You go through a heavy industrial area of a large city and there it all is, the technology. In front of it are high barbed-wire fences, locked gates, signs saying NO TRESPASSING, and beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick whose purpose is unknown, and whose master you will never see. What it’s for you don’t know, and why it’s there, there’s no one to tell, and so all you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn’t belong there. Who owns and understands this doesn’t want you around. All this technology has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. Its very shape and appearance and mysteriousness say, “Get out.” You know there’s an explanation for all this somewhere and what it’s doing undoubtedly serves mankind in some indirect way but that isn’t what you see. What you see is the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange, incomprehensible shapes. And you think, even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes. So the final feeling is hostile, and I think that’s ultimately what’s involved with this otherwise unexplainable attitude of John and Sylvia. Anything to do with valves and shafts and wrenches is a part of that dehumanized world, and they would rather not think about it. They don’t want to get into it.
John and Sylvia are a couple that our author goes on cross-country motorcycle adventures with. The author here is noodling on their apparent hostility to the mechanics of the machines that carry them around the country, and is obviously trying to make it symptomatic of a larger societal trend -- away from the human and towards the machine as the center of our philosophic life.
That’s well and good. But this is where the frustration begins for me. Because when the author talks about technology, he’s talking about the industrial technology of another time. And although his book was published in 1974, when he waxes against technology like this, I have a hard time not envisioning the technology of turn-of-the-20th-century dystopian epics like Metropolis. I can almost hear the Giorgio Moroder music playing.
And that really leaves me flat. So even though he talks a lot about the isolating effects of technology...
Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices -- TV, jets, freeways and so on -- but I hope it’s been made plain that the real evil isn’t the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It’s the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil. That’s why I went to so much trouble to show how technology could be used to destroy the evil. A person who knows how to fix motorcycles -- with Quality -- is less likely to run short of friends than one who doesn’t. And they aren’t going to see him as some kind of object either. Quality destroys objectivity every time.
...he seems to be speaking about another time -- a time in which humans still had a predisposition to objective dualism between themselves and their technology. In the late 2010s, after social media and smartphones have effectively reprogrammed our brains, I’m not sure humans still see themselves as separate from and hostile to their technology.
What he complains about with regard to Aristotle...
What I find in Aristotle is mainly a quite dull collection of generalizations, many of which seem impossible to justify in the light of modern knowledge, whose organization appears extremely poor, and which seems primitive in the way old Greek pottery in the museums seems primitive.
...is exactly how I feel about him and his ideas. Through long sections of the book, which he unironically frames as his own Chautauqua, the modern reader has to patiently wait for the author to come to conclusions that philosophers much more ancient than him have already reached and moved past.
If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.
About this Einstein had said, “Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest,” and let it go at that. But to Phaedrus that was an incredibly weak answer. The phrase “at any given moment” really shook him. Did Einstein really mean to state that truth was a function of time? To state that would annihilate the most basic presumption of all science!
But there it was, the whole history of science, a clear story of continuously new and changing explanations of old facts. The time spans of permanence seemed completely random, he could see no order in them. Some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for less than a year. Scientific truth was not dogma, good for eternity, but a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything else.
The Phaedrus mentioned above is not the fictional character from Plato’s dialogue. It is instead the alter ego of the author himself. We eventually come to learn that the author was once a professor of philosophy for whom these mental meanderings became so shattering to his sense of identity and permanence that his personality split and his world fell apart. The motorcycle trip that he is on -- and during which he is evidently writing his Chautauqua -- is an attempt to pick up the pieces and repair the breach.
But to me, with no wish to diminish his real suffering, the author’s journey to nihilism and back is tedious and boring. Again and again while reading his text, I found myself scribbling in the margins comments like: “I’m sorry that you started with the false understanding that the world is permanent. But just because the revelation that it is not shatters your fragile ego, it does not mean that others have not comfortably built their own stability in what you now call chaos.”
And when he starts talking about Zen, the Buddha, and Quality, he frankly loses me entirely. The most salient piece of wisdom in the book comes long before those complications. It goes like this:
Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. … He makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
And those aren’t even the author’s words. They’re Einstein’s. The world as it is and the world as we perceive it are two different things. That’s the only dualism that matters -- now and forever. For those who wish to lead an examined life, they can either build their castle on those shifting sands, or they can contend that nothing can ever be built, and destroy themselves in the process.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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