story that is fundamental - and we cannot go deeper than a story - then the question becomes how to distinguish between the stories - MacIntyre's 'Whose Justice? Which Rationality?' In a way this is the Dark Mountain agenda, but I would raise one caveat. Something that Brueggemann writes about the role of the Prophet (the Prophet is the one who stands outside of the Machine speaking the word of the living God to it) - the Prophet isn't called to speak a new language but rather to reanimate the old language. He writes, "The task of prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness.... To offer symbols that are adequate to the horror and massiveness of the experience which evokes numbness and requires denial. The prophet is to provide a way in which the cover-up and the stonewalling can be ended. This does not mean that symbols are to be invented, for that would be too thin. Rather, it means that the prophet is to reactivate out of our historical past symbols that always have been vehicles for redemptive honesty..." If we are still, despite the superficial denials, living within a fundamentally Christian story within the West - post-Christendom but still haunted by the Holy Ghost - then resistance to the Machine will necessarily employ a revivified Christian language. Not necessarily a church language, of course, but the language of sin and repentance, forgiveness, restoration and redemption, that sort of thing. Sorry, starting to ramble....
I think that’s very well put about the post-Christian nature of the storytelling available to the West. You see this in contemporary fiction, where the Christian Story and the Christian language that goes with it — sin, repentance, redemption — is still alive, if often transmuted or sublimated. But it’s there, because without it Westerners don’t really have much to write about. I see this in Paul’s own fiction, written before his formal conversion. To a great extent Westerners are defined by their continual reworking of the Christian material, even when they think they’re undoing it. The question then is how to turn this unconscious, buried vein of raw material into the architecture of a new or revivified culture.
Two very interesting points. Sam, absolutely I came to realise that 're-animating' old stories - rather than trying to create 'new stories' from our broken, post-modern imaginations - is the work. If we are storymakers, and some stories are truer than others, then the task has to be rediscovering the truth.
Jonathan, this is also true and interesting. Someone talked to me recently about the whole Star Wars saga (the good films and the terrible ones) as incporating the whole Western, ie Christian, arc of fall, sacrifice and redemption, and it's probably true. Even those who rebel against this story end up replicating it.
Maybe Sam is right - revivifying language is a/the starting point. If, for example, 'sin' means 'missing the mark', and 'repentance' means 'starting again', then we're already some way to seeing with fresh eyes.
Just a small remark (soz been too busy to engage much). Certainly, the first Star Wars was not based particularly on the Christian story. Lucas had written a script, he then came across Joseph Campbell and his idea of the hero's journey, met Campbell and rewrote it to match that story - all the elements of Campbell's cycle are there quite explicitly. That story structure can be found in many of the great stories of the world (sometimes by accident, sometimes by design - say people wiser than me!). About the rest of the Star Wars films I have no idea. Most aspects of the Christian story have precursors in the ancient world - virgin births, death and resurrections, three-tiered structure of the world, etc. In Jung's view the stories are archetypal - deeper in humanity that the specific cultural manifestations of specific myths and narratives.
Yes, I'd read that somewhere too. I think when you add in the prequels though (complete with virgin birth, temptation and fall!) it gets a bit more explicit. Accidentally no doubt. Jung may or may not have been right about his archetypes, but there's something interesting about the possibility that Western people can't help telling a Christian story, whether they like it or not (which they mostly don't.)
Exactly, I think CS Lewis was getting onto this same topic at the end of "Myth Became Fact" (I'll quote him because I will never match him):
"God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about “parallels” and “Pagan Christs”: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t"
You know, I'd never thought of Star Wars as very Western or Christian. I thought of it as influenced by some Japanese films, and as rather Taoist. (That's no criticism on my part!) I was raised completely without any sort of religion, and you know the first way I encountered the Christian Story? -- Star Trek, I mean the 1980s films. Specifically the trilogy (amazing how we like triune things in the West, eh?) films II-IV, i.e. from The Wrath of Khan through Voyage Home, telling the story of the death and resurrection of Spock, in the course of which the Earth is saved.
Maybe I need to watch some more but they have never caught my imagination! I suspect Jung is neither right nor wrong about archetypes (as is true of all theories!) but I do think he pushes us into helpful territory in understanding the roots of our stories (religious or otherwise) and the purposes they serve. What gets generally overlooked, in the rush to popularise him, is that he argues that the root of archetypes, myths, and stories is somatic rather than cognitive. For me that is interesting coz it's consistent with modern neuroscience (such as Demasio - The Strange Order of Things) in getting to the root of the human need to make meaning and create cultures.
Thank you as ever for your essays. For a subtle finessing of Mumford's grasp of the mythos of the Machine, Jeremy Naydler's 'In the Shadow the the Machine, the prehistory of the computer and the evolution of consciousness' is invaluable. Naydler opens up a more nuanced understanding of the mythos's prehistory - particularly in relation to ancient Egypt - and addresses the implication arising from what you're working around here of whether in the relationship between the Machine mythos and the sacral ways of being it repeatedly co-opts into the service of its own myth, the former actively seeks to derail the latter into the lines of travel you outline, and what the import of that might mean in terms of our consciousness and the revelation of the Logos.
Noticing an attuning in your thoughts for The Abbey to more ancient wisdom traditions that inform Jeremy Naydler's work (the late Keith Critchlow was one of his colleagues), I felt with today's essay especially as if Naydler's thinking, and 'In The Shadow' in particular, has been waiting for you to find it. I'm just so glad that meeting may now come about.
Thank you for the wonderful essay, as usual. I had a few thoughts on your notion of openness. It is not just that self-definition is a right, but that self-definition as one's life work is a key part of the mythology of the machine. I've thought a lot about how this myth of the self is embedded in the cultural ecosystem of Anglophone women. There are several possible quests for the self - on the one hand, the mantra of "be yourself" and the justification of limitless consumption (provided the brands reflect your values) as well as defensively limiting how much of this self you share with others (abhorrence of personal sacrifice for others unless it is part of your (maternal) identity, whereas forgoing certain niceties for your career, comfort or physical beauty is a form of self-fulfillment). On the other hand, the system - the Machine? - wants us to be constantly searching for our true self. And our true self is not someone who washes dishes or scrubs floors or darns socks. These tasks must be outsourced (to a machine or, let's be honest, a poorer woman) so that we can spend time doing things that help us pursue our desires and our self-improvement (oh right, once we find the self we must improve upon it). We are conditioned to be in constant battle with our natural appearance and natural aging, and our spiritual energies are depleted by decades of collectively ritualized fasting and exercising to control the shape of our bodies followed by feasting as a "you deserve it" remuneration for our privations. The response to stress or suffering is indignation accompanied by self-care (read: the consumption of goods and services that slightly ameliorate the terrifying and exhausting wonder of being embodied). I think the modern (postmodern?) notion of the self - liberated from metaphysics or a cosmic hierarchy or even Mary Harrington's idea of interdependence, and yet somehow ours alone to individually cultivate - paves the way for the other core values you mention. Technologism, commercialism, and materialism promise us a homecoming to our true self, liberated from tediousness, ugliness, the whims of fortune and history.
Hit the nail on the head when you describe the artists and prophets and such who warn of the Machine as being right — and ineffective. My thought moves in a couple of directions from there, perhaps to make a circle in the end.
First, I don’t think Christianity or any other religion opposes the Machine directly. It cannot be opposed directly; it may only be outwitted, outmaneuvered, its own energy turned against it as in some martial arts. “Render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s.”
But that’s not the whole story. “My kingdom is not of this world.” Christianity, like much Eastern religion, proceeds from the premise that this world of human history is, as Tolkien said (citing his own Christian faith as the reason for this view), a “long defeat.” The Book of Nature, as the medievals called it, may be read for the glorification of its Maker, but “the world” i.e. the human world, is basically vicious. If it were not so I don’t think you’d see the monastic impulse arise in East and West alike. Whether speaking of the Kali Yuga or of the Cosmocrat, the Prince of this World, *the great religions do not try to redeem civilization.* There are ways for civilization to be more or less in harmony with “nature and nature’s god,” with Heaven, but civilization as such is not a real object, not something that can be redeemed. In eternity, says Christianity, there is but one kingdom and it is not the making of humankind, though it dwells in humankind and we in it even now, down here on the fallen earth.
So that brings up my second line of thought, which is a question that disturbs me and for which I have no answer: Must critique of the Machine always proceed from some blindness or temporary bracketing of the primordial truth of the Fall? Swap in some other religious system’s way of putting it if you like. But the point is it’s not clear how humankind individually or collectively can fight or actively resist and critique the Machine with the aim of destroying it (and replacing it with what?) if the making of the Machine is part of our very (fallen) nature. You can read this as just another version of the Machine co-opting potential resistance. Or it can be a place to more firmly distinguish between culture and civilization, and perhaps between one kind of civilization and another, or between one particular civilization and another. I think it matters that Jesus, who spoke those words neither for nor against massive civilization but as it were sidestepping it, lived in the Roman Empire at its height. But then, Socrates lived in a city state — albeit an imperializing one — and he met a similar end.
For me, a parable of sorts is to be found in the life of Harlan Hubbard. He was something of a primitivist, anyway a practical, self-reliant man who lived on, or on the banks of, the Ohio River during most of the 20th century, in a home or houseboat of his own construction and without electricity. A Thoreau-type, and friend of Wendell Berry. Or one could think of him as a kind of modern monastic (he had no children, by the way, and it is amazing how all this gets more complicated when you bring children into the equation). I am a great admirer of Hubbard’s life and of his painting and writing. But those two art forms are of course products of at the very least a culture, if not the civilization in which Hubbard lived. He also played baroque music on the cello, and his wife played with him on the violin—Bach, chiefly, who is also my favorite composer. But there it is again, the old rub: Can you have Bach without the massive civilization he was a part of? I am not alone in finding solace and transcendence in playing and listening to Bach’s music. Would I be willing to give it up for a better civilization? I honestly do not have an answer. Or not a constant answer. When I think about it in the abstract I might say yes. When I’m in the music, the answer is a definite No. But I fear the question may be flawed, as all past counterfactuals are.
I look forward to the future installments of this ambitious essay. I think there are distinctions to be made, subtle lines to be drawn — always provisionally, and not for the purpose, usually, of picking out bad guys, but in order to better see how fair is blent with foul, always. I’m particularly keen to see if you will find any viability in the Orthodox Christian vision of the human task as the “spiritualization of matter.” At some point, I think, you must see your way clear to justifying this very medium in which we are communicating, and the other media of the arts. I say “must” because it’s a dilemma I myself have faced urgently, and I sense it haunts you too. You’re a writer after all! That’s not nothing. Especially it’s not nothing if one gets around conceiving the writer’s (or intellectual’s or other artist’s) task as beating the Machine at its own game. Jesus and Buddha and Socrates wrote nothing, but even they weren’t trying to bring down the Machine. So what are we trying to do? It’s a serious question.
This is all very interesting, and gets to the heart of the matter, and the questions I have been wrestling with for years.
Firstly, to come to your last point: I don't know if you've come across my book 'Savage Gods', which came out a couple of years ago, but it is a book-length question on precisely the question of whether writing itself is an intrinsic part of the Machine, or of civilisation, or whatever we want to call it. The conclusion being that, yes, it is. The Dark Mountain call for 'uncivilised writing' also looks like a tautology then. I stopped writing for 18 months after that, and only started again here because I had too many questions I still wanted to explore.
What I am trying to do here is sort out the thicket in my own mind, firstly, and also to offer to others some thoughts that might help them do the same. But I suspect I will end up where you suggest this is headed. I think the Machine is inevitable, because it is in us; and if the world is fallen, or in the Kali Yuga, or in Maya, as the Indian traditions would have it then there is no way to conquer or replace it. As I suggested here, Sauron will always rise again. I think that is precisely why Christ neither resisted nor justified empire. You're also right that religion is no solution as such, and can often contribute to the problem.
So I can't justify this medium, and I don't think I am going to offer any kind of 'solution' to the problem of the Machine; all such proposals lead to tyranny. They're a trap too. I have a feeling that the monastic impulse is the key to freedom, but the freedom is not of this world, and those of us with families, as you say, can't follow that path. Hence, I suppose, religious communities of various kinds. I think all we can do is live in the cracks.
Oh, I read Savage Gods alright. It was intense — I can only imagine how it must have been to write it! And the hiatus it ushered in for you, that’s part of a small but venerable tradition. Kierkegaard and Rimbaud come to mind. Also Melville and Hardy giving up novels. I think a lot of modern artists/writers/intellectuals run into these aporia, these critical silences, after which we either have to switch gears (literary forms) or do something completely different with our lives. As you know, it’s very close and potentially bound up with religious conversion, in Christian terms “metanoia” — the total re-vision of the world. It’s not even just a modern phenomenon. I think of Aquinas and his sudden feeling: “All my work seems to me but straw.” No doubt it is. And yet Jesus also appears to him saying, “You have written well of me.” But after that he wrote no more, or nothing but hymns.
I also think of Wendell Berry again. He writes somewhere that his essays come from fear and anger, his fiction from remembering a lost world, and his poetry from joy. Or something to that effect. We do have these very different modes at our disposal. So different that it’s maybe not fair to lump them all together as “writing.” But the frustration with writing as a whole, no matter how various its possibilities — I get that too. Even this frustration, though, may not only be a sign of emptiness or futility. There is a feeling one gets that the ultimate reality is wordfull silence or wordless music, and the very limits of art can point to this truth.
For me, the great quest has been to find, in the face of the gutless, soulless, disembodied existence offered to me by the dominant culture into which I was born, a faith that is life-affirming. And I know it is an impossible quest (the best kind). But not an unworthy one. In Christianity I only partly find that ultimate affirmation. It will always be a both/and faith, its understanding of reality being analogical. That is, a Christian tries to speak God, be it through his whole life, or through her chosen art, or through a calling. And we cannot perfectly succeed. Everything — even the Eucharist — is at best an analogy, a similarity to the divine that is at the same time an ever-greater dissimilarity. That’s the Christian metaphysics of language and the “analogia entis” in a nutshell, on my reading of it anyway. Sounds airy and abstract when I write it out like that. But it is something that can actually be lived out, and part of that living it out is indeed the frustration of never quite getting it right, in words or in any other way. It is actually one of the most nefarious deceptions of the Machine or Prince of this World that things could ever be all right. Just one more glass, one more product, one more surgery, and the world will be as it should be...
I wonder if you know David Jones’ work? Poet, artist, essayist. His distinction between art (and with it liturgy) and what he calls “the utile” has a lot to do with your (our) wrangling with the validity and role of the arts and other cultural expression in a fallen human world. Jones was a Catholic, and as such able to draw on the Christian both/and, the vision of a cosmos (and the human place and work in it) as both sacramental and fallen — in fact, sacramental because fallen. Anyway, David Jones is a great resource because his essays, though a bit odd, are brief and clear and not too numerous. His poetry is brilliant. He’s mostly been neglected, but I believe a lot of his work is recently back in print.
But, talk about excess of words! — I’ll shut up now.
I hadn't seen that quote from Berry before. Very apt. Yes, there are many different kinds of writing of course - the place poetry comes from is a world away from the place an essay comes from (I probably share his impulse for essay writing!) I don't know David Jones, but will explore. Many thanks.
JM Greer has written eloquently and revealingly about these topics in his (erstwhile) The Archdruid Report and current blog, Ecosophia—as well as many books. He made, I thought, a useful distinction between tools that expand human capabilities, vs. prostheses that replace them. He explained that all tools create externalities, positive and negative, and our cultural conversations determine our awareness and the values we apply to such spillovers.
Thinking about all the “isms” and theories we apply to our political and economic life, I realized some years ago that the critical distinction was not public vs private, but rather concentrated vs distributed—in other words, power. One might think of the machine in similar terms: concentrated but brittle mechanical power as the opposite of the distributed and resilient biological strength of nature. Yin vs Yang, sun vs. moon, as so beautifully expressed in the I-Ching.
Thanks Karen. Yes, Greer has been an influence on me for years. And that is a useful distinction. And I think your distinction is spot on too. That comes back to the old critique of scale, I suppose, which is a critique of power in the end. It's all about our desire to conquer nature - which will always fail.
If we speak JM Greer's name enough in these boxes, perhaps we can summon him to this page... ! Seriously though, he's been a large influence on me as well and is one of the better reads I've come across on the net in the last decade. Glad to see him mentioned.
As to your point Karen, I feel the internet and most digital communication itself is a great example - it can be a fine extension of our communicative abilities, but is less good and occasionally detrimental when used as a 'prosthetic replacement' for real, true, in person interaction.
Breaking bread across a table > infinite Zoom chats.
Thank you Paul. Brilliant as always. I am wondering here about Erik Davis's idea of 'techgnosis' - a portmanteau combining the gnostic emphasis on transcending the flesh with the newfangled technological apparatus' that make it possible to do so. For Davis, it is the capacity to imagine ourselves and transcend physical limits that constitutes the divine: we each become angels of our own making connecting up with others in virtual space and time, a kind of informational sacred. You are suggesting techne is anti-material and thus anti-human (and I tend to agree), but there are other readings that cast the technological in a rosier light. I notice Douglas Rushkoff, who used to be a proponent of the technosis idea -- or at least of the internet as a decentralised, utopian space -- has now renounced this for 'team human'. Perhaps in its early stages, various technologies from lawnmowers to washing machines offer transcendence from drudgery (the natural limits none of us enjoy), only to destroy the very freedom they opened up. The same has been written on the arrival of ostensibly time saving domestic technologies. In the end, they created, to quote the title of Ruth Cowan's book, 'More Work for Mother'. (Subtitle: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave).
'Techgnosis' is a great phrase! That's all very interesting. I suspect that with tech there is a tipping point, as there is with wealth. if you live in great poverty, more wealth is much desired and needed. Once you become comfortable, more wealth, and its pursuit, becomes a trap, then actively unhealthy. I think it's the same with tech. To a poor washerwoman, a washing machine is a back-saving Godsend. But Alexa?
Paul, In light of your essay, I am curious about your thoughts on Jacques Ellul and his seemingly parallel take on world-consuming "technique" and how he blended a Marxist critique with a Christian prescription. When I read essays like yours, they impact me in a visceral way of truth being felt in my body and one part of me wonders how we can extract ourselves from this machine. I think for Ellul this is impossible and the Christian challenge is to live as "salt" or "light" during this epoch.
Hello Paul, this is very interesting. So when Mumford talks about how the machine has been turned into a god or has been sacralised, he means as an (false) idol? Since the Machine is anti-God, anti-Good, anti-Beauty, etc.
Also I wanted to ask for some recommendations, you mention there are many novels on the 'abolition of man' theme, I've read Alexandria (really liked it) and other usual suspects like That Hideous Strength, 1984, Brave New World, I guess Lord of the Rings counts as well, what are some other interesting ones?
You could add to your list the animating spirit and organizing life force, Qi, mana of the machine - an interest based, debt based money system tied to international banking that at all costs must be sustained or the machine dies. Like cancer the money supply must continually grow. Like spirit for the most part money is now an ethereal, non-substantial force flowing invisibly like my monthly payment to the Abbey of Misrule which flies from California to Ireland. Failed resistance of the medieval church to usury was key to the current rise of the machine. St. Francis who lived at the beginning of expansion of the money economy and the start of modern banking in Italy. He refused to receive money donations, only material donations. “The love of money is the root of all evil” Here are discussions of this topic and a possible alternative to an usury based money system - https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/money-and-the-turning-of-the-age/https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/money-a-new-beginning-part-1/https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/money-a-new-beginning-part-2/
The alternative is to have money serve its convenient function as a medium of exchange but not be so much a storage or source of wealth by eliminating interest (usury). Money is then less lovable.
Yes, definitely. I'd call it the need for every invested dollar to return more, which the ancients called usury: when instead of a means of exchange, the money becomes the end in itself - "using money to make money". It's so foundational we don't see that actual prosperity comes our work, and not the money. And as someone who used to serve as a business exec, I can say that the *absolute imperative* to return X% growth to the shareholders causes all sorts of stupid, wasteful, (and sometimes evil) decisions that are even known to be so at the time, but at which the CEO shrugs, for he knows he is a slave to that number too. And so he wields the whip on his VP's, and then on down the line. But yet we all *need* X% growth in our savings/pensions, and we wield the whip with just as much indifference as the worst CEO.
Really, usury is probably just the financial instantiation of Progress. It also takes shape as Financialization, a special instance of the materialism that abounds in management, namely anything that can't be quantified is not real. But I think worth calling it out, so that we better understand what Progress and Growth and Materialism mean concretely in the economic sphere.
For what it's worth, I think that also points dimly toward a way out - the Machine truly can't see what it cannot quantify. It doesn't see true value, and so it's outputs degrade while the numbers go up. But if we can offer true, holistic value, and find each other, we can resist. Further, our relationships (family, friends, community), our stories, our prayers not only can't be seen by the Machine, but are assumed not to exist. Of course this means it tramples them, but it also means we can hide from it and be free.
Jeff and Tom, thanks for bringing this point, because culturally we can't ask ourselves: What is more Christ-like than voluntary poverty? Is there any other way out of this than voluntarily giving up our wealth, to starve the Machine of its Marketing Budget, Annual Yield, GDP-Growth? The reason we can't give it up is, as Jeff alluded to above, the reason this site exists: because Paul, like all of us, needs to be comfortable, and substack money is a convenient way for it. Like all of us, he's unlikely to make it through retirement spinning stories and ideas for his neighbors. Thus our work is quantified for the Machine. Only if our stories, prayers, offerings are local, direct, and relationship-based (invisible to the Machine) can they be entrusted to the community. I think there are ways to bridge our lack of trust to "consider the lilies" but in the meantime we must count ourselves as "those who trust in riches."
Re: the intuitive being denigrated in this culture, notice how when rational thought leads to an erroneous conclusion, that is forgivable and is in fact "just how science works". If an intuitive thought leads to an erroneous conclusion that is an example of laughable naiveté.
Well, the Great Reset is of course proposed by the WEF, who are the sugar daddies of the Machine's advance. Klaus Schwab is like the Wizard of Oz, only more charmless.
If nothing else, the robot lawnmowers can help us to remember that "all flesh is as grass" ... a statement that really makes sense in its context in Isaiah 40, where God withers the empires, exposes the futility of technologically driven religions, gives power to the faint, and tends his flock like a shepherd. Thanks for another great essay.
Breath-taking, poetic, crystal clarity. Thank you.
Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? Immensely relevant. Here is a flavour that this article reminded me of: "On Labor Day and Memorial Day weekends we travel for miles on these roads without seeing another vehicle, then cross a federal highway and look at cars strung bumper to bumper to the horizon. Scowling faces inside. Kids crying in the back seat. I keep wishing there were some way to tell them something but they scowl and appear to be in a hurry, and there isn’t..."
Many years ago! Prescient ...
Chautauqua!
Superb post. I suppose the big arising question would be: is writing (already a form of artificial and collective intelligence) and even language and all tool use in fact also ‘the machine’? But these things define our very humanity, from the outset a ‘supplementation’ of nature. Was Mumford not really arguing for a de-mythicised machine, a machine subordinated to better myths, better gods, more truly human goals? Therefore for a kind of embedded machine rather in the way that Karl Polanyi wanted an embedded market? A subordination of technology and its selective use, not its abandonment as that would mean abandoning the human as such? That might differentiate him from Agamben’s apparent apocalyptic refusal of the cultural as such. John Milbank
Many thanks John, and it is very good to have you here.
I wrote a book a couple of years ago called 'Savage Gods', which was an exploration of precisely that question: is writing a part of the machine? Is it more of a trap than a liberation? You are right of course that writing is a technology, and that our use of technologies defines us. However, Mumford claims at the beginning of his book that we are not 'tool using animals' so much as 'storytelling animals.' He is adamant that it is not our ability to create 'technics' which makes us unique so much as our ability to create myths to embed them in.
But can the machine be embedded? I doubt it, myself. It has its own telos, I think, and we no longer really control it. Haven't we spent years trying to embed the Machine within certain stories, from communism to socialism to liberalism, only to see it break free of them? I think that the more frightening possibility (and Kevin Kelly wrote about this approvingly in his book 'What Technology Wants') is that the Machine is already controlling and remaking us. Perhaps it has always done this.
This does imply that the Machine can't be subordinated. But maybe we can distinguish between a tool and a technology, and between a technology and the Machine itself. I hope we can talk more of this as these essays go on.
Thanks very much Paul. Will look at that book. Agree with final sentence: maybe tool and technology need not be part of machine. And that means yes seeing word and language as more primary than tool though I think tool was also there from the outset. Bernard Stiegler interesting on this as you likely know, building on Leroy-Gourhan, who had a rather teleological view of evolution influenced by Teilhard. Both suggest rather as you do that technology from the outset has made us as much as the reverse. That implies humans can’t really control technology: it truly is a diabolical god. But is there a religious alternative that I would call ‘the theurgic’? What I mean is that if we allow that words and artefacts are making us as much as we make them because really and truly this is divine mediation (thus statues and books have been taken as sacred) then it is precisely ritual that tends to contain the machine. Perhaps Chinese geomancy in the past was an example of that, or the way the Neolithic sculpting of the landscape clearly had a ritual character? Of course to the degree people worshipped terrible gods of power this only promoted the machine as with the pyramids, but the more it is allowed that the divine is good, loving and peaceful then the more we can be open to tempering ritual influences through our very exercises of poesis and techne? In Christian terms that would mean that all our making must be subservient to the mass as with medieval cathedrals. Somehow we have to turn our whole culture (or a new one) now more radically into a cathedral?
The Eucharist heals the world.... (and the feast of Corpus Christi was the intrusion of the Machine - manufacturing a product that could be abstracted from the meal-context - into the human-shaping ritual). Thank you for the reference to Agamben by the way, I hadn't come across him before but he seems extremely interesting.
Broadly I agree. De Lubac showed that Eucharistic transformation got disconnected from the making of the church as the body of Christ in the layer Middle Ages. In that sense it became an extrinsic machine of miracle controlled by the clergy. But am not so sure that Corpus Christi was *necessarily* implicated in that. It more follows in a stronger sense as expressed by Aquinas of the ‘material’ reality of treansubstantiation. One could see the CC feast as the attempt to extend the reading of everything eucharistically: to transubstantiate the entire world as it were.
Mumford points out at one point in his book that modern machine society valorises the breaking of at least seven of the ten commandments. I often idly wonder whether what I am calling the Machine might fit the description 'Anti-Christ' quite well. But that's for another time!
Jonathan Geltner has a fascinating comment below which is worth reading. In Christian terms, it seems important that Jesus neither justified nor rebelled against the Machine of his time, the Roman empire, but 'sidestepped' it. In that sense, it is probably true that we need a culture the shape of a cathedral; but it is probably true also that this culture can't encompass 'the world'. That is to say we can't oppose the Machine and seek its replacement at scale. We probably have to start very small with rebuilding a sacred culture from the ground up - as the early church did, in fact.
Ultimately, Jesus failed to even sidestep the machine and was willing to be killed by it. Same with Socrates in his own way. I think about the saying, "My Kingdom is not of this world", to which Jesus adds, if it was of this world, "my servants would fight" to get him released. (John 18:36). This is key.
I can imagine in saying "this world" Jesus making a sweep of his hand and referring to narrowly the Praetorium and more broadly to the power of Rome (or even more broadly to "Rome" perhaps). In contrast to the world kingdom, in the kingdom of heaven, one does not fight but is willing to die at the hands of those who do fight for supremacy. Resist not evil.
If this is correct, I find myself balking at the very notion. I am greatly outmatched against the machine and the powers it wields. I, for one, have no place to escape to. No place to hide from it. I certainly don't want to die as a lamb led to the slaughter. But isn't that what we are asked to be ready to do? Even willing to do?!
To pivot back to Socrates, if philosophy is learning how to die, how much more so is the path of Religion, particularly Christianity? Yes, to die to the ego, to self, to ambition, etc., but certainly not only that? At least any Christianity that is a handmaid to the Lord rather than the handmaid to the machine.
Sometimes, perhaps uncharitably, I see a lot of the Benedict Option-style handwringing about the admittedly ominous changes in the culture, to be a desire for comfort and security and happiness which we were never promised. To the contrary!
So maybe it isn't about defeating or even sidestepping the machine but learning to die and to go about our work, worrying not for tomorrow.
I wish I could actually do that.
I think it is quite wrong, at least from a Christian *theological* viewpoint, to speak of Jesus as failing in any regard. I meant his teaching sidesteps the Machine: he directs his disciples neither to flee it nor to fight it — nor to serve it.
As to what God does with the Machine, up to and including the sacrifice of his only begotten Son, the entire Christian point, I take if, is that grace or providence turns apparent evil to good—without rendering it any less apparently evil. Ignominious death on the cross (state execution) becomes the “reign from a tree.” These are ultimate mysteries, not to be parsed in reductive sociopolitical terms. And you are absolutely right that comfort, whether physical or cultural (for lack of a better term), is the last thing the Christian is to expect or desire. Whoever would save his life will lose it. Take up your cross... This is why I think asceticism is the key, or one of the keys, to a way forward from the “end of history.”
Very well said. Thank you for the clarification. You are right, "Failed" was a bad word choice on my part. Better said, perhaps, that Jesus freely chose to face the worst the machine could dole out.
Bumping an old thread is to break internet taboo, and so to emulate The Machine (yikes) but just some stuff off the back of your passing ‘Anti-Christ’ coda.
When we get down to the civilisational/metaphysical status of Machinehood etc. in these comment threads, I can’t help but feel we’re finally getting at the real questions.
Illich thought we needed something like ‘a new theology of the Anti-Christ’ and then promptly leaked it—almost despite himself it seems—in Rivers North of the Sea. Stemming from it, the point I want to make is that I don’t think you can claim any metaphysical entity as the Anti-Christ (or even just as Anti-Christic) well.. until after Christ showed up. Now that’s not to get frisky with John 1 but—and I think Illich and Ellul’s positions are strong on this—it’s the advent of the Messiah at his historically contingent moment that sets in motion metaphysical machinery (pun intended?) that then precipitate whatever the hell (pun intended) Anti-Christ is.
The Messiah is new and (following Illich) his very effect is to open new possibilities for The Machine. Possibilities only open for the Principalities and Powers to start wielding on AD civilisations as it were. Something about is has been new, something about it’s western form is unique. And that has to A. be accounted for and B. change the centre of gravity of this story I think.
Your friend R.S. Thomas talks about how “Over us the planes build / The shifting rafters / Of that new world / We have sworn by”, it would be satellites now I guess, but I must admit I find the vision John gives above of perhaps our bright overhead tracks being somehow, impossibly, redeemed into the rafter of a far more glorious cathedral quite beautiful.
And as Ellul kept saying, the biblical God—the God of the only near-east religion with an urban paradise—seems to make a very definitive point of taking our idolatrous Babylons and deciding he can redeem even them into into an Eternal City.
Absolutely. Responding to Christs way of things locally . Thanks Paul for putting words to whats going on around us. I'm already thinking how I can stop worshipping the machine ! Appreciate your essays and (learning new words !) 😀
It reminds me of a story I heard a long time ago from a magician about summoning demons to do your work. He said they are very effective but when they deliver your result it comes with a problem. Another demon has to be summoned to deal with it. The demon delivers but another problem ensues which requires another summoning and so on. The question in the end is who is summoning whom?
Hi Paul, I certainly would agree with all of your listed 'characteristics' of the 'machine'. I would venture another, and I would describe it as the movement towards a truly global labour market, requiring the deconstruction of barriers to movements of labour. This essentially economic imperative, is assisted by a cultural/ethical 'superstructure' of an antagonism to the nation state, national borders,national identity, and even in many cases the national tongue if it is seen as a barrier to 'progress'. The latter process is exemplified here in Ireland, with the withering away of Irish as a spoken language over the last 200 years. This characteristic of a truly global labour market, of course is connected intrinsically, over time, to the erosion of real wages, the 'gig economy', and further enhances the power of the increasingly 'supra-national' corporations and global 'trading blocs'.
John Corcoran
Kerry
Indeed - humans are reduced to units of production and consumption.
...and then eventually seen as redundant and phased out.
I feel you may be in danger of creating a machine of your own with this story, which seems very Marxian at root, and apt to give rise to fear and resentment and anger in your readers. There's a simpler account. Human beings desire happiness, the satisfaction of their needs and the removal of various forms of uneasiness, including that of excessive labour. Pursuing this desire, institutions (states, markets, technology, companies, etc) arise, which are the product of human action if not human design. Their virtues and flaws are reflections of the human flaws that went into the making of them, with their roots in those desires. All we have to do if we dislike the "machine" that has arisen as a result of our desires and actions is to desire and act differently. It's as simple and as impossibly difficult as that! (Am loving your series of essays by the way and look forward to future installments.)
Well, in some ways that's not so far from the story I am telling here. But it doesn't take seriously the question of power. Marx was right about that - and though I am no Marxist, and never have been, what that strand of the left has provided over the last century or so is a clear eyed understanding of how power structures are built and maintained, which those on the 'right', very generally, tend to overlook or gloss.
For example, you say:
'Human beings desire happiness, the satisfaction of their needs and the removal of various forms of uneasiness, including that of excessive labour. Pursuing this desire, institutions (states, markets, technology, companies, etc) arise ...'
I'll be exploring this a bit more next time, but this isn't an accurate picture of why Machine societies arise. Mumford's example of Egypt is a good one. The 'megamachine' of ancient Egypt did not arise because institutions came about to make the people happy and content. It arose because those in power wanted to create vast monuments, epic cities and sophisticated economies which benefited themselves, and in order to do that they instituted mass slavery and a kind of proto-Fordism. The same happened in England in the industrial revolution. These systems did not arise to make the ordinary folk happier. They arose to agglomerate power for elites, and often impoverished the people as a result.
As Mumford pointed out, these power structures are as ancient as human societies, and are indeed a manifestation of our various virtues and flaws. But they're also self-perpetuating, and at this point the Machine has a direction and even a mind of its own, I think. We certainly do have to desire and act differently, as I said at the end of the essay. But that in itself is not going to be enough to prevent the ongoing agglomeration.
Thanks for your reply and I look forward to your future explorations of these issues (in particular what in addition to human action will be required!)
A more recent book on my stack (yet unread) that continues Mumford from what seems to be a more (non-marxist) leftist perspective is Fabian Scheidler's "The End of the Megamachine: A Brief History of a Failing Civilization". I hope to get to it soon.
From what I can tell it is entirely consistent with what is being discussed here. Central is the question of hidden ideologies of power and the destruction caused by the infinite accumulation of capital, which Scheidler puts at the heart of our system.
The very human desire to be free of want and need, not so much as and end in itself but as a precursor to the final liberation of the soul, the path to utopia, the stairway to heaven? There's a lot in that Stuart and it's not just a Marxian delusion.
Christ said, in the unutterably beautiful Sermon on the Mount: I know you have need of these things but seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. The message is clear; this is your priority, the good the true and the beautiful, seek that and the material will follow. The assumption that the material will lead to the divine, absurd as it sounds when you put it like that, is sadly dominant.
The Tower of Babel, monument to a powerful elite or an attempt to build a bridge to heaven. Is there something of that in our struggles (beyond mere survival). Is there something of the Tower of Babel in the "Machine"
Here's a chilling poem by Marx, perhaps the ultimate expression, the final fulfillment of that desire; God completely usurped by man.
https://youtu.be/fvmn1wLglak?t=1102
Link starts with the poem's preamble but the entire clip (I'm a Christian and a Marxist) is well worth watching.
Cheers,
David.
Fascinating. I've been thinking a lot about Babel lately. It looks like the story of the Machine told in different language. It really is as old as Mumford said.
If - and I agree that it is - it is the story-making that is foundational, then the essential need is to attend to the stories, and the nature of the stories. That is, stories have *rules* - and we are into the multiply overlapping realms of Jung's archetypes, myth-making, magic, mystery traditions and so on. I know you know all this - which is why I shall keep recommending Neil Gaiman's Sandman sequence (or, to a lesser extent, American Gods). It is a story about the nature of stories (and therefore where gods come from - gods not God), and to a great extent it explores the nature of the rules of storytelling. If it is story that is fundamental - and we cannot go deeper than a story - then the question becomes how to distinguish between the stories - MacIntyre's 'Whose Justice? Which Rationality?' In a way this is the Dark Mountain agenda, but I would raise one caveat. Something that Brueggemann writes about the role of the Prophet (the Prophet is the one who stands outside of the Machine speaking the word of the living God to it) - the Prophet isn't called to speak a new language but rather to reanimate the old language. He writes, "The task of prophetic imagination is to cut through the numbness.... To offer symbols that are adequate to the horror and massiveness of the experience which evokes numbness and requires denial. The prophet is to provide a way in which the cover-up and the stonewalling can be ended. This does not mean that symbols are to be invented, for that would be too thin. Rather, it means that the prophet is to reactivate out of our historical past symbols that always have been vehicles for redemptive honesty..." If we are still, despite the superficial denials, living within a fundamentally Christian story within the West - post-Christendom but still haunted by the Holy Ghost - then resistance to the Machine will necessarily employ a revivified Christian language. Not necessarily a church language, of course, but the language of sin and repentance, forgiveness, restoration and redemption, that sort of thing. Sorry, starting to ramble....
I think that’s very well put about the post-Christian nature of the storytelling available to the West. You see this in contemporary fiction, where the Christian Story and the Christian language that goes with it — sin, repentance, redemption — is still alive, if often transmuted or sublimated. But it’s there, because without it Westerners don’t really have much to write about. I see this in Paul’s own fiction, written before his formal conversion. To a great extent Westerners are defined by their continual reworking of the Christian material, even when they think they’re undoing it. The question then is how to turn this unconscious, buried vein of raw material into the architecture of a new or revivified culture.
Two very interesting points. Sam, absolutely I came to realise that 're-animating' old stories - rather than trying to create 'new stories' from our broken, post-modern imaginations - is the work. If we are storymakers, and some stories are truer than others, then the task has to be rediscovering the truth.
Jonathan, this is also true and interesting. Someone talked to me recently about the whole Star Wars saga (the good films and the terrible ones) as incporating the whole Western, ie Christian, arc of fall, sacrifice and redemption, and it's probably true. Even those who rebel against this story end up replicating it.
Maybe Sam is right - revivifying language is a/the starting point. If, for example, 'sin' means 'missing the mark', and 'repentance' means 'starting again', then we're already some way to seeing with fresh eyes.
Just a small remark (soz been too busy to engage much). Certainly, the first Star Wars was not based particularly on the Christian story. Lucas had written a script, he then came across Joseph Campbell and his idea of the hero's journey, met Campbell and rewrote it to match that story - all the elements of Campbell's cycle are there quite explicitly. That story structure can be found in many of the great stories of the world (sometimes by accident, sometimes by design - say people wiser than me!). About the rest of the Star Wars films I have no idea. Most aspects of the Christian story have precursors in the ancient world - virgin births, death and resurrections, three-tiered structure of the world, etc. In Jung's view the stories are archetypal - deeper in humanity that the specific cultural manifestations of specific myths and narratives.
Yes, I'd read that somewhere too. I think when you add in the prequels though (complete with virgin birth, temptation and fall!) it gets a bit more explicit. Accidentally no doubt. Jung may or may not have been right about his archetypes, but there's something interesting about the possibility that Western people can't help telling a Christian story, whether they like it or not (which they mostly don't.)
Exactly, I think CS Lewis was getting onto this same topic at the end of "Myth Became Fact" (I'll quote him because I will never match him):
"God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about “parallels” and “Pagan Christs”: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t"
You know, I'd never thought of Star Wars as very Western or Christian. I thought of it as influenced by some Japanese films, and as rather Taoist. (That's no criticism on my part!) I was raised completely without any sort of religion, and you know the first way I encountered the Christian Story? -- Star Trek, I mean the 1980s films. Specifically the trilogy (amazing how we like triune things in the West, eh?) films II-IV, i.e. from The Wrath of Khan through Voyage Home, telling the story of the death and resurrection of Spock, in the course of which the Earth is saved.
Maybe I need to watch some more but they have never caught my imagination! I suspect Jung is neither right nor wrong about archetypes (as is true of all theories!) but I do think he pushes us into helpful territory in understanding the roots of our stories (religious or otherwise) and the purposes they serve. What gets generally overlooked, in the rush to popularise him, is that he argues that the root of archetypes, myths, and stories is somatic rather than cognitive. For me that is interesting coz it's consistent with modern neuroscience (such as Demasio - The Strange Order of Things) in getting to the root of the human need to make meaning and create cultures.
Thank you as ever for your essays. For a subtle finessing of Mumford's grasp of the mythos of the Machine, Jeremy Naydler's 'In the Shadow the the Machine, the prehistory of the computer and the evolution of consciousness' is invaluable. Naydler opens up a more nuanced understanding of the mythos's prehistory - particularly in relation to ancient Egypt - and addresses the implication arising from what you're working around here of whether in the relationship between the Machine mythos and the sacral ways of being it repeatedly co-opts into the service of its own myth, the former actively seeks to derail the latter into the lines of travel you outline, and what the import of that might mean in terms of our consciousness and the revelation of the Logos.
Thanks for that tip, Joanna. Sounds really interesting. I will explore.
Noticing an attuning in your thoughts for The Abbey to more ancient wisdom traditions that inform Jeremy Naydler's work (the late Keith Critchlow was one of his colleagues), I felt with today's essay especially as if Naydler's thinking, and 'In The Shadow' in particular, has been waiting for you to find it. I'm just so glad that meeting may now come about.
OK, then in that case I must order a copy!
Thank you for the wonderful essay, as usual. I had a few thoughts on your notion of openness. It is not just that self-definition is a right, but that self-definition as one's life work is a key part of the mythology of the machine. I've thought a lot about how this myth of the self is embedded in the cultural ecosystem of Anglophone women. There are several possible quests for the self - on the one hand, the mantra of "be yourself" and the justification of limitless consumption (provided the brands reflect your values) as well as defensively limiting how much of this self you share with others (abhorrence of personal sacrifice for others unless it is part of your (maternal) identity, whereas forgoing certain niceties for your career, comfort or physical beauty is a form of self-fulfillment). On the other hand, the system - the Machine? - wants us to be constantly searching for our true self. And our true self is not someone who washes dishes or scrubs floors or darns socks. These tasks must be outsourced (to a machine or, let's be honest, a poorer woman) so that we can spend time doing things that help us pursue our desires and our self-improvement (oh right, once we find the self we must improve upon it). We are conditioned to be in constant battle with our natural appearance and natural aging, and our spiritual energies are depleted by decades of collectively ritualized fasting and exercising to control the shape of our bodies followed by feasting as a "you deserve it" remuneration for our privations. The response to stress or suffering is indignation accompanied by self-care (read: the consumption of goods and services that slightly ameliorate the terrifying and exhausting wonder of being embodied). I think the modern (postmodern?) notion of the self - liberated from metaphysics or a cosmic hierarchy or even Mary Harrington's idea of interdependence, and yet somehow ours alone to individually cultivate - paves the way for the other core values you mention. Technologism, commercialism, and materialism promise us a homecoming to our true self, liberated from tediousness, ugliness, the whims of fortune and history.
Thanks for this. What a sharp analysis. I'd love to see more about this.
Hit the nail on the head when you describe the artists and prophets and such who warn of the Machine as being right — and ineffective. My thought moves in a couple of directions from there, perhaps to make a circle in the end.
First, I don’t think Christianity or any other religion opposes the Machine directly. It cannot be opposed directly; it may only be outwitted, outmaneuvered, its own energy turned against it as in some martial arts. “Render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s.”
But that’s not the whole story. “My kingdom is not of this world.” Christianity, like much Eastern religion, proceeds from the premise that this world of human history is, as Tolkien said (citing his own Christian faith as the reason for this view), a “long defeat.” The Book of Nature, as the medievals called it, may be read for the glorification of its Maker, but “the world” i.e. the human world, is basically vicious. If it were not so I don’t think you’d see the monastic impulse arise in East and West alike. Whether speaking of the Kali Yuga or of the Cosmocrat, the Prince of this World, *the great religions do not try to redeem civilization.* There are ways for civilization to be more or less in harmony with “nature and nature’s god,” with Heaven, but civilization as such is not a real object, not something that can be redeemed. In eternity, says Christianity, there is but one kingdom and it is not the making of humankind, though it dwells in humankind and we in it even now, down here on the fallen earth.
So that brings up my second line of thought, which is a question that disturbs me and for which I have no answer: Must critique of the Machine always proceed from some blindness or temporary bracketing of the primordial truth of the Fall? Swap in some other religious system’s way of putting it if you like. But the point is it’s not clear how humankind individually or collectively can fight or actively resist and critique the Machine with the aim of destroying it (and replacing it with what?) if the making of the Machine is part of our very (fallen) nature. You can read this as just another version of the Machine co-opting potential resistance. Or it can be a place to more firmly distinguish between culture and civilization, and perhaps between one kind of civilization and another, or between one particular civilization and another. I think it matters that Jesus, who spoke those words neither for nor against massive civilization but as it were sidestepping it, lived in the Roman Empire at its height. But then, Socrates lived in a city state — albeit an imperializing one — and he met a similar end.
For me, a parable of sorts is to be found in the life of Harlan Hubbard. He was something of a primitivist, anyway a practical, self-reliant man who lived on, or on the banks of, the Ohio River during most of the 20th century, in a home or houseboat of his own construction and without electricity. A Thoreau-type, and friend of Wendell Berry. Or one could think of him as a kind of modern monastic (he had no children, by the way, and it is amazing how all this gets more complicated when you bring children into the equation). I am a great admirer of Hubbard’s life and of his painting and writing. But those two art forms are of course products of at the very least a culture, if not the civilization in which Hubbard lived. He also played baroque music on the cello, and his wife played with him on the violin—Bach, chiefly, who is also my favorite composer. But there it is again, the old rub: Can you have Bach without the massive civilization he was a part of? I am not alone in finding solace and transcendence in playing and listening to Bach’s music. Would I be willing to give it up for a better civilization? I honestly do not have an answer. Or not a constant answer. When I think about it in the abstract I might say yes. When I’m in the music, the answer is a definite No. But I fear the question may be flawed, as all past counterfactuals are.
I look forward to the future installments of this ambitious essay. I think there are distinctions to be made, subtle lines to be drawn — always provisionally, and not for the purpose, usually, of picking out bad guys, but in order to better see how fair is blent with foul, always. I’m particularly keen to see if you will find any viability in the Orthodox Christian vision of the human task as the “spiritualization of matter.” At some point, I think, you must see your way clear to justifying this very medium in which we are communicating, and the other media of the arts. I say “must” because it’s a dilemma I myself have faced urgently, and I sense it haunts you too. You’re a writer after all! That’s not nothing. Especially it’s not nothing if one gets around conceiving the writer’s (or intellectual’s or other artist’s) task as beating the Machine at its own game. Jesus and Buddha and Socrates wrote nothing, but even they weren’t trying to bring down the Machine. So what are we trying to do? It’s a serious question.
This is all very interesting, and gets to the heart of the matter, and the questions I have been wrestling with for years.
Firstly, to come to your last point: I don't know if you've come across my book 'Savage Gods', which came out a couple of years ago, but it is a book-length question on precisely the question of whether writing itself is an intrinsic part of the Machine, or of civilisation, or whatever we want to call it. The conclusion being that, yes, it is. The Dark Mountain call for 'uncivilised writing' also looks like a tautology then. I stopped writing for 18 months after that, and only started again here because I had too many questions I still wanted to explore.
What I am trying to do here is sort out the thicket in my own mind, firstly, and also to offer to others some thoughts that might help them do the same. But I suspect I will end up where you suggest this is headed. I think the Machine is inevitable, because it is in us; and if the world is fallen, or in the Kali Yuga, or in Maya, as the Indian traditions would have it then there is no way to conquer or replace it. As I suggested here, Sauron will always rise again. I think that is precisely why Christ neither resisted nor justified empire. You're also right that religion is no solution as such, and can often contribute to the problem.
So I can't justify this medium, and I don't think I am going to offer any kind of 'solution' to the problem of the Machine; all such proposals lead to tyranny. They're a trap too. I have a feeling that the monastic impulse is the key to freedom, but the freedom is not of this world, and those of us with families, as you say, can't follow that path. Hence, I suppose, religious communities of various kinds. I think all we can do is live in the cracks.
Oh, I read Savage Gods alright. It was intense — I can only imagine how it must have been to write it! And the hiatus it ushered in for you, that’s part of a small but venerable tradition. Kierkegaard and Rimbaud come to mind. Also Melville and Hardy giving up novels. I think a lot of modern artists/writers/intellectuals run into these aporia, these critical silences, after which we either have to switch gears (literary forms) or do something completely different with our lives. As you know, it’s very close and potentially bound up with religious conversion, in Christian terms “metanoia” — the total re-vision of the world. It’s not even just a modern phenomenon. I think of Aquinas and his sudden feeling: “All my work seems to me but straw.” No doubt it is. And yet Jesus also appears to him saying, “You have written well of me.” But after that he wrote no more, or nothing but hymns.
I also think of Wendell Berry again. He writes somewhere that his essays come from fear and anger, his fiction from remembering a lost world, and his poetry from joy. Or something to that effect. We do have these very different modes at our disposal. So different that it’s maybe not fair to lump them all together as “writing.” But the frustration with writing as a whole, no matter how various its possibilities — I get that too. Even this frustration, though, may not only be a sign of emptiness or futility. There is a feeling one gets that the ultimate reality is wordfull silence or wordless music, and the very limits of art can point to this truth.
For me, the great quest has been to find, in the face of the gutless, soulless, disembodied existence offered to me by the dominant culture into which I was born, a faith that is life-affirming. And I know it is an impossible quest (the best kind). But not an unworthy one. In Christianity I only partly find that ultimate affirmation. It will always be a both/and faith, its understanding of reality being analogical. That is, a Christian tries to speak God, be it through his whole life, or through her chosen art, or through a calling. And we cannot perfectly succeed. Everything — even the Eucharist — is at best an analogy, a similarity to the divine that is at the same time an ever-greater dissimilarity. That’s the Christian metaphysics of language and the “analogia entis” in a nutshell, on my reading of it anyway. Sounds airy and abstract when I write it out like that. But it is something that can actually be lived out, and part of that living it out is indeed the frustration of never quite getting it right, in words or in any other way. It is actually one of the most nefarious deceptions of the Machine or Prince of this World that things could ever be all right. Just one more glass, one more product, one more surgery, and the world will be as it should be...
I wonder if you know David Jones’ work? Poet, artist, essayist. His distinction between art (and with it liturgy) and what he calls “the utile” has a lot to do with your (our) wrangling with the validity and role of the arts and other cultural expression in a fallen human world. Jones was a Catholic, and as such able to draw on the Christian both/and, the vision of a cosmos (and the human place and work in it) as both sacramental and fallen — in fact, sacramental because fallen. Anyway, David Jones is a great resource because his essays, though a bit odd, are brief and clear and not too numerous. His poetry is brilliant. He’s mostly been neglected, but I believe a lot of his work is recently back in print.
But, talk about excess of words! — I’ll shut up now.
I hadn't seen that quote from Berry before. Very apt. Yes, there are many different kinds of writing of course - the place poetry comes from is a world away from the place an essay comes from (I probably share his impulse for essay writing!) I don't know David Jones, but will explore. Many thanks.
JM Greer has written eloquently and revealingly about these topics in his (erstwhile) The Archdruid Report and current blog, Ecosophia—as well as many books. He made, I thought, a useful distinction between tools that expand human capabilities, vs. prostheses that replace them. He explained that all tools create externalities, positive and negative, and our cultural conversations determine our awareness and the values we apply to such spillovers.
Thinking about all the “isms” and theories we apply to our political and economic life, I realized some years ago that the critical distinction was not public vs private, but rather concentrated vs distributed—in other words, power. One might think of the machine in similar terms: concentrated but brittle mechanical power as the opposite of the distributed and resilient biological strength of nature. Yin vs Yang, sun vs. moon, as so beautifully expressed in the I-Ching.
Thanks Karen. Yes, Greer has been an influence on me for years. And that is a useful distinction. And I think your distinction is spot on too. That comes back to the old critique of scale, I suppose, which is a critique of power in the end. It's all about our desire to conquer nature - which will always fail.
Schumacher's appropriate scale technology... :)
If we speak JM Greer's name enough in these boxes, perhaps we can summon him to this page... ! Seriously though, he's been a large influence on me as well and is one of the better reads I've come across on the net in the last decade. Glad to see him mentioned.
As to your point Karen, I feel the internet and most digital communication itself is a great example - it can be a fine extension of our communicative abilities, but is less good and occasionally detrimental when used as a 'prosthetic replacement' for real, true, in person interaction.
Breaking bread across a table > infinite Zoom chats.
Thank you Paul. Brilliant as always. I am wondering here about Erik Davis's idea of 'techgnosis' - a portmanteau combining the gnostic emphasis on transcending the flesh with the newfangled technological apparatus' that make it possible to do so. For Davis, it is the capacity to imagine ourselves and transcend physical limits that constitutes the divine: we each become angels of our own making connecting up with others in virtual space and time, a kind of informational sacred. You are suggesting techne is anti-material and thus anti-human (and I tend to agree), but there are other readings that cast the technological in a rosier light. I notice Douglas Rushkoff, who used to be a proponent of the technosis idea -- or at least of the internet as a decentralised, utopian space -- has now renounced this for 'team human'. Perhaps in its early stages, various technologies from lawnmowers to washing machines offer transcendence from drudgery (the natural limits none of us enjoy), only to destroy the very freedom they opened up. The same has been written on the arrival of ostensibly time saving domestic technologies. In the end, they created, to quote the title of Ruth Cowan's book, 'More Work for Mother'. (Subtitle: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave).
Just a few thoughts.
'Techgnosis' is a great phrase! That's all very interesting. I suspect that with tech there is a tipping point, as there is with wealth. if you live in great poverty, more wealth is much desired and needed. Once you become comfortable, more wealth, and its pursuit, becomes a trap, then actively unhealthy. I think it's the same with tech. To a poor washerwoman, a washing machine is a back-saving Godsend. But Alexa?
Paul, In light of your essay, I am curious about your thoughts on Jacques Ellul and his seemingly parallel take on world-consuming "technique" and how he blended a Marxist critique with a Christian prescription. When I read essays like yours, they impact me in a visceral way of truth being felt in my body and one part of me wonders how we can extract ourselves from this machine. I think for Ellul this is impossible and the Christian challenge is to live as "salt" or "light" during this epoch.
I may write about Ellul in future actually. But I want to read him properly first. I have a hunch he is very important. Watch this space.
Hello Paul, this is very interesting. So when Mumford talks about how the machine has been turned into a god or has been sacralised, he means as an (false) idol? Since the Machine is anti-God, anti-Good, anti-Beauty, etc.
Also I wanted to ask for some recommendations, you mention there are many novels on the 'abolition of man' theme, I've read Alexandria (really liked it) and other usual suspects like That Hideous Strength, 1984, Brave New World, I guess Lord of the Rings counts as well, what are some other interesting ones?
You could add to your list the animating spirit and organizing life force, Qi, mana of the machine - an interest based, debt based money system tied to international banking that at all costs must be sustained or the machine dies. Like cancer the money supply must continually grow. Like spirit for the most part money is now an ethereal, non-substantial force flowing invisibly like my monthly payment to the Abbey of Misrule which flies from California to Ireland. Failed resistance of the medieval church to usury was key to the current rise of the machine. St. Francis who lived at the beginning of expansion of the money economy and the start of modern banking in Italy. He refused to receive money donations, only material donations. “The love of money is the root of all evil” Here are discussions of this topic and a possible alternative to an usury based money system - https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/money-and-the-turning-of-the-age/ https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/money-a-new-beginning-part-1/ https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/money-a-new-beginning-part-2/
The alternative is to have money serve its convenient function as a medium of exchange but not be so much a storage or source of wealth by eliminating interest (usury). Money is then less lovable.
Those old medieval people disliked usury for very good reasons! Thanks for the Eisenstein links.
Yes, definitely. I'd call it the need for every invested dollar to return more, which the ancients called usury: when instead of a means of exchange, the money becomes the end in itself - "using money to make money". It's so foundational we don't see that actual prosperity comes our work, and not the money. And as someone who used to serve as a business exec, I can say that the *absolute imperative* to return X% growth to the shareholders causes all sorts of stupid, wasteful, (and sometimes evil) decisions that are even known to be so at the time, but at which the CEO shrugs, for he knows he is a slave to that number too. And so he wields the whip on his VP's, and then on down the line. But yet we all *need* X% growth in our savings/pensions, and we wield the whip with just as much indifference as the worst CEO.
Really, usury is probably just the financial instantiation of Progress. It also takes shape as Financialization, a special instance of the materialism that abounds in management, namely anything that can't be quantified is not real. But I think worth calling it out, so that we better understand what Progress and Growth and Materialism mean concretely in the economic sphere.
For what it's worth, I think that also points dimly toward a way out - the Machine truly can't see what it cannot quantify. It doesn't see true value, and so it's outputs degrade while the numbers go up. But if we can offer true, holistic value, and find each other, we can resist. Further, our relationships (family, friends, community), our stories, our prayers not only can't be seen by the Machine, but are assumed not to exist. Of course this means it tramples them, but it also means we can hide from it and be free.
Very interesting notion in your last para there. I think that's well worth pondering further.
Jeff and Tom, thanks for bringing this point, because culturally we can't ask ourselves: What is more Christ-like than voluntary poverty? Is there any other way out of this than voluntarily giving up our wealth, to starve the Machine of its Marketing Budget, Annual Yield, GDP-Growth? The reason we can't give it up is, as Jeff alluded to above, the reason this site exists: because Paul, like all of us, needs to be comfortable, and substack money is a convenient way for it. Like all of us, he's unlikely to make it through retirement spinning stories and ideas for his neighbors. Thus our work is quantified for the Machine. Only if our stories, prayers, offerings are local, direct, and relationship-based (invisible to the Machine) can they be entrusted to the community. I think there are ways to bridge our lack of trust to "consider the lilies" but in the meantime we must count ourselves as "those who trust in riches."
> the Machine truly can't see what it cannot quantify. It doesn't see true value
This is why Satan doesn't understand that killing Christ is a bad idea, isn't it?