High development as it might appear to a native would not be accessible to our visual mode of awareness. We can get some idea of the attitude of the member of a tradition-directed society to technological improvements from a story related by Werner Heisenberg in The Physicist’s Conception of Nature. A modern physicist with his habit of “field” perception, and his sophisticated separation from our conventional habits of Newtonian space, easily finds in the pre-literate world a congenial kind of wisdom.
Heisenberg is discussing “science as a part of the interplay between man and Nature” (p. 20):
“In this connection it has often been said that far-reaching changes in our environment and in our way of life wrought by this technical age have also changed dangerously our ways of thinking, and that here lie the roots of the crises which have shaken our times and which, for instance, are also expressed in modern art. True, this objection is much older than modern technology and science, the use of implements going back to man’s earliest beginnings. Thus, two and a half thousand years ago, the Chinese sage Chuang-Tzu spoke of the danger of the machine when he said:‘As Tzu-Gung was travelling through the regions north of the River Han, he saw an old man working in his vegetable garden. He had dug in irrigation ditch. The man would descend into the well, fetch up a vessel of water in his arms and pour it out into the ditch. While his effort were tremendous the results appeared to be very meagre.
‘Tzu-Gung said, “There is a way whereby you can irrigate one hundred ditches in one day, and whereby you can do much with little effort. Would you not like to hear of it?” Then the Gardner stood up, looked at him and said, “And what would that be?”
‘Tzu-Gung replied, “You take a wooden lever, weighted at the back and light in the front. In this way you can bring up water so quickly that it just gushes out. This is called a draw-well.”
‘Then anger rose up in the old man’s face, and he said, “I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know such things; I am ashamed to use them.”
All values apart, we must learn today that our electric technology has consequences for our most ordinary perceptions and habits of action which are quickly recreating in us the mental processes of the most primitive men. These consequences occur, not in our thoughts or opinions, where we are trained to be critical, but in our most ordinary sense life, which creates the vortices and matrices of thought and action.
McLuhan's thought echos Christopher Alexander's in Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Primitive man in building shelter is in direct contact with his materials. Forms adapt to the needs and materials in a direct and unselfconscious way. In this way, man is closer to nature and at one with nature. Modernity pulls us farther away as our relationship to shelter shows. The disintermediation of man from nature causes an inevitable fragmentation of the consciousness into a constellation of categories, concepts and images.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure whether this is good or bad. However I believe that this extreme reductionism in education is no longer leading us in the most production path possible. The student is presented with an ever growing body of arcane knowledge that they are left to themselves to work into a cohesive world-view. Exceptional people inevitably do that in continually amazing ways. But the divergence between what society needs today and what the universities produce is disheartening.
Like the farmer, sometimes the most appropriate response to some narrow solution to a problem is to reject the temptation to buy one more thing, to learn one more narrow gaming skill and focus on the eternal truths like society, health, beauty and the universe.
In the end, I don't think I agree that our electric technology is bringing us back to the mental processes of primitive men no matter how much I wish it were so. I think our electric technology has enabled a return to tribalism in our society but had done more to more us away from the fully integrated consciousness of primitive man than any prior technology has.