Human beings must become themselves before they die. And because they die, there is no such thing as unequivocal human “progress”—no such thing as a collective humanity growing better, faster, or stronger.
Each generation begins again, and whatever the last generation achieved does not repeat itself in their children as if encapsulated in their genetic code. Any improvement of the human lot depends on human love, that is, on the successful giving and receiving of reality by dying people to growing people. Fail in this regard, and the whole thing is a wash.
Of course, there are books to the contrary—sordid little books about how mankind teeters on the edge of a new phase of evolution, about how the homo was once only erectus but now, with his phone, stands to graduate into something like a deus. This thinking is often called humanist. Really, it is only human-ish. And it is only human-ish because it forgets the importance of that oh-so-human word—if.
It is customary, among Muslims, to pepper every sentence with inshallah—if God wills it. It is a commandment, among Christians, to say, “If the Lord is willing, we will live and do this or that” (James 4:15). For Orthodox Jews it’s be-ezrat hashem and for Southern Protestants, “God willin’ and crick don’t rise.”
This universal religious charism of adding an “if ” to every proposed future irks the humanists, what with their lexicon of “necessary phases” and “singularities,” their aesthetic of inevitable leaps of progress. It’s as if, at the annual conference of Californian futurists, after every TED talk gushing over how, soon, we will 3D-print our sausage, some shuffling, flea-bitten rabbi were to take center-stage and add, “but who knows? Who can say? Perhaps not! Perhaps the computer will go kaput!”
Yet the humanists are inhuman, and the rabbi is not, for it is the nature of all human development to depend on an exchange between generations that cannot be determined in advance. To consider every technological development under the hermeneutic of the “if ” is to consider humanity as humanity— an animal that only ever might successfully transmit what it knows, might successfully pass the football of knowledge before the tackle of death.
The humanists are inhuman, but let us not be taken for fools: their “philosophy” is more materially determined by the stock market than spiritually determined by any insight into the human condition. For the Zuckerbergs and Musks of our technological empire, every spiel about progress is a pitch for a product. Within the religious consciousness, you might buy a smartwatch, who can say? Within the humanist consciousness, it is inevitable that you will, so buck up. Humanism is a philosophy developed post facto to justify pitching every iPhone as the Inevitable Next Step in our Improving Human Future.
The non-inevitability with which man gives himself to man makes me nervous. I feel the fragility of the human family every time I light up a device, knowing that neither I nor anyone I know could possibly create, maintain, or fix the system by which it apparently serves me. The world relies on systems requiring specialized sorts of knowledge without guaranteeing that these sorts of knowledge will be lovingly handed on, lovingly received. I do not mean to argue that the modern world is the first to notice or fear the contingency of human progress as it leans so heavily on a love that it cannot promise. The same religious traditions that emphasize the great “if” of human continuity demand such antique behaviors as “sons being obedient to their fathers” and “fathers turning their eyes to their children”; as respect for the old and care for the young; as never moving a landmark or changing a law lest we sin and disturb the delicate dance by which geriatrics give the world to infants before they turn to dust. We have always feared collapse.
Even in Christendom, I can still imagine a man becoming awfully aware that, unless the skill of the trades were to be passed faithfully from master to apprentice, the whole thing could go belly-up; that we could end up as the barbarians after the fall of Rome, men among ruins, people who simply do not know how to construct and maintain the various arches and colonnades under which they nevertheless congregate. It is not enough that a people triumph, that they build the world in their image, that they make amazing things—unless a tree bears fruit, it is cast into the fire. The achievements of Christendom, like the achievements of Rome, may well end up like the property of the eunuch—amassed for a lifetime, but with no child on which to be bestowed.
But how much more does the specter of collapse haunt us, we beepers and boopers of a victorious technological empire? The barbarians did not receive the Roman tradition of making concrete—the method was lost for several hundred years. Their military technology, likewise kaput. But hey, who needs concrete? Who needs the phalanx? The people of the collapsing Roman Empire successfully received and transmitted a baseline of agricultural knowledge that enabled them to survive. They may have lamented the loss of high culture, but they could comfort themselves with the warmth of the low.
But it is precisely this tradition of low, peasant culture that has been obliterated from our living knowledge. Even farming has become a job rather than the human vocation, quintessential and sine qua non. Building is a technological activity known to a few. The basic skills by which people “get by”—from sewing to salting, building to brewing—have become professional commodities produced by intensive technologies and sold for a price rather than a human tradition given and received. How could we, knowing that there have been periods of history in which all manner of technologies, from making concrete to indoor plumbing, “died” with a generation, imagine that the making microchip processors will not do the same? How could we who, in a mania for technical means, very nearly lost the tradition of breastfeeding imagine that we are safeguarded from losing the complex systems of knowledge and action required for watering fields by automated drone?
No technology is fruitful by itself. A smartphone may allow us to speak in tongues of men and of angels, but without the love by which the younger generation is raised up to the ownership and knowledge of smartphone production, it is nothing—a blip on the screen. The leaders of our technological empire are aware of this, and so they describe their devices as coming in “generations”; as having parent devices; as growing and evolving. They halo technology with a fecundity it does not really have, even as they technologize actual human fecundity with devices it does not really need. This comforts us against the obvious loss of human sovereignty that comes with a life lived in and through a constantly proliferating technological culture.
Liberals like to imagine technological progress as the progress of things which get better all the time. Man is an onlooker of this progression, and not its king and cause—though sometimes he gets to partake in it when he is imagined as a thing amongst things, dutifully improving (or evolving). But in fact, the apparent “necessity” of technological progress depends, at every moment, on human freedom, and not simply on the inventing of this or that device, but on the persistent unity between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, masters and apprentices, in which an invention—whether the lowliest device or the grandest construction of state—is seen as worth giving and worth receiving, one to the other.
As of yet, it is the mode of liberal capitalist states to enforce the apparent necessity by which an invention persists in being and is transmitted from one generation to another by the production of conditions of scarcity, in which people’s livelihoods are tied directly to continued technological production. That is to say: we will either learn to code, or we will starve; we will receive what is handed down because there are no jobs otherwise, and there is no subsistence available to those without said jobs. In this way, the world becomes cold and harsh, and each generation grows bitter in their distinction from the last, for rather than receiving what the previous generation saw as worth receiving they find themselves enslaved to what the previous generation invented: and they scrounge about for a way to do the same thing to their children.
This article originally appeared in the overture to New Polity magazine, issue 3.4 (Fall 2022). It is published here in preparation for the New Polity conference on technology.