Love in the Machine Edition
A field report from among the Doomers and the Optimists; dark flow and the language of love; coal miners and activist nuns; Dostoyevsky, Heaney, Weil; the nude in history and the history of the motel.
And it’s the old religion
But the urge remains the same:
Freedom from the body,
Freedom from the pain.
—Florence & the Machine, “Old Religion”
The revelation in Christ of the mystery of God as Trinitarian love is at the same time the revelation of the vocation of the human person to love. This revelation sheds light on every aspect of the personal dignity and freedom of men and women, and on the depths of their social nature.
—Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church
Friends,
What does it mean to love? What does it mean that what and how we love shapes us as much as, or more than, it does the object of our love? How do we learn to love well—not only to love the right things, but to love them in the right way?
These might seem strange questions for a gathering of technologists, academics, writers, mechanics, and other assorted eccentrics who have come together to hash out the implications of the Technological Age under which all of creation currently groans. And yet the questions came up again and again, as I sat listening at the recent gathering of the “Doomer Optimists,” co-hosted by the Savage Collective, in rural western Pennsylvania. The conversations, among both panelists and participants, orbited, explicitly or implicitly, around these fundamental questions of love—questions which, I came to see, were framing the entire event, more than any particular debate around any specific technology. As they frame the problem of living in our current moment.
The Savage Collective is “a fellowship of writers, scholars, and tradesmen aiming to promote flourishing lives among working class Americans by examining and improving the conditions of labor in the Machine Age,” based in the environs of Pittsburgh, PA. The Doomer Optimists are a larger, and looser, nationwide grouping of those who—well, the precise definition is a matter of some ongoing discussion. The capaciousness is part of the point. All I knew before I went is that among them were people I would be happy to call friends, even if I had not yet met them; people who were creative, and generous, and committed to thinking through how to live well in our current age with both rigor and charity, whether or not we agreed on everything, or anything. That’s usually all I need to know. And I was happy, as ever, to be proven right.
The discussions returned again and again to this: that the problem of technology, its appropriate use or its regulation or its ultimate rejection, is the problem of understanding what it is to be human, and what humans are for, and what kind of creatures we are. And the problem of understanding what it is to be human is the problem of love, because we are before anything else, creatures who love, who have been loved into existence, and strive imperfectly to return it. If some have sought, on a more practical level, to define us in the first instance as tool-using creatures, it is only because we love our lives, and naturally seek the means to enhance them; because we love our families and communities, and want to provide for them and protect them; and because we love Creation and want to more fully participate in it. Love is inescapable for us; the most hardened and cynical heart can and must love, even if it has learned to only love its own pride, its own pleasures, or the dark consolation of its own wounds.
Thus the risks of various technological regimes, at bottom, come down to how they cultivate or degrade our loves. The allure of transhumanism comes down to, on one hand, a disordered love of the otherwise noble impulse to overcome our weaknesses, and on the other hand, a failure to love our created limits, our given natures. You may find something like this across the board. The addictive attachment to a smartphone is often a disordered and ultimately insatiable hunger for the feeling of connection; social media rage often a distorted pursuit of our need for a tribe; novel reproductive technologies are often tragic expressions of the understandably overwhelming desire for a family or, inversely, for a romantic love that will finally cause us no sorrow and impose on us no obligations; many of our culture’s most isolating features can be understood as a misguided push for positive agency and autonomy, while its authoritarian and surveilling impulses speak to a need for order and stability in the face of mass disorientation; “doomscrolling” is a deformed immersion in the otherwise wholesome hunger for novelty and exploration. Even the techbro projects toward “solving death,” which are too easy to mock, touchingly reveal, more than the fear of death, the inescapable longing for transcendence, eternity, and the redemption of all things.
This is the significance of the concept of “dark flow,” alluded to by writer and panelist Farahn Morgan. Our august social scientists use the term to describe the consuming, dissociative state of addiction, in which time and the outside world dissolve into a sort of hazy dirge, revealing that what is pursued is not the object of addiction per se, but precisely the hypnotic state of being hopelessly in love with it, a fragile state which as it degrades must be constantly renewed.
But this is only an inverse, fallen mirror of what all artists know to be one of the most precious and productive gifts of their vocation. We are indeed made to be hopelessly in love. Dissociation is a cheap knock-off of transcendence. The transporting state of authentic, creative flow, in which time likewise dissolves, and we learn to be hopelessly in love, not with escapism or self-destruction, but with the rhythm of words or with sunlight on the side of a building, is, I dearly hope, a foretaste of the Kingdom.
In this way, diagnosing the root of our disorders, and the beautiful loves towards which they gesture, can help us thoughtfully and coherently discern our tools. In Illich’s framing, it can help us know when we are using them (which can be good or bad) and when they are using us, or allowing others to use us, or encouraging us to use others (pretty much all categorically bad). In any case, as is now common knowledge, they are busy shaping us. More specifically, they are teaching us our loves back to ourselves. In this sense they are reaching into us at the absolute deepest level. Our challenge is to cultivate the awareness of how they are doing this, whether through intuition or analysis or experiment, and to act wisely on this knowledge, whether individually or communally.
Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision.
—Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality
Practicing this skill can help us avoid the sense that some of us sometimes have (or at least that I have sometimes had) that our own tech-skeptical impulses are asking us to draw more or less arbitrary lines, using some unpersuasive heuristic like “rejecting all technology invented after I was 15 years old.” It can give us a more mature understanding of why glasses or books or antibiotics or Quinacridone pigments or pizza ovens, and even email and Twitter and Wikipedia, have been good additions to our human toolkit, while artificial wombs are not. (Though I have learned through hard experience that pizza oven innovation can also go too far.)
It can help give us the confidence to reject the worst in technology—that’s the easy part. More importantly, it can give us the confidence to accept what is good in human ingenuity and innovation, and make fruitful use of it, in dialogue with our natures and the traditions in which we participate, rather than adopting a purely defensive posture. It can help us baptize and integrate what we can and toss into the fire what we cannot, and help us cultivate, as the prayer goes, “the wisdom to know the difference.”
To this end, particularly engrossing were the discussions that plumbed the history of technological development and local cultures, a practice that can give us the distance necessary to start to see how specific changes have shaped specific human communities and specific human loves. Local boy Oliver Bateman Did the Work by delivering an overview of the western PA coal industry, a rendition at once rousing and tender, told through the story of one man, a story of the dignity of productive labor even amid objectively harsh and seemingly dehumanizing conditions. There was also the story of Sister Mary Fides Shepperson, the first woman to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, whose commitment to the life of the local convent opened up onto a long public career as a teacher, writer, and peace activist.
It is fitting that Morgan’s talk on the folklore of her native Appalachia centered on her distinction between two languages: the language of love, and the language of efficiency—the language of machines and algorithms. The language of efficiency is impersonal, anxious, and self-serving; the language of love is personal, deliberate, and oriented toward the well-being of others. Clearly we must choose wisely. But the history of labor, as well as the competence and devotion to craft of the mechanic and the long-haul trucker and the hacker, testify to how we can learn to better love our machines, too—personally, deliberately, and always with an eye to how they may best serve others.
Amor Vincit Omnia. The Shepherd seeks to gather all things to Himself. Even, perhaps, in the end, the ambitious hopes for transcendence that drive our restless innovation.
Links.
Read Oliver Bateman’s full talk on Robin, the coal miner.
Read Farahn Morgan on Maryland’s data center battles. Then subscribe to County Highway and read her on the Healing Appalachia addiction recovery music festival.
Listen to Ashley Fitzgerald’s conversation with Leah Sargeant on the dignity of dependence.
Read Tessa Carman on Miłosz, Simone Weil, rootedness, and transhumanism.
Read Emma Collins on why smartphoness are being unfairly villainized.
The long arc of Seamus Heaney. “I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”
Alice Gribbin on the nude.
Knausgaard on The Brothers Karamazov, that “novel of voices.”
Probably also a good time as ever to be reading Dostoyevksy’s Demons.
The illustrious hundred-year history of the roadside motel.
A beautiful reflection on painting, attention, sickness, and devotion: “Somebody loves me enough to keep looking.”
Why is it so easy to rob a museum in France?
Help me to create a love eternally alive
From my constant quarrel with the world.
A single link of inspiration and action,
Unknown to the productions of unthinking nature.
A thing only human, into which a swarm
Of electrons indifferently spatters its shots,
The work of a being who lives in a great house
All alone with its molds and its blemishes.
A still point that, contrary to history,
Divides what is fluid into good and evil—
Help me, mother. Strengthen in the man
What you knew as the child’s ardors.
Let me not put down my burden.
Let the wind from the Vistula flow like an ocean.
You who wished to grant me the gift of life,
May you be greeted in the name of God. Amen.
—Miłosz, “My Mother’s Grave”
May the maroons and fog-drenched ochres and the darkening greens of November soothe the palette of your heart,
As ever,
J
These talks are so interesting. I am almost done with my fall semester, taking Philosophy of Art & Beauty, and so much of it revolves on the idea of *Eros* — starting with Plato and going through Aquinas to Maritain and onward. This particular quote you cite caught my attention: “The language of efficiency is impersonal, anxious, and self-serving; the language of love is personal, deliberate, and oriented toward the well-being of others. Clearly we must choose wisely.” The fetishization of efficiency has everything about turning inward. A rightly ordered love turns outward, toward communication, community, and communion — all stemming from the same Latin root. It is generative and generous.
You’ve mentioned so much that warrants revisiting.
Great work, brother. Loved reading this.