Or is it? Is there even an ‘endpoint’ at all? Perhaps this is the wrong way to look at what is happening here. Because we are not faced with that Manichaean choice I once imagined we would come to: are you man or machine? We find ourselves, instead, on a spectrum; or perhaps on a slow train, with a clear direction of travel but with no defined stops. Where – whether – to jump off? It is never clear.
Google Glass might provide my barcode moment, but everyone has to choose their own, if they have one. At what point will you jump from the train – and where will you land? At what point will the merger between humans and their machines frighten or disgust you so much that the wake-up call becomes too loud to ignore? I know people for whom the advent of email and the internet provided that moment. Someone I respect recently described the internet simply as ‘a trap’, and it was hard to disagree, though it didn’t stop me using it.
We are already merging with our technologies. I have sat in pubs with people who play with their smartphones rather than talk to me (perhaps it’s just me) and walked down country lanes with people who are too busy Tweeting to notice the tweeting. Twenty years ago this stuff would have been unthinkable. In twenty years’ time it will look primitive.
But how far back should we go to trace the beginning of this merger? What would a hunter-gatherer from the Mesolithic think if she were somehow able to travel here and examine a twenty-first-century human? If she were to look at me, with a plastic and steel contraption on my eyes to enhance my vision, and metal in my teeth and an old scar inside my throat where my tonsils were surgically removed and, who knows, in twenty-five years’ time a silicon artificial hip and a couple of new heart valves made out of parts of a pig? Would she not think that she had seen the post-human future?
Or does this trajectory go back to the creation of language itself? Or of writing – a form of symbolism that allows us to overlay our intellectual abstractions onto messy reality? Here you are, reading my words; here I am, trying to communicate with you. Is this not a deeply weird way of interacting? We are not responding to each others’ body language, or smiles or frowns. There is no chit-chat, no animal relationship at work, no drawing on the ancient intuitions of our species that allow us to converse person to person, with all that this entails. You have probably never even met me. There is just this monologue, cast in lines on a page. We may stimulate each others’ brains, but the rest of us sits inert, gazing in on the symbols. The novelist William Golding – a Christian, though an idiosyncratic one – believed that the biblical Fall came with the development of language. At that point, we had moved inexorably towards abstraction and away from reality, and our fate was sealed.
Perhaps this is really a question of what we get used to and how quickly we get used to it, and how we assume that our small, personal experiences represent something static and unchanging, though this is almost never the case. Grow up with books, as I did, and books seem normal. How would they have seemed to someone from an oral culture? Alien? Inhuman? Perhaps.
When I think about this I think, strangely, about my childhood. I grew up in Middlesex; or rather, that part of greater London which was once Middlesex. My Middlesex was an endless suburb. The local park and the drain under the tube line we played in, the always-closed cricket pavilion, the junior school with the asphalt playground and the blackberries in the hedges. The old toyshop on the bridge, the garages behind the council estate, the thin strips of back garden, the fake-beamed Ind Coope pub from which emanated the exciting and glamorous smell of stale bitter. This was the Middlesex of my childhood. These are my blue remembered hills.
But there were once other Middlesexes, that I am much too young to have seen. This place had been, before the arrival of the Romans, a great forest of oak, elm and beech, inhabited by elk, wolf and deer. Later, the home of the Middle-Saxons became the second-smallest county in England, a retreat for merchants from the noise and grime of London. It developed into an agricultural ‘home county’ with a distinct character – small, hidden, human-scale – which made its loss the harder to take for those who knew it. These days, Middlesex barely exists. It has all been swallowed up by London, and even those who live there don’t use the county’s name any more. There is only a memory where a place used to be.
I discovered John Betjeman, the chronicler of the death of Middlesex, in my early twenties. I discovered old-fashioned poems about places I knew – Harrow, Greenford, Rayner’s Lane, Ruislip – in guises that meant nothing to me. It was like seeing a picture of your mother at eighteen, young and free and with no idea you will ever be born. Here was a county of whispering pines, enormous hayfields, elm trees, meadowlands, low, laburnum-leaned-on railings. The evocation of its loss was strong and clean and managed to raise a nostalgia in me for something I had never been part of.
For it wasn’t the world I knew. I knew pavements and park railings and cul-de-sacs and council estates and concrete street lamps and white dogshit and the remains of old air-raid sirens. Compared to its past richness, my Middlesex was a drab monoculture. It was, in Betjeman’s words, ‘silent under soot and stone’. But I liked it, because it was where I came from.
I wonder now whether we could Middlesex the whole world. I wonder if we could replace the rainforests with plantations, fish out the seas until only a couple of commercial species are left, carpet the moors in turbines and dam all the rivers and build endless suburbs over what remains of the hay meadows that are now used to grow maize for silage. I wonder if we could busy ourselves with our microchips and machines, turning the world into a planetary farm to support our digital appetites and sinking deeper into our machine-led narcissism as we do. I wonder if we could deplete the diversity and richness of this wild world by 80 or 90 per cent – and within a few generations see it all forgotten, even by those who noticed its going. I wonder if, raised in this culture, with all the new toys to play with, wearing our Google Glasses, sitting in our self-driving cars, we would even notice, or care?
Our current plunge into ecological overshoot could lead to global economic collapse. Our pushing up against ecological limits could lead to the unplanned scaling back of the human machine. The planet itself may rebel. That’s the fear – or the hope, depending on your point of view. But what if the fear is wrong? What if we somehow manage to get ourselves out of this fix? What if the Silicon Valley cornutopians are right, and technology or ingenuity or blind luck save us? Or what if Earth reacts differently; what if it can, after all, tolerate the elimination of 80 per cent of terrestrial life? What if a planet of rats, cockroaches, pigeons, GM crops, synthetic livestock and post-human immortals is possible after all?
In other words, what if this ongoing fear of ‘collapse’, which I seem so often to come back to in my writing, is a narrative designed to quell a worse fear: that things might not collapse, but continue like this? That the Earth’s final wild frontiers may be tamed and diluted, ravaged and destroyed, and that we would not care much because we were too busy following the logic of our narrative to its endpoint, becoming our machines – our little creations, made in our own image, sent out to rule the world with our culture’s poison in their silicon veins?
The professional ‘futurist’ Steve Fuller, author of the predictably titled book Humanity 2.0, insists that our direction of travel is now set: that a merger with our machines is not only inevitable but will be popular and beneficial. ‘People are voting with their feet to enter Humanity 2.0 with the time they spend in front of computers, as opposed to having direct contact with physical human beings,’ he chunters blithely. ‘In all this, it’s not so much that we’ve been losing our humanity but that it’s becoming projected or distributed across things that lack a human body. In any case, Humanity 2.0 is less about the power of new technologies than a state of mind in which we see our lives fulfilled in such things.’
I suspect he’s probably right, and I think that many people, given the opportunity, will want this to go further without much thinking about the implications. But for tho
se of us who don’t – those of us who think we can identify a point beyond which we are not personally prepared to plunge into this – what then? What do we do? How do we live?
This question is not new either. Seek out Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon: it is about a society whose members choose to destroy all technology created after a particular date, precisely because they have realised that the endpoint of technological progress would be the end of humanity as they know it. I’ve already mentioned George Orwell, who speculates at length in The Road to Wigan Pier on ‘the tendency of the machine to make a fully human life impossible’, and how the inevitable endpoint of this vision of progress is the human being reduced to ‘a brain in a bottle’. If and when we choose to revolt personally against this, we are revolting not against something new in itself, but simply to the next step on a very old journey away from external nature and towards an internal world in which we get to create our own exclusively human version of reality.
It is more than likely that any rebels against this vision will be in the minority. But so what? If you treat this not as a ‘global issue’, which requires some kind of mass political response, but instead as a personal experience you have to live through, things start to look rather different. I usually find that the small picture is the most important one. You can think about ‘global issues’ until your head hurts and you want to die of despair: it is another form of abstraction. We live by the small things: the things we can control or experience personally.
There are fewer and fewer things, in a consumer economy, that we are encouraged or permitted to control. But if we want to, we are still free to make different lives for ourselves to whatever degree we can manage it. We are as free (for now) to say no to Google Glass as we are to say no to credit cards or cars or supermarket shopping. That doesn’t mean escaping from the machine – that’s impossible – but it means negotiating a relationship with it that gives us as much autonomy as we need or can get or can cope with. In these times, this is probably the best we’re ever going to do.
Personally, I have always been with Orwell and with D. H. Lawrence: the techno-industrial culture dehumanises us, sucks out of us some animal essence, which it is impossible perhaps to explain but can be clearly intuited by those who are paying attention. But we can’t react to this by trying to globalise or politicise these intuitions. We don’t have to be ‘activists’, campaigning to try and make our particular view of virtual technology the dominant one. This kind of approach is doomed to fail and will likely lead to despair, just as the attempt to prevent climate change and environmental crisis in this way is leading to despair. There are tides in the affairs of men, and standing on the beach ordering the waves back does not make you brave or forward-thinking.
This is a personal view of course, and one I have been developing for a long time, but it seems to me that a kind of strategic retreat is both the best way to ensure personal sanity and to keep the flame of a particular, pre-machine vision of humanity alive. We all choose our own personal visions. I have written about retreating and withdrawing several times before, and it has often brought down on my head accusations of ‘defeatism’ and the like from the activist-minded. But it’s not about defeat, or surrender. It’s about pulling back to a place where you can find the breathing space to be free and human again. From that, all else follows, if you can pay attention.
dark-mountain.net, 2012
Dark Ecology
Take the only tree that’s left,
Stuff it up the hole in your culture.
Leonard Cohen, ‘The Future’
Retreat to the desert, and fight!
D. H. Lawrence
The handle, which varies in length according to the height of its user, and in some cases is made by that user to his or her specifications, is like most of the other parts of the tool in that it has a name and thus a character of its own. I call it the snath, as do most of us in this country, though variations include the snathe, the snaithe, the snead and the sned. Onto the snath are attached two hand grips, adjusted for the height of the user. On the bottom of the snath is a small hole, a rubberised protector and a metal D-ring with two hex sockets. Into this little assemblage slides the tang of the blade.
This thin crescent of steel is the fulcrum of the whole tool. From the genus blade fans out a number of ever-evolving species, each seeking out and colonising new niches. My collection includes a number of grass blades of varying styles – a Luxor, a Profisense, several Austrians and a new, elegant Concari Felice blade that I’ve not even tried yet – whose lengths vary between 60 and 85 centimetres. I also have a couple of ditch blades (which despite the name are not used for mowing ditches particularly, but are all-purpose cutting tools that can manage anything from fine grass to tousled brambles) and a bush blade, which is as thick as a billhook and can take down small trees. These are the big mammals you can see and hear. Beneath and around them scuttle any number of harder-to-spot competitors for the summer grass, all finding their place in the ecosystem of the tool.
None of them, of course, are any use at all unless they are kept sharp, really sharp: sharp enough that if you were to run your finger lightly along the edge you would lose blood. You need to take a couple of stones out into the field with you and use them regularly – every five minutes or so – to keep the edge honed. And you need to know how to use your peening anvil, and when. Peen is a word of Scandinavian origin, originally meaning ‘to beat iron thin with a hammer’, which is still its meaning, though the iron has now been replaced by steel. When the edge of your blade thickens with over-use and over-sharpening, you need to draw the edge out by peening it – cold-forging the blade with hammer and small anvil. It’s a tricky job. I’ve been doing it for years but I’ve still not mastered it. Probably you never master it, just as you never really master anything. That lack of mastery, and the promise of one day reaching it, is part of the complex beauty of the tool.
Etymology can be interesting. Scythe, originally rendered sithe, is an Old English word, indicating that the tool has been in use in these islands for at least a thousand years. But archaeology pushes that date much further out; Roman scythes have been found with blades nearly two metres long. Basic, curved cutting tools for use on grass date back at least ten thousand years, to the dawn of agriculture and thus to the dawn of civilisations. Like the tool, the word, too, has older origins. The Proto-Indo-European root of scythe is the word sek, meaning to cut, or to divide. Sek is also the root word of sickle, saw, schism, sex and science.
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I’ve recently begun reading the collected writings of Theodore Kaczynski. I’m worried that it may change my life. Some books do that, from time to time, and this is beginning to shape up as one of them.
It’s not that Kaczynski, who is a fierce, uncompromising critic of the techno-industrial system, is saying anything I haven’t heard before. I’ve heard it all before, many times. By his own admission, his arguments are not new. But the clarity with which he makes them, and his refusal to obfuscate, are refreshing. I seem to be at a point in my life where I am open to hearing this again. I don’t know quite why.
Here are the four premises with which he begins the book:
Technological progress is carrying us to inevitable disaster;
Only the collapse of modern technological civilisation can avert disaster;
The political left is technological society’s first line of defence against revolution;
What is needed is a new revolutionary movement, dedicated to the elimination of technological society.
Kaczynski’s prose is sparse, and his arguments logical and unsentimental, as you might expect from a former mathematics professor with a degree from Harvard. I have a tendency towards sentimentality around these issues, so I appreciate his discipline. I’m about a third of the way through the book at the moment, and the way that the four arguments are being filled out is worryingly convincing. Maybe it’s what scientists call ‘confirmation bias’, but I’m findin
g it hard to muster good counter-arguments to any of them, even the last. I say ‘worryingly’ because I do not want to end up agreeing with Kaczynski. There are two reasons for this.
Firstly, if I do end up agreeing with him – and with other such critics I have been exploring recently, such as Jacques Ellul and D. H. Lawrence and C. S. Lewis and Ivan Illich – I am going to have to change my life in quite profound ways. Not just in the ways I’ve already changed it (getting rid of my telly, not owning a credit card, avoiding smartphones and e-readers and satnavs, growing at least some of my own food, learning practical skills, fleeing the city, etc.) but properly, deeply. I am still embedded, at least partly because I can’t work out where to jump, or what to land on, or whether you can ever get away by jumping, or simply because I’m frightened to close my eyes and walk over the edge.
I’m writing this on a laptop computer, by the way. It has a broadband connection and all sorts of fancy capabilities I have never tried or wanted to use. I mainly use it for typing. You might think this makes me a hypocrite, and you might be right, but there is a more interesting observation you could make. This, says Kaczynski, is where we all find ourselves, until and unless we choose to break out. In his own case, he explains, he had to go through a personal psychological collapse as a young man before he could escape what he saw as his chains. He explained this to an interviewer in 2001:
I knew what I wanted: to go and live in some wild place. But I didn’t know how to do so … I did not know even one person who would have understood why I wanted to do such a thing. So, deep in my heart, I felt convinced that I would never be able to escape from civilisation. Because I found modern life utterly unacceptable, I grew increasingly hopeless until, at the age of 24, I arrived at a kind of crisis: I felt so miserable that I didn’t care whether I lived or died. But when I reached that point a sudden change took place: I realised that if I didn’t care whether I lived or died, then I didn’t need to fear the consequences of anything I might do. Therefore I could do anything I wanted. I was free!
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays Page 10
