I have recently undertaken two labours which caused me to reconsider a few questions which have always been close to my heart; the renovation of a house and the restitution of an old allotment (for non-British readers; a plot of horticultural land owned by the local government and leased to townsmen on request).
The Hammer
In renovating an old house my first task was the stripping back of some large walls, removing tonnes of old plaster, render and muck. I live in a very northerly place where the westish weather conspires to blow damp through the stoutest masonry.
I have a deeply ingrained preference for simple, old fashioned tools, and so started out my work with a hammer and chisels. Though the work was not exactly pleasant, there was gratification in how the old plasterwork would come away cleanly with the application of a little skill and a dose of effort. It felt scientific. Though not quiet the work was rhythmic, and though messy it felt basically hygienic; the muscles gearing to the pace and geometry of the task and making their work felt through a healthful sense of exhaustion which could be quickly dissipated. Soon, however, I came to the parts of the wall which had been repaired at some point with modern materials. Here layers of gypsum and cement mortar clung obstinately to the masonry and, try as I might, I soon realised that by strength of arm it would take me many days to remove the stuff. I therefore brought in a large electrical rotary hammer. As with most power tools it gave an initial thrill of efficacy, tearing into the harder material with superhuman impacts. It must have speeded the work threefold or fourfold, and being a man of regular obligations this was a necessary saving of time. Yet how quickly did I appreciate the totally different character of the work; lifting and holding the juddering, unwieldy machine in all sorts of positions gave the body a sense not of salutary exercise but grinding fatigue. The noise was brutal on my ears and I was also aware of how it must have polluted the tranquility of the air some distance from my house. Even with this machine the work took days, partly because it was impossible to continue at it for long concerted periods, and at the end of each day my head rang and my fingers felt arthritic. Furthermore, though it was necessary to me, I could not but feel that there was something frighteningly inefficient about the machine. This sprang not from a sense of fashionable “green guilt”, but from a more basic sense of grace, proportion and frugality. By a rough mental calculation I estimated that it would require about ten able cyclists going a fair pelt to equal the wattage expended by the motor. The machine had to be regularly fed with grease and would snap a steel bit most days when the metal finally fatigued from so much impact. Also, whereas with the hammer and chisels I felt as though I was constantly informing and improving my technique, as well as conditioning my body to the task, with the power hammer there was only a little knack to be attained beyond which the labour did not evolve but only drained the energy and patience. When the job was done I wanted badly to throw the power-hammer into the sea.
The sickle
I recently took over an old allotment in the town. It was in such a parlous state when I received it that I was tempted to refuse it; thickly overgrown everywhere with stinging and lacerating weeds which only hid masses of rubble, junk metal, plastic trash and every other thing frustrating to the blade of a shovel; but even such a rubbishy plot is not easy to come by in these days so I accepted the work it would entail.
Now the first thing to do before the junk-strewn soil could be worked over was to cut away the mass of tall weeds and grasses. Many people came offering me advice on how to do it, all being recommendations of some kind of machine. At first I did hire an electric “weed-whacker”. The ground was much too unlevel for a regular mower, and so polluted with debris that any kind of blade would be constantly dinged and blunted. The weed wacker hummed away, but it was by no means fast work because the thing was so unwieldy and one would constantly have to see to the cutting filament. Also, apart from the aggravating noise and action, it would churn all the vegetation into an irregular mess so that it was difficult to tell what had been properly cut, and awkward to rake away the mutilated cuttings afterwards. However I had recently picked up an old hand scythe from a garage sale and after growing sufficiently frustrated at the machine thought to give it a try. It was in poor shape to start with so needed to be extensively reground, then filed and sharpened back to a new edge; probably the work of an hour. It took some little practice to get a truly sharp edge honed reliably, but once that knack was grasped the sickle was a revelation. I carved through the whole plot in short order, feeling at every stroke a little profit in aptitude and strength. Better, the grass and weeds fell in regular swathes which could be raked and forked away smoothly into an admirable heap, and the maneuverability of the blade allowed the cuts to follow the undulations of the ground with facility. I aslo noticed as I worked that a multitude of frogs, slow-worms and mice fled nimbly out of the path of the blade. Everybody that passed by told me that it looked like very hard work, but it didn’t feel so, and I in turn looked with pity on the other gardeners wrestling rotovators and other ungainly contrivances over their earth in a fugue of petrol fumes and whining motors.
The elegant sliver of steel which I swung could realistically be so swung for perhaps half a century before it would be honed away to uselessness, and then it would be just a nub of re-workable steel and a rod of wood fit for kindling. The man to swing it for those decades would be strong of back and blessed with an unusual coordination of the wrist, and could have cleared square miles of intransigent brush. What would be the parallel case of the man wedded to a motor tool?
So far, so dull perhaps. My trivial observations above could easily be found on any old “permaculture” blog or (heaven forefend!) the lifestyle section of the god-forsaken Guardian’s lifestyle section, yet hear me out; I hope to make a deeper import. Here is the gist: our technology is not nearly advanced enough.
After the foresaid this may sound like a contradictory conclusion, but we misunderstand the meaning of advanced, confusing it with novel and complex. Clarke’s famous “third law” runs: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Now, the common usage and the original drift of this phrase suggests that the only real difference between magic and technology is understanding of the proximate causes behind a manipulated phenomenon. I think the law is right but the sense is wrong. For a magical act is not characterised simply as being an impressive or powerful or mysterious performance. A magical act is also an act of peculiar independent mastery, and of grand parsimony; doing much with and by little, whether in be a word or a gesture or ritual. Doing more by intelligence than matter. A technology which might strike us as magically effective or marvelous, a computer being the obvious example, is actually very dependent and very profligate, only the long train of its expense and convolution is not obvious at the point of its use. We do not see the dynamos churning or the leagues of cable or the ranks of blinking servers which actually deliver its quiet prodigalities. This is not magical, or if so is only comparable to stage magic. Real magic supposes a special knowledge that knows just how and where to touch the world to evoke the desired effect. It’s efficacy is not determined by the amount of force it can cleverly bring to bear on a problem, but in understanding the path through the problem by a grasping hidden or manifest natural laws. A laser is a very clever contrivance. One may use a relatively small laser to burn through a heavy block of wood or even stone. But the trick is just in taking very much power, material, contrivance and expense and giving it an incredibly acute point of delivery where none of those things are obvious. As a box, a lens and a few wires it certainly looks magical slicing without apparent effort through the most obdurate material. But a really magical act is in the man who comes with a small mallet and a handful of wedges and after a few minutes of rhythmic tapping in the right places splits the block with greater ultimate efficiency, whether faster or slower. Magic is not just the ability to dominate things by will, but to dominate them by will through subtle understanding, and which only depth, not broadness of understanding makes possible.
I am not saying something so glib as “scythes are magic”. Scythes are also a technology, but their pattern shares those virtues which define magic at a later point in the spectrum, whereas most of the machine technologies we are familiar with veer in a different direction. The axe, the scythe, the notepad; these things embody and employ the grasp of a natural principle which make them in themselves sufficient for the task. The laser, the motor-mower, the laptop; these bring, by massive devotions of manpower, diverse knowledge, expended energy and economic organisation, an expediential advantage in power or speed. This advantage may be existentially necessary, as when meeting the problems of war or basic sustenance, or may only be desirable in the pursuit of prosperity or ease; but in either the case comes at significant expense. The sophistication of the technology is often no more than a measure of how well that expense is obscured from the experience of the user or observer.
Our technology is nothing like advanced enough. To be truly advanced it would have that savour of magic. Yet this is not necessarily to speak against machinery and sophistication; our industrial technologies do not show well in part because the course of their development has been retarded and corrupted by many forces whose interests lie in varied special advantages rather than true progress in engineering. In electronics generally, and in especially in solid-state computing, we can squint to see something elegant and solid; a material confession of an occult principle of nature. Yet circuit boards are universally ugly, electronic gadgets usually trashy and our use of electrical technologies is clearly unhealthful. I am optimistic that somehow electrical principles could be harnessed by man into implements as simple, handsome and independent as an axe or dip-pen, though admittedly it may require a greater type of man to use them. In a sense this should be no downside. Our technologies should grow with us and oblige us to grow; only they should not outstrip us and drag us along behind them.
This principle also feeds into the dignity and grace of labour. My political awakening came through Marxism, and though my thoughts have hardened both against Marx the man and the “ism” of his mature ideology, I remain sympathetic to the spirit and diagnostics of Marxist thought. Perhaps Marx and his adherents were practically all cynical in their political endeavours, but even if this is the case they could only muster such human enthusiasm by appealing to a vein of significant truth somewhere. I do not hope here to untangle the web of questions which bind together the realities of our modern industrial capitalism, but only point to the fact that the mode of technologies produced by our mercantile modernity naturally strikes the sensitive man as ugly and baleful. It actually does alienate man from his labour. Whether it be true of machinery in general, which I doubt, our machinery is both aesthetically repellent and unsalutary in use.
An artist friend of mine pointed out to me a fact germane to this. He noted that in illustration and design practically all modern technology must be presented unrealistically to please the eye. Whereas in illustrating works of history or high fantasy the material elements such as swords, ropes, castles and carts may be drawn essentially as they appear in reality and still please the eye, in works depicting modernity or science fiction the technological objects are must be mutated to be aesthetically satisfying. Think of how weapons, aircraft and gadgets appear in film or illustrated science fiction. They are usually attractive or interesting to the degree that they are impractical according to the technological praxis we are familiar with. Actual modern technology looks disproportioned, banal and finicky when incorporated into a work of even commercial art. This should give us some indication that there is aught awry in how our technology is conceived, that it should consistently jar with beauty and parsimony which are perennial goods imbued in our sense of taste, where that taste is not bent out of shape by long misuse.
Unfortunately life often obliges us to make use of the ugly. It does seem that in our time we must make use of the advantages offered by these ambivalent technologies, and I am not advocating Ludditism. Yet it is also incumbent upon us dissidents, or I might say men of The Rectification, to recognise this dynamic in the orientation of technology, and employ where we may a wisdom at variance with common doing. We do this not only because we lay claim to more accurate perception, and so should seek to mature this understanding beyond the commonplace; to actually advance wisdom, but because there are true practical advantages intimated in clean, independent, parsimonious and timeless technologies, even if it is difficult to prove it by objective metrics. E. F. Schumacher approached this idea with the concept of “appropriate technology”, wherein the truly scientific mind freely applies tools of the correct sophistication to a task, weighing the marriage of problem to solution with the holism of a philosopher and not the tunnel vision of the technician.
Not only do I believe that there are real advantages to be had in cultivating our skill in simpler, more elegant technologies of all sorts, but it does not seem outlandish to suggest that circumstances may oblige us or our children to rely on there regardless of preference. We should elect to forsake these double-edged advantages where practicable so that we will not be confounded if suddenly stripped of them. Our bodies and skills need to be weaned from our dependence on gadgetry, trained to be capable of working closer to principle where necessary, or where we can afford to work in better devotion to beauty.
I can imagine a polity where fields are cut with scythes, boys hunt rabbits with home-made crossbows and zeppelins plow the skies with quiet grace. I think that where wisdom is applied there is no incongruity in a man daubing his timber-framed house in simple lime and yet building vessels to reach the stars, but I think that the shape of the machines he forms will be very different and will evince that special aptness which not only serves but pleases. This is not a utopian manifesto. Even if possible, such a vision can only be held as a fond, distant speculation in this day, but our imaginations, where calibrated by wisdom, are the god-given testing grounds of the ideas we consider. In the small ways we now might, let us test these things for true.
Great piece, very interesting.
I'd distinguish between tools & machines: tools require or at least allow real skill, they can become extensions of the human; machines require technical knowledge and permit little human influence. Quote from Blood Meridian came to mind:
"You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. You believe that?
I dont know.
Believe that."