The following originally appeared on The Archdruid Report.
The myth of the machine has implications that go well beyond the usual
terms of discussion in the peak oil scene. One of those implications unfolds
from the way that so many people who are concerned about peak oil fixate
obsessively on the hope that some kind of machine will solve the problem.
There are at least three ways in which this fixation gets in the way of any
meaningful response to the end of the age of cheap abundant energy. The first,
of course, is that peak oil isn't a problem, because by definition a problem at
least potentially has a solution. Peak oil has no solution. That's true in the
narrow sense of the term — no possible turn of events will allow industrial
civilization to extract a limitless supply of crude oil from a finite
planet — and it's becoming increasingly clear that it's just as true in the broad
sense — no other energy source can provide anything close to the torrent of
cheap, highly concentrated energy that petroleum provided to industrial society
during the last century.
Peak oil is thus a predicament rather than a problem, since nothing we or
anyone else can do will make it go away. Instead, we and our descendants down
through the millennia to come will have to live with the reality of a world
much less lavishly stocked with concentrated energy sources than the one our
ancestors inherited a few short centuries ago. The task awaiting us and our
descendants is that of finding creative and humane responses to that implacable
reality. To that challenging and rewarding task, in turn, the current obsession
with fantasies of salvation via machine offers no help at all. Quite the
contrary, by distracting attention from the adjustments that will have to be
made, the obsession makes the work ahead of us more difficult than it has to
be.
The second sense in which the obsession with machines gets in the way of a
useful response to the predicament of peak oil is that it pushes responsibility
for doing something onto someone else. I sincerely doubt that any of my readers
have any influence worth noting over the decisions involved in building giant
wind turbines, say, or developing thorium reactors, or turning some substantial
fraction of Nevada into one giant algal biodiesel farm. This makes it easy to
insist that steps like these are the appropriate response to the coming of peak
oil, since the people doing the insisting don't have to follow through on the
insistence; it's all somebody else's job.
No doubt the sheer convenience involved in this approach has much to do with
its popularity, but there's another factor involved. An enormous amount of
rhetoric about the future these days starts from the assumption that the
lifestyles of the middle classes in today's industrial societies are normal,
and ought to be available indefinitely — at least to those same middle classes.
Now in fact there's nothing normal at all about the pampered and privileged
lives of today's middle classes; from strawberries in midwinter to vacations in
the tropics, those lives are full of the most absurd sort of extravagance, and
only a civilization surfing the tsunami of cheap energy that ours gets from
fossil fuels could convince itself that such habits are anything else. Still,
those who have access to such things are predictably unwilling to let go of
them, and insisting that it's someone else's job to come up with a way to keep
them around is one way to express that unwillingness — at least for the moment.
The downside of depending on someone else to do that or any other job, of
course, is that dependence always has a political cost. Frank Herbert's classic
SF novel Dune has one character
explain this to another with commendable precision: "Once men turned their
thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that
only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." The same dynamic
is present whenever people allow themselves to become dependent on machines.
Power exerted through a machine is defined purely by I-It relationships; the
only way to relate to a machine is to compel and control it, and (not, please
note, "or") to be compelled and controlled by it. That defines the
direct relation of person to machine, but it also tends to define the indirect
relation of person to person when a machine is the medium. The logic here is
straightforward: a machine can only transmit those aspects of relationship that
require no inner life to communicate, since a machine has none. The more
thoroughly an interaction between people is reshaped for machine processing,
therefore, the more completely any potential for I-Thou relationship is
filtered out of the interaction.
It's possible for a relationship between people that passes through a machine
to avoid being flattened out into a relationship of compulsion and control, but
it takes work, and tends to be most successful when the people in question also
have interactions that aren't dependent on machines. The more that human life
and human interactions are defined by machines, the more difficult this tends
to become — and of course it's not incidental that people who want to compel and
control, or to be compelled and controlled, can do that easily enough without
going to the trouble that's involved in sustaining an I-Thou relationship in a
world of machines. Carry this logic out to its natural endpoint and you get the
total erasure of all human values that Jacques Ellul anatomized in The Technological Society, a system in
which every relationship is forced into the Procrustean bed of mechanism
because anything else would be inefficient.
Ellul assumed that this trend was inescapable, but then he was a man of his own
time, and the first faint shockwaves of the end of the age of abundance
apparently slipped past him unnoticed. Other social critics who commented on
the same thing — Lewis Mumford and C.S. Lewis are among those I've mentioned in
earlier posts — assumed, along the same lines, that only a sustained effort to
oppose the rule of mechanism could halt the march of society toward a future of
inhuman efficiency. What very few thinkers of their generation grasped was the
extent to which the myth of the machine misstated the source of the power that
machines had during the twentieth century. What made industrial society so powerful
in their day wasn't any particular strength or virtue in the cult of mechanism
itself, or in the habits of thinking that an obsession with mechanism made
popular for a time; it was simply that during a relatively brief window of
historic time, the amount that could be done by machines powered by fossil
fuels, and following the internal logic of machinery, was vastly greater than
the amount that could be done by humans powered by human energy sources, and
following their own internal logic.
That window of time is coming to an end around us right now, and the third
sense in which an obsession with machines gets in the way of a useful response
to the predicament of peak oil unfolds from that fact. Those people who are
rushing around trying to find a mechanical answer to peak oil are jumping
aboard a bandwagon when the horse pulling it has just fallen over dead. Lacking
the cheap, abundant, highly concentrated energy that only fossil fuels can
provide, complex machines are by and large much less efficient than human beings, and the obsession with machines
is therefore a habit of thought that's well past its pull date.
It's hard to think of anything that flies in the face of contemporary attitudes
more comprehensively than the suggestion that human beings are more efficient
than machines under any circumstances at all. Still, if you consider the whole
system upon which each of the two depends, the superiority of the human is easy
to see. Behind the machine — almost any machine in the modern industrial world — stands
a sprawling infrastructure that depends on constant inputs of energy: not just
energy in general, either, but very large quantities of cheap, concentrated
energy fitting precise specifications. That energy powers the machine, to be
sure, but it also manufactures it, keeps spare parts in stock, and powers and
supplies the huge networks that make it possible for the machine to do what it
does. A laptop computer all by itself is an oddly shaped paperweight; to make
it function at all, you have to add electricity, and thus the entire system
that produces the electricity and keeps it flowing; to make it more than a toy,
you need the internet, and thus a far more complex system, which among other
things uses a vast amount of additional energy; and of course to produce the
laptop, the electrical grid, and the internet in the first place, counting all
the products and services needed by all the economic sectors that contribute to
their manufacture and functioning, you need a fairly large proportion of the
entire industrial economy of the modern world.
Human beings do not suffer from the same limitations. A human being all by
herself is capable of meeting her essential operating needs in a pinch, using
only the very diffuse energy sources and raw materials available in a natural
environment; a few dozen human beings, given suitable knowledge and skills, can
support themselves comfortably over the long term on a tribal-village level,
using the same diffuse energy sources; a few thousand human beings subject to all
these limits can create a civilization. In a world without vast amounts of
cheap energy, human flexibility and creativity consistently beats mindless
mechanical rigidity. That's why, for example, the ancient Greek inventors who
created the steam turbine and crafted highly efficient gearing systems didn't
launch the industrial revolution two thousand years early; the recognition that
fossil fuels existed in enough quantity to power steam engines, drive gear
trains and replace human labor with mechanical force was missing, and without
that, Hero of Alexandria's steam turbine and the Antikythera device's clockwork
mechanism could never be anything more than clever toys.
A society used to turning as much of its work as possible to machines faces a
similar failure of understanding when the fuel for the machines runs short. The
missing piece in the present case, though, is the extraordinary potential for
productive and creative work that exists within human beings. Machines fill so
potent a role in our emotional lives that most people in the modern industrial
world shy away from the thought of doing much of anything without them. Even if
we could count on a limitless supply of cheap energy, this would be an
embarrassing dependency — a shiny high-tech crutch is still a crutch, after all.
A limitless supply of cheap energy, though, is exactly what we can't count on,
and so what would otherwise be merely an embarrassment is shaping up to be a
lethal liability.
Thus one of the greatest challenges ahead of us as the age of abundance ends is
nothing less than the rediscovery of the possibilities of our own humanity. The
work that needs to be done — and in an epoch of decline, there will be plenty of
that — will have to be done with the capacities woven into the human body and mind,
along with those additional capacities that can be developed in both by
training and practice. The effort that nowadays gets poured into teaching
people how to manipulate machines will need to be redirected into teaching them
how to bring out the creative and productive capacities in themselves. That
can't be done effectively, please note, by trying to manipulate them like so
many machines, or by teaching them to manipulate themselves in the same manner;
I-It relationships do very poorly at directing human productive and creative
powers. It will require instead the ability to understand human beings as human
beings rather than inconveniently squishy bipedal machines, and the capacity to
enter into I-Thou relationships, that has always defined good teachers and good
leaders.
Less than a hundred years ago, the sort of awareness I'm suggesting here was a
common response of people across the industrial world to the mechanization of
everyday life, and less than forty years ago a revival of that same approach — the
human potential movement of the Seventies — achieved a not inconsiderable success
before it was stomped by the same backlash that flattened the industrial
world's last real attempt to turn aside from the mess it's made for itself. The
recognition that the potential within the individual human being is the
industrial world's most thoroughly wasted and neglected resource has surfaced
at intervals straight through the history of industrialism, and been hurriedly
swept back under the rug time and again. Go back to the origins of contemporary
industrial society in the scientific revolution, in fact, and you can trace the
same opposition in the tangled conflicts by which the first versions of modern
science seized the cultural conversation of their time from the remnants of
Renaissance humanism and set our civilization on the path to its current
predicament.
There are immense issues involved in a recovery of the human, a refocusing of
attention toward what human beings can do with their own innate possibilities
and potentials for learning and away from the quest to replace as many human
functions as possible by this season's crop of computerized gimmickry. What I hope to get across is the core
idea that the most important resources we have left at this point, the most
promising potentials for a response to the end of the age of cheap abundant
energy, are not machines, or potential sources of fuel, or anything else
outside the individual human being.
Even considering that thought, as I've suggested, flies in the face of deeply
rooted prejudices. Point out, for example that a human mind with appropriate
training can remember impressive amounts of data — there was once an entire
system of mind training, the Art of Memory, designed to make this possible — and
most people will come up with any number of reasons why some kind of remembering
machine is a better idea. In a world with drastically limited supplies of
concentrated energy and far too many urgent uses for those supplies, a system
of training that can take care of the need to remember data without adding to
the demand for electricity, spare parts, or the like is pretty clearly the
better idea, but that recognition can only happen once people step outside the
myth of the machine.
There are any number of other examples of things that human beings can do, or
can learn to do, that will fill essential needs in a deindustrializing or fully
deindustrialized world, when permanent shortages of concentrated energy
suitable for powering machines makes the vast majority of today's technology
useless except as scrap. A significant number of them are still being
practiced, or — like the Art of Memory — can be revived with relative ease from
written sources dating from the Renaissance or, in some cases, more recently
still. A great many more will need to be invented, or reinvented, in the years
ahead. The supposedly serious thinkers of our time are unlikely to contribute
anything to that task; in contemporary industrial civilization, as in every
other human culture, the basic qualification that makes thinkers respectable is
an unthinking acceptance of the basic myths of their era. Nowadays, the myth of
progress is one of those basic myths, and the myth of the machine stands right
beside it.
The myth of progress is coming to pieces around us as I write this. The myth of
the machine will follow it in due time. In the interval before they dissolve
and are replaced by narratives better suited to the needs and possibilities of
the deindustrial age, there is a great deal that can be done to begin the
rediscovery of the human, to preserve those teachings from the past that can
fill critical needs in the future, and to sketch out the first rough drafts of
new disciplines that will apply the creative and productive possibilities of
the individual to the challenges ahead.
Image by redjar, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
