The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
Page 22
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.3
We rarely look to poetry for instruction anymore, but here we see how a poet’s scrutiny of the world can be more subtle and discerning than a scientist’s. Frost understood the meaning of what we now call “flow” and the essence of what we now call “embodied cognition” long before psychologists and neurobiologists delivered the empirical evidence. His mower is not an airbrushed peasant, a romantic caricature. He’s a farmer, a man doing a hard job on a still, hot summer day. He’s not dreaming of “idle hours” or “easy gold.” His mind is on his work—the bodily rhythm of the cutting, the weight of the tool in his hands, the stalks piling up around him. He’s not seeking some greater truth beyond the work. The work is the truth.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
There are mysteries in that line. Its power lies in its refusal to mean anything more or less than what it says. But it seems clear that what Frost is getting at, in the line and in the poem, is the centrality of action to both living and knowing. Only through work that brings us into the world do we approach a true understanding of existence, of “the fact.” It’s not an understanding that can be put into words. It can’t be made explicit. It’s nothing more than a whisper. To hear it, you need to get very near its source. Labor, whether of the body or the mind, is more than a way of getting things done. It’s a form of contemplation, a way of seeing the world face-to-face rather than through a glass. Action un-mediates perception, gets us close to the thing itself. It binds us to the earth, Frost implies, as love binds us to one another. The antithesis of transcendence, work puts us in our place.
Frost is a poet of labor. He’s always coming back to those revelatory moments when the active self blurs into the surrounding world—when, as he would write so memorably in another poem, “the work is play for mortal stakes.” 4 The literary critic Richard Poirier, in his book Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, described with great sensitivity the poet’s view of the essence and essentialness of hard work: “Any intense labor enacted in his poetry, like mowing or apple-picking, can penetrate to the visions, dreams, myths that are at the heart of reality, constituting its articulate form for those who can read it with a requisite lack of certainty and an indifference to merely practical possessiveness.” The knowledge gained through such efforts may be as shadowy and elusive as a dream—the very opposite of algorithmic or computational—but “in its mythic propensities, the knowledge is less ephemeral than are the apparently more practical results of labor, like food or money.”5 When we embark on a task, with our bodies or our minds, on our own or alongside others, we usually have a practical goal in sight. Our eyes are looking ahead to the product of our work—a store of hay for feeding livestock, perhaps. But it’s through the work itself that we come to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our situation. The mowing, not the hay, is what matters most.
NONE OF this should be taken as an attack on or a rejection of material progress. Frost is not romanticizing some distant, pre-technological past. Although he was dismayed by those who allowed themselves to become “bigoted in reliance / On the gospel of modern science,” 6 he felt a close kinship with scientists and inventors. As a poet, he shared with them a common spirit and a common pursuit. They were all explorers of the mysteries of earthly life, excavators of meaning from matter. They were all engaged in work that, as Poirier described it, “can extend the capability of human dreaming.”7 For Frost, the greatest value of “the fact”—whether apprehended in the world or expressed in a work of art or made manifest in a tool or other invention—lay in its ability to expand the scope of individual knowing and hence open new avenues of perception, action, and imagination. In the long poem “Kitty Hawk,” written near the end of his life, he celebrated the Wright brothers’ flight “Into the unknown, / Into the sublime.” In making their own “pass / At the infinite,” the brothers also made the experience of flight, and the sense of unboundedness it provides, possible for all of us. Theirs was a Promethean venture. In a sense, wrote Frost, the Wrights made the infinite “Rationally ours.”8
Technology is as crucial to the work of knowing as it is to the work of production. The human body, in its native, unadorned state, is a feeble thing. It’s constrained in its strength, its dexterity, its sensory range, its calculative prowess, its memory. It quickly reaches the limits of what it can do. But the body encompasses a mind that can imagine, desire, and plan for achievements the body alone can’t fulfill. This tension between what the body can accomplish and what the mind can envision is what gave rise to and continues to propel and shape technology. It’s the spur for humankind’s extension of itself and elaboration of nature. Technology isn’t what makes us “post-human” or “transhuman,” as some writers and scholars have recently suggested. It’s what makes us human. Technology is in our nature. Through our tools we give our dreams form. We bring them into the world. The practicality of technology may distinguish it from art, but both spring from a similar, distinctly human yearning.
One of the many jobs the human body is unsuited to is cutting grass. (Try it if you don’t believe me.) What allows the mower to do his work, what allows him to be a mower, is the tool he wields, his scythe. The mower is, and has to be, technologically enhanced. The tool makes the mower, and the mower’s skill in using the tool remakes the world for him. The world becomes a place in which he can act as a mower, in which he can lay the swale in rows. This idea, which on the surface may sound trivial or even tautological, points to something elemental about life and the formation of the self.
“The body is our general means of having a world,” wrote the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his 1945 masterwork Phenomenology of Perception.9 Our physical makeup—the fact that we walk upright on two legs at a certain height, that we have a pair of hands with opposable thumbs, that we have eyes which see in a particular way, that we have a certain tolerance for heat and cold—determines our perception of the world in a way that precedes, and then molds, our conscious thoughts about the world. We see mountains as lofty not because mountains are lofty but because our perception of their form and height is shaped by our own stature. We see a stone as, among other things, a weapon because the particular construction of our hand and arm enables us to pick it up and throw it. Perception, like cognition, is embodied.
It follows that whenever we gain a new talent, we not only change our bodily capacities, we change the world. The ocean extends an invitation to the swimmer that it withholds from the person who has never learned to swim. With every skill we master, the world reshapes itself to reveal greater possibilities. It becomes more interesting, and being in it becomes more rewarding. This may be what Spinoza, the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher who rebelled against Descartes’ division of mind and body, was getting at when he wrote, “The human mind is capable of perceiving a great many things, and is the more capable, the more its body can be disposed in a great many ways.”10 John Edward Huth, a physics professor at Harvard, testifies to the regeneration that attends the mastery of a skill. A decade ago, inspired by Inuit hunters and other experts in natural wayfinding, he undertook “a self-imposed program to learn navigation through enviro
nmental clues.” Through months of rigorous outdoor observation and practice, he taught himself how to read the nighttime and daytime skies, interpret the movements of clouds and waves, decipher the shadows cast by trees. “After a year of this endeavor,” he recalls, “something dawned on me: the way I viewed the world had palpably changed. The sun looked different, as did the stars.” Huth’s enriched perception of the environment, gained through a kind of “primal empiricism,” struck him as being “akin to what people describe as spiritual awakenings.”11
Technology, by enabling us to act in ways that go beyond our bodily limits, also alters our perception of the world and what the world signifies to us. Technology’s transformative power is most apparent in tools of discovery, from the microscope and the particle accelerator of the scientist to the canoe and the spaceship of the explorer, but the power is there in all tools, including the ones we use in our everyday lives. Whenever an instrument allows us to cultivate a new talent, the world becomes a different and more intriguing place, a setting of even greater opportunity. To the possibilities of nature are added the possibilities of culture. “Sometimes,” wrote Merleau-Ponty, “the signification aimed at cannot be reached by the natural means of the body. We must, then, construct an instrument, and the body projects a cultural world around itself.”12 The value of a well-made and well-used tool lies not only in what it produces for us but what it produces in us. At its best, technology opens fresh ground. It gives us a world that is at once more understandable to our senses and better suited to our intentions—a world in which we’re more at home. “My body is geared into the world when my perception provides me with the most varied and the most clearly articulated spectacle possible,” explained Merleau-Ponty, “and when my motor intentions, as they unfold, receive the responses they anticipate from the world. This maximum of clarity in perception and action specifies a perceptual ground, a background for my life, a general milieu for the coexistence of my body and the world.”13 Used thoughtfully and with skill, technology becomes much more than a means of production or consumption. It becomes a means of experience. It gives us more ways to lead rich and engaged lives.
Look more closely at the scythe. It’s a simple tool, but an ingenious one. Invented around 500 BC, by the Romans or the Gauls, it consists of a curved blade, forged of iron or steel, attached to the end of a long wooden pole, or snath. The snath typically has, about halfway down its length, a small wooden grip, or nib, that makes it possible to grasp and swing the implement with two hands. The scythe is a variation on the much-older sickle, a similar but short-handled cutting tool, invented in the Stone Age, that came to play an essential role in the early development of agriculture and, in turn, of civilization. What made the scythe a momentous innovation in its own right is that its long snath allowed a farmer or other laborer to cut grass at ground level while standing upright. Hay or grain could be harvested, or a pasture cleared, more quickly than before. Agriculture leaped forward.
The scythe enhanced the productivity of the worker in the field, but its benefit went beyond what could be measured in yield. The scythe was a congenial tool, far better suited to the bodily work of mowing than the sickle had been. Rather than stooping or squatting, the farmer could walk with a natural gait and use both his hands, as well as the full strength of his torso, in his job. The scythe served as both an aid and an invitation to the skilled work it enabled. We see in its form a model for technology on a human scale, for tools that extend the productive capabilities of society without circumscribing the individual’s scope of action and perception. Indeed, as Frost makes clear in “Mowing,” the scythe intensifies its user’s involvement with and apprehension of the world. The mower swinging a scythe does more, but he also knows more. Despite outward appearances, the scythe is a tool of the mind as well as the body.
Not all tools are so congenial. Some deter us from skilled action. The digital technologies of automation, rather than inviting us into the world and encouraging us to develop new talents that enlarge our perceptions and expand our possibilities, often have the opposite effect. They’re designed to be disinviting. They pull us away from the world. That’s a consequence not only of the prevailing technology-centered design practices that place ease and efficiency above all other concerns. It also reflects the fact that, in our personal lives, the computer has become a media device, its software painstakingly programmed to grab and hold our attention. As most people know from experience, the computer screen is intensely compelling, not only for the conveniences it offers but also for the many diversions it provides.14 There’s always something going on, and we can join in at any moment with the slightest of effort. Yet the screen, for all its enticements and stimulations, is an environment of sparseness—fast-moving, efficient, clean, but revealing only a shadow of the world.
That’s true even of the most meticulously crafted simulations of space that we find in virtual-reality applications such as games, CAD models, three-dimensional maps, and the tools used by surgeons and others to control robots. Artificial renderings of space may provide stimulation to our eyes and to a lesser degree our ears, but they tend to starve our other senses—touch, smell, taste—and greatly restrict the movements of our bodies. A study of rodents, published in Science in 2013, indicated that the brain’s place cells are much less active when animals make their way through computer-generated landscapes than when they navigate the real world.15 “Half of the neurons just shut up,” reported one of the researchers, UCLA neurophysicist Mayank Mehta. He believes that the drop-off in mental activity likely stems from the lack of “proximal cues”—environmental smells, sounds, and textures that provide clues to location—in digital simulations of space.16 “A map is not the territory it represents,” the Polish philosopher Alfred Korzybski famously remarked,17 and a virtual rendering is not the territory it represents either. When we enter the glass cage, we’re required to shed much of our body. That doesn’t free us; it emaciates us.
The world in turn is made less meaningful. As we adapt to our streamlined environment, we render ourselves incapable of perceiving what the world offers its most ardent inhabitants. Like the young, satellite-guided Inuit, we travel blindfolded. The result is existential impoverishment, as nature and culture withdraw their invitations to act and to perceive. The self can only thrive, can only grow, when it encounters and overcomes “resistance from surroundings,” wrote John Dewey. “An environment that was always and everywhere congenial to the straightaway execution of our impulsions would set a term to growth as sure as one always hostile would irritate and destroy. Impulsion forever boosted on its forward way would run its course thoughtless, and dead to emotion.”18
Ours may be a time of material comfort and technological wonder, but it’s also a time of aimlessness and gloom. During the first decade of this century, the number of Americans taking prescription drugs to treat depression or anxiety rose by nearly a quarter. One in five adults now regularly takes such medications.19 The suicide rate among middle-aged Americans increased by nearly 30 percent over the same ten years, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.20 More than 10 percent of American schoolchildren, and nearly 20 percent of high-school-age boys, have been given a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and two-thirds of that group take drugs like Ritalin and Adderall to treat the condition.21 The reasons for our discontent are many and far from understood. But one of them may be that through the pursuit of a frictionless existence, we’ve succeeded in turning what Merleau-Ponty termed the ground of our lives into a barren place. Drugs that numb the nervous system provide a way to rein in our vital, animal sensorium, to shrink our being to a size that better suits our constricted environs.
FROST’S SONNET also contains, as one of its many whispers, a warning about technology’s ethical hazards. There’s a brutality to the mower’s scythe. It indiscriminately cuts down flowers—those tender, pale orchises—along with the stalks of grass.* It frightens innocent animals,
like the bright green snake. If technology embodies our dreams, it also embodies other, less benign qualities in our makeup, such as our will to power and the arrogance and insensitivity that accompany it. Frost returns to this theme a little later in A Boy’s Will, in a second lyric about cutting hay, “The Tuft of Flowers.” The poem’s narrator comes upon a freshly mown field and, while following the flight of a passing butterfly with his eyes, discovers in the midst of the cut grass a small cluster of flowers, “a leaping tongue of bloom” that “the scythe had spared”:
The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of us to him,
But from sheer morning gladness to the brim.22
Working with a tool is never just a practical matter, Frost is telling us, with characteristic delicacy. It always entails moral choices and has moral consequences. It’s up to us, as users and makers of tools, to humanize technology, to aim its cold blade wisely. That requires vigilance and care.
The scythe is still employed in subsistence farming in many parts of the world. But it has no place on the modern farm, the development of which, like the development of the modern factory, office, and home, has required ever more complex and efficient equipment. The threshing machine was invented in the 1780s, the mechanical reaper appeared around 1835, the baler came a few years after that, and the combine harvester began to be produced commercially toward the end of the nineteenth century. The pace of technological advance has only accelerated in the decades since, and today the trend is reaching its logical conclusion with the computerization of agriculture. The working of the soil, which Thomas Jefferson saw as the most vigorous and virtuous of occupations, is being offloaded almost entirely to machines. Farmhands are being replaced by “drone tractors” and other robotic systems that, using sensors, satellite signals, and software, plant seeds, fertilize and weed fields, harvest and package crops, and milk cows and tend other livestock.23 In development are robo-shepherds that guide flocks through pastures. Even if scythes still whispered in the fields of the industrial farm, no one would be around to hear them.