A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded upon trash and waste, and such a society is a house built on sand.

- Dorothy Sayers


Monday, June 18, 2018

Many African tribes have a proverb that I think helps, in large part, to explain why we are often so stupid and so damaging with technology. With variations, it goes like this:

"It is only when a problem has lasted a long time that wisdom comes to it."

-African Proverb (Akan)

In other words, wisdom about what to do about a problem arises slowly, out of lived experience.  To solve a problem rightly, one must first decide if it is actually a problem at all. Certainly, not every difficulty, discomfort, or inefficiency is. Sometimes these are blessings in disguise, as almost all of us know from personal experience. One also needs to determine where the true locus of the problem lies. Is it genuinely a materials problem? Or is it perhaps a cultural problem? Or an individual skills problem?  Then one needs to examine possible alternatives with an eye to what and whom they may harm or disadvantage, and how much cultural and physical disruption they may cause.  Lastly, one must consider one's resources, the expense involved, and whether a solution will be durable and easily maintained, or will become a burden on those too young to be a party to the decision making process.  For a solution to be wise, it must address all of these issues - and sometimes doing nothing is, on balance, the best thing to do.  The assumption that every problem comes with a built in "fix" may be one of the dogmas of our technological society - but it is, at best, an assumption. At worst, it is hubris.

In a materialistic and technological society like our own, most of these steps are by-passed. Every problem is assumed in advance to be a causal problem, and every problem has a causal solution.  The engineering is everything - a simple matter of the application of energy and force at the right point on the causal chain and - voila - the problem is "fixed."

This "technological stance" is remarkably short on self-reflection and cultural evaluation. Seeing everything - (even ourselves, generally, via "computer" and "machine" model analogies") as purely material objects, one is, when in this stance, inclined to regard the material element in the situation as the only element properly relevant. Initially, of course, this leads to engineering a quick power fix for an old problem - often by-passing traditional wisdom and cultural constraints entirely in the excitement of being able to overcome an ancient ill. More often than not, though, any such initial solution, by ignoring cultural factors and the finite resources and skill levels of the community for whom the problem is being resolved, simply "hides" the problem in its full complexity, or provides a complex stop-gap which requires the constant involvement of a professional class of technicians, who generally have a profit motive - shifting the problem culturally over into the economic sphere, with all of the ramifications that entails.   Even on the purely material level, though, this initial technological fix often creates another problem, or a similar problem in a different place.  Because the situation is now novel, all those involved don't really have a feel for what's going on or how to adapt or react at a deep level. Floundering, we slap another quick engineering fix on the new problem (or cascading series of problems resulting from the original fix), using technologies that are often so new that we don't understand how to use them wisely either - and this, in turn, creates new problems, new fractures in the relationships between culture, nature, and individuals.  (For an intuitively obvious example of this in action, a quick examination of the transportation and infrastructural repair going on in pretty much any major city will suffice.)  And so it goes. We pile quick fix upon quick fix until the environment is so filled with novelty that we, quite literally, have no idea what we are doing at any level of depth - and all of the ancient cultivated and hard learned wisdom of our species is as rags - since everything changes so fast that there is no way to apply that wisdom with any particularity in the rapidly changing conditions that we have imposed upon our natural environment.

In such a context, our African friends would perhaps suggest that wisdom begins with recognizing our limits - that as a species we don't do our best thinking or designing on the fly. Wise solutions demand deliberative and culturally and ecologically sensitive reflection, by people who are trusted by others to take all of these different elements into consideration. This entails, amongst other things, that those for whom the problem is being fixed must have a right to make a genuine contribution to the solution proposed, and should retain a veto right over its implementation, in the recognition that, sometimes, wisdom involves discomfort - living with a problem long enough to understand all its facets and interactions with the environing conditions, whether natural, cultural, or personal.

Wisdom, typically, arrives with age, practice, long habituation, struggle, and experience.  A culture that bypasses all these for a quick mechanical force-fix, remains childish - puerile.  Or so it has come to seem to me.

This is not Luddism. Technology has its place, and genuine solutions can be technological in nature. It is, however, a firm resolve that every technological fix and novelty should have to justify itself before the bar of human flourishing and the ancient wisdom of the species - and that every such technological solution needs to be, in principle at least, sustainable and maintainable by those on whose behalf it was made.   "Profit motive" is not enough. "New" is not enough. Even - "you won't be in discomfort, or pain, anymore" isn't always enough - or opium would be a panacea. In all of life, as in medicine itself, a treatment for a special condition or disease may be temporarily effective at controlling the symptoms, but still lead to the death of the patient, by hiding a deeper ailment. Since we are the patient - the patient is ourselves and all that we depend on for our existence in this world - I think it behooves us to be more careful than we usually are.