Editors Note:
Man is a machine-maker and a world-builder. In the following essay, Andrew Willard Jones describes the “humane” world of the arts and, opposite and intermingled with it, the “technocratic” world. His argument does not allow for simple techno-pessimism, nor a boundless excitement for unilateral technological progress. Instead, he shows that our machines and technologies either bring us into the “ever greater difference,” the unconquered wilderness, or turn inward, mining the humane world for ever more scarce goods.
This essay is paradigmatic for New Polity’s approach to technology, and is being made available here, revised and updated from initial publication, in preparation for an upcoming podcast series and our Spring 2027 event on AI. In addition, this essay is available for PDF download here.
About 25 years ago, a good friend and I created what we called “the axiom”: “The future is always worse than you think it is going to be.” It began as a sarcastic and self-depreciating joke about how we were becoming middle-aged cranks before our time. Nevertheless, we were capable of amassing a significant amount of evidence in the axiom’s defense.
P. D. James’s 1992 novel Children of Men imagines a future in which, for some unexplained medical reason, no babies have been born, world-wide, for 20 years. James describes how nuts this makes people, especially women. They start having birthday parties for their dogs and cats. They call themselves pet “parents,” put their pets in strollers, and congratulate each other for owning such adorable animals. You can see the axiom: James needed a mysterious medical disaster in order to make such a scenario believable, but it has more-or-less come true without one. The future is worse than we thought it was going to be.
In the 1980’s, it was a commonplace of the paranoid right to worry that the government would insert microchips into us or tattoo barcodes onto us in order to track our every movement. In the novel 1984, when Orwell imagines the government spying on everyone, he imagines them mandating two-way screens in every home. In both cases, we predicted that tracking and surveillance would require an immense expenditure of government power and that people would acquiesce only for fear of the consequences of not doing so. But what has actually happened? Everyone voluntarily carries around an extremely sophisticated piece of surveillance equipment and allows it to moderate their access to information. Fear and force were basically unnecessary: we all bought smartphones just “cuz”—because they were new, because we liked funny videos, because it felt pleasant and powerful to be able to waste time scrolling and prodding at a screen. Depressingly, people don’t really care about freedom. The future is worse than we thought it would be.
We used to talk about designer babies. The idea was that, in the near future, scientists would be able to manipulate the genes of babies in utero or the genes of their parents’ gametes in order to produce perfect children. Want a boy? Easy. Want blue eyes? No problem. Tall? We can do that. The 1997 movie Gattaca was based on this premise. But the way in which we have actually come to “design” babies is very different. We produce 10 or 30 embryos in the lab, see which ones have which traits, pick the one we want, and kill the rest. In Gattaca, everyone was healthy because everyone was “designed.” In reality, diseases like Down Syndrome are all but eradicated because anyone who is suspected of having them is killed. The future is worse.
Since the 1950’s we have imagined that, in the future, we would have flying cars, jet-packs, and spaceships of all sorts—as in Back to the Future, Blade Runner, or almost any sci-fi movie produced before 2010. Our reasoning was obvious: people like going places and they would invest their resources in getting more of what they liked: vehicles that would allow them to go places faster, easier, and with greater freedom. But what really happened? Instead of developing machines to send us zooming through the world, we invented the world of the screen, where a crummy, manipulative version of the world flows into our heads without us having to get out of bed. This has resulted in strange phenomena: teenage drinking has decreased, teenage premarital sex and out-of-wedlock births are way down, teenage car accidents, crimes, and arrests are no longer a significant social problem. Every negative consequence of adventure in the real world, even childhood bone fractures, is fading. The objectives of conservative-leaning social workers have been achieved by a universal simulation of youthfulness, wonder, transgression, and risk. Again, the future is worse.
We used to think that the progressive march of ever-increasing hedonism would lead to a future of “free love” in which everyone would be having sex with everyone else. Dystopian novels from We to Brave New World to Love in the Ruins all imagined something like this. But what really happened when we finally shed sexual inhibition? Pornhub, and with it the fact that people are having less sex now than anytime on record. The prudes of the 1950s were way more sexually active than the libertines of today.
I think I have proved my point. The axiom isn’t just a joke. But I have come to realize that it has a limited application: it is an observation of the downward spiral of all technocracies. A technocracy is not merely a society that is full of machines. It is a society that is a machine—or at least attempts to become one. Like democracy or oligarchy, technocracy is a form of power, a regime—a way of ordering mankind and the world that both posits and produces a future for both. This is the “future” that my friend and I have always found “worse.” But if contemporary discussions concerning the latest and greatest technology—AI—are anything to go by, we do not really understand why our future is always worse; why our technological progress and the promise of our inventions always seems to end in something lame and disappointing; why we are not happy wielding our new, immense, and impressive power. We do not understand technocracy, the form of power in which we all (at least partially) reside: I hope to shed light on this mystery.
The Humane
Despite the newness of any technology, it is still the product of human power—a thing made by men. We are the source of technological creativity, the ones who build machines and mechanisms. Here, I want to explore the idea of man as a machine-maker. I choose the potter and his pot as my example, not to oversimplify or ignore the complexities of the digital technologies that so concern us, but to bring into relief “technology” and “mechanism” as they appear in even the most pre-technological and non-mechanical arts.
When a potter crafts a pot, he sees into the nature of clay. He sees what it is and, in doing so, what it could be—in other words, he perceives the act and the potency of the clay. The potter sees the form of the pot in the nature of clay. This perception does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, knowing clay—its act and potency—requires knowing the world around the clay. In order to see what the clay could be, he has to see what other things are: potency is only activated by something already in act. For a pot to emerge out of the clay, the potter must do something to the clay with something already there, with water, his hands, the kiln. He must understand the form of these things and so their potency, and so everything that interacts with them. This means that in order for the potter to see the clay as a potential pot, he must have a vision and knowledge of a world, a complex and mysterious “whole” made up of things and their relations, a world in which pots appear possible and desirable—a world in which they belong.
This vision is not an extrinsic “looking in”; the potter’s knowledge is not merely “passive.” Clay, simply, does not have the power to become a pot apart from the knowledge and world of the potter. In other words, the potter’s vision of the world—a world in which pots are possible and desirable—is constitutive of the nature of clay. Without this knowledge, “clay” would not be clay as we know it: that is, clay with the power to become a pot. This creative, world-altering knowledge is an art (in Greek, a technê).
Pots have an “end”; they are made to be artifacts with purpose in the world. The potter who sees a potential pot in the clay cannot see this purpose in a vacuum, apart from other things. He only sees the clay “crying out” to be molded into a pot because he considers—in his own mode—-the “final end.” The art that brings together the clay, the water, the kiln, his hands is intrinsically bound up with the table the pot will sit on, the broth it will contain, the person who will dip his bread into it and who will smile at his friend sitting across from him. We can say then that, ultimately, the art of the potter concerns the purpose of the whole world. In this way, every pot ever made exceeds the art of pottery, considered on its own. The potter sees the pot in relation to the world: this “total” idea, the “exemplar,” is what the potter holds in his mind as he works on the clay. When the pot comes to be through his work, it comes as an addition to a world that was waiting for it, and in joining that world it makes the world more a place where pots belong and are useful.
The world of the arts is necessarily a social and shared world. The craftsman begins as a child who must learn the many arts that structure his family’s world. He must learn how to speak, what things are, why he is there, and what others are for. He is shaped—as clay by the potter—by the craftsmanship of his family: according to the art of family life, the art of education, the art of household management, the art of rule. All of these situate the child in a world of forms and ends. As the child internalizes and so becomes a master of the family arts, he becomes a person who belongs in the family; even more, the family becomes more the place where the child belongs. This process is one of con-corporation: the family is modified in the direction of the child as the child is modified in the direction of the family. This is what it means for the family to be his home; a world where he dwells as himself; a world that needs him in order to be complete, to be a whole.
As an apprentice, the child brings this world with him. He has to learn, simply, how clay is shaped into a pot, but even more how the pot is to be incorporated into his world, the world in which he and his family belong. An art is never in fact some generic skill. An art is a deep, abiding understanding of a person in his world—it is a habitus, a second nature. When the master instructs the apprentice (in such a way that the apprentice will one day become a master) his instruction must be personal, must be directed at this apprentice, this person. This is because mastery is nothing other than the integration of the art into the person himself and so the integration of the person into the world that includes the art—and a modification of the art, and so its world, in the direction of the person.
Education is a sort of “crossing” of exemplars, the ideas that are held in the mind for art. The master sees in the apprentice what he wants the apprentice to become, a true master of the art. He holds an exemplar in his mind that is really an image of himself in the mode of the apprentice. At the same time, the apprentice sees in the master a model to emulate and holds an exemplar of himself as an image of the master. In this way, the master knows himself, as a master of the art, directly and the apprentice, as a potential master, only indirectly. The apprentice knows himself directly and the master indirectly. As they work together, their exemplars begin to cross: both modify their idea in the direction of the other’s as the contours of that idea become visible.
The relationship between the master and the apprentice is a profound dynamic of authority and obedience, a sort of conversation which creates the shared space of the crossing of their parallel but non-identical ideas.[1] This is a relationship in which both persons are modified and so con-corporated. The shared world that emerges from this is a realization of neither the master’s nor the apprentice’s exemplars: their ideas included a supposition of the other person and his world, and such a supposition is always a mixture of the truth of the other and the truth of one’s self. This shared world is different from the ideas of both and yet recognizable by both. It is neither univocal nor equivocal, but analogical. As this shared space grows in completeness, their relationship grows into what the tradition calls “friendship.” When the apprentice masters the art, it has become an art shared between two masters, the possession of neither. One master recognizes the art of another even though it is not what he would have made; this recognition occurs precisely because the master recognizes the art of pottery as including intrinsically other masters, operating in a world they share and so a world that none of them exhaust. This is what it means, I think, for one to recognize the universal behind the particular, the idea that transcends one’s exemplars. It is precisely this transcendance of the universal that allows the master to educate the next apprentice, and the next, and the next—ever deepening but never exhausting the art.
Every art includes the other arts in so far as they bear upon the possibility and desirability of that art. The carpenter must have an idea of pottery because pots sit on tables of wood—because the person who dips his bread into the broth is sitting in a wooden chair. As a member of a family, the carpenter has learned the art of manners, an art that includes pots. He has learned the art of doing the dishes, of hospitality, of nursing a sick friend—more “pots.” The carpenter knows what pots are, though not as the potter knows. For the potter, the pot is the ground for understanding the table. For the carpenter, the table is the ground for understanding the pot. The carpenter can’t make a pot nor can he teach another how to do it, but he knows one when he sees it, because he knows what tables are and who he is as a carpenter in the world. The full battery of learned arts, the habitus, the second natures that constitute a man as the person he is in the world—all of these include within themselves all the other arts that constitute the total, shared world in which the artist dwells with other artists. To learn an art is not simply to specialize or narrow one’s focus upon some partial and limited number of tasks. Rather, it is to know the whole world in the mode of that art.
Ideas of things are not, therefore, stale, identical repetitions of ideal forms. When the craftsman forms his idea, he is himself included within it. The idea of the pot is, at the same time, an idea of the world and an idea of the potter at home in it. The pot is social in two very important senses. First, as I have already explained, the art of pottery is social; it has an end that integrates it into the wider social environment; the products of pottery are capable of being evaluated by others because the art of pottery is implicated in all the other arts. Secondly, the craftsman’s pot images himself, and so his community, into this shared world. When his pot modifies the world, it modifies it by moving it toward being a home for the pot, for the art, for the potter, for the carpenter, for their communities, even as it modifies all these identities and associations in the direction of the wider world. Art, therefore, bridges the gaps between things and persons—through the construction of a world that bears the image of persons. We share, therefore, a world of non-identical repetitions—images of persons in things, and things in universals—and this non-identity is the condition of possibility for the world’s dynamism.
The person dwells in the world as himself and yet the world is not contained within himself. The carpenter lives in a world that is shared with the potter. The potter recognizes the table and the carpenter recognizes the pot—and yet they are not the same to each. This shared world is an infinitely complex crossing of arts that contain within themselves all other arts. The world is essentially analogical: essentially present and yet from every person’s place, open. The carpenter knows what a pot is, but the potter could show him something he doesn’t know. This showing would not undermine his carpentry, but allow him to improve it, because his art is in the world of the other arts: his carpentry is for a world that includes pottery. The world is not simply his idea; it is an idea that is shared through the conversation within the arts and between the arts. Perhaps we can conceive of the world as simply the place where conversation is possible—the space where language works.
In short, art creates a humane world. Man as an artist is engaged in a project of elevating the raw material of reality into his world—building that world through building himself. The products of art are humane, integral to who we are. The matrix of potency and act, of the relational forms that form the world and so underwrite any craft, is itself the product of craft. To state it boldly: we live in a world that is an artifact.
This understanding might tempt us down any number of metaphysical dead-ends. We might end up “thrown” into Heidegger’s mysterious “clearings” where beings appear without warning, wherein we try to ground the world on itself and get lost in being’s circular flow. We might, like Derrida, get caught in our categories and words, in our self-referential arts which appear as inscription (law rather than conversation), so that meaning is always deferred until it vanishes into the groundless différance. Or we might, like Deleuze, try to ground the whole in desire and so find a world of endless frustration, of desires grounded on desires which are never satisfied. Each of these approaches attempts to describe the whole of the phenomenal world through one of its movements: identity, artifice, or desire; each attempts to articulate an effect greater than its cause, a whole grounded on a part. The world as social construction, then, becomes a tragedy.
If we want to save the world—which I think we should—we have to make a theological move: The raw material of reality is not that “raw.” St. Thomas, following Augustine and most of the Christian tradition, called reality a product of art, albeit a divine art. God fashions the world according to exemplars, ideas, each of which includes within itself every other idea—because each of them is God thinking himself in a different mode. The parts of reality are already a world, a whole, bound up together in a matrix of potency and act and directed toward a desirable end: communion with their divine source. Man is most like God because he is given intellect, a special participation in the divine mind. The tradition refers to the intellect as a light, an illumination, through which reality appears to man as already a world, albeit a wilderness; a world calling out for man to transform it; calling for his arts, his naming of the animals, his subduing and having dominion. Man does not move into this wilderness under his own steam, as it were. If he did, we would find ourselves back to Heidegger, Derrida, or Deleuze—trying to ground reality upon man. Rather, man in his nature is always already called into a wilderness that is integral and whole, into a world waiting to be humanized by a humanization that is both possible and desirable. As the apprentice is called by the master, so is man called by God.
Man’s creation of a world, therefore, is neither groundless, arbitrary, nor violent. The human arts that create the world are each an image of the divine art of creation in a different mode. This is the doctrine of the analogia entis, the analogy of being—the doctrine that saves metaphysics from the postmodernists. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 articulated it this way: “between creator and creature no similarity can be noted, however great, without an ever-greater difference being noted between them.”[2] Man’s ideas are finite (each being a thinking of himself). God’s are infinite (each being a thinking of Himself). Man’s ideas are images of the divine ideas; there is a real similarity between the two, but it is always offset by an ever-greater difference. Our arts, then, create a world that has no “backstop.” Everything we craft, everything that appears to us as this or that, has more behind it. Everything is a symbol: something that means something more. This “more” is the wilderness, the world of God’s art, not yet elevated into our own, but asking for it. We see it, we know it is there, not as something fixed, but as that which lies beyond and calls us to greater perfection, greater mastery. The wilderness is present to us as potential—a potential which is already in relation to the act of our world, that is, to our arts. Our arts already push, or perhaps pull, us into this realm of “more.” The potency that is integral to any act is greater than what that act has proper claim to, because every act is always a participation in the transcendent, is always more than it is and more than its resources can account for: potency outstrips act.
This allows for the creativity of the arts. The master potter, called by the divine, comes to perceive beyond all the pots that he has ever seen, into the darkness that lies beyond the pots, a seeing that renders the darkness penetrable—a wilderness and not an abyss. His art is a similarity to the divine art but, as such, it is also an intimation of that ever-greater difference that always exists wherever a similarity obtains between creature and creator. There is always another, better pot to make. This is why we refer to the master artist as being “inspired”: he creates something that has never been seen before and yet something that still belongs in the world, something that the world was calling for even though it did not know how to articulate it. The human world is looking for God, daring to move into the “ever-greater difference” as it is called into it. This truth is what renders our arts beautiful. Beauty is the inexplicable breaking through of the infinite into the finite[3] or, as we might say from the other direction, the seemingly preposterous extension of the arts of man into the art of God.
All craft, all technê, has its end in an artistry that is necessarily beautiful because all technê is always pointing beyond itself, always intimating more, and therefore always sublime. The development of the arts and the world they build is the construction of an ever-greater beauty. This is the essence and purpose of our rationality. It is not found in our sorting of the world into categories that we can then use in logical deductions. A computer does this. Rather, it is found in our undermining of mere categories with universals that always surpass our attempts at systemization: the “similarity” (categories) always calls forth the “ever-greater difference” (the transcendental) which gives space for our categories to be and to grow. This rhythm distinguishes the universals of reason from mere notions or opinions or variables of computation, and it is what distinguishes a techne from a knack. A philosopher is he who pursues the ever-greater difference, undermining every known “universal” in the pursuit of the true universal. The true craftsman is a philosopher of wood or stone or clay, undermining his art through its ever-greater perfection, refusing to allow it to “settle in” to a mechanical repetition. The true craftsman is the master of his art and so of the world that the art constructs, describes, and comprehends—his mastership is a dynamic rhythm between what has been done and what could be done, between the particular and the universal, the similarity and the difference.
Art, then, like philosophy, subsists in wonder and so in humility. Wonder flows out of our smallness in our greatness, out of the strangeness of being a little, finite, particular person who somehow participates in the universal. The insect is small, but it does not know that it is small. It is only small from the outside. Only something bigger than the bug knows that the bug is little. Man is different. Man is small on the inside. Man feels small. He looks up and sees what’s there: not as its equal, but from within his smallness. The tension between our limited, particular existence and our rationality—which knows the “ever-greater” universal—makes wonder possible. Our smallness is as integral to this experience as our greatness: wonder describes the very rhythm between the two. Wonder is the experience of our bold, even rash, turn toward the infinite by which we, who are always outstripped by the “ever-greater difference,” dare to claim “similarity” to God.
Here, then, is the relationship between philosophy and theology. It is not some sort of silly stacking of “grace” on top of “nature,” nor a merely methodological distinction concerning which data one uses in one’s reasoning. Philosophy begins in wonder, and wonder prepares us for theology, which frankly admits and thinks upon what philosophy intimates: that our every idea, our every work, is a participation in the infinite otherness of God who exceeds them. The smallness of philosophy is already a participation in the greatness of theology. Philosophy is a handmaiden, not in some servile conception, but in the Marian form—the servant who bears her own master into the world. The humility of the true philosopher and so of the true artist is an act of faith.
We can move into the difference only through the similarity—only through our categories. But if we are not to suppose that an effect can exceed its cause, this requires the condescension of that which is beyond down and into that which is present. The shallower world must be deepened with the resources available to it, a feat which is possible because those resources are open, through faith and the hope that accompanies it, to the greater difference. Mastership is always a form of worship and prayer. The master is led, as he himself leads the apprentice, through the crossing of his exemplars with those of the Master Himself. The master offers his ideas to God and God modifies them as he gives them back. God speaks back to the master in the idiom through which the master speaks to Him and yet God does not leave that idiom alone, but calls forth the potency that resides within it and which surpasses it, moving it deeper into the ever-greater difference. The master is always an apprentice, the father always a son, and his dutiful speaking and listening is what renders him truly a master, one who leads the humane world deeper into the true, the good, and the beautiful.
The Necessity of Mechanism
For the small child, the space outside the little humane world of his family is a wilderness. The father condescends into the child’s world, analogously formulating the truths of his more complex world into the idiom of the child’s. The father calls his son out into the wilderness—which is the world of the father. This is what makes the expansion of the child’s world possible—love from the father and faith and courage from the son. The child must trust his father and jump into the pool, must trust his father and pedal faster, must trust his father and get on the school bus. This requires a mechanization or “technologization” of the larger, deeper world—a temporary pretending, for the sake of the child, as if the “ever-greater difference” is exhausted in the “similarity however great.”
Let me try and explain: A master lays down laws that the apprentice must follow, must memorize, must practice without understanding. “If A then B,” “If C then D,” and so on. This is mechanism. The apprentice takes on the form of a servant “who knows not what his master is doing.” This is the only way for him to follow the master because the master is modifying the apprentice’s world in a way that doesn’t make sense from within his native resources. If it were otherwise, the apprentice would already possess the art. The master’s or the father’s “law,” then, is laid down and accepted as if nature itself. The master assumes the position of God; his ideas form the (relative) “wilderness” that calls out to the apprentice. This is why the tradition repeatedly asserts that rulership is the most divine of arts and that the ruler is to the ruled as God is to the universe.[4] The objective of the master is for the “naturalness” of the mechanisms (the infallible laws that provide paths for the apprentice out of his little world and into the wilderness) to fade away as that wilderness becomes his home. The laws are a tentative bringing forward of the apprentice’s smaller world into the greater one. Once that greater world is inhabited, the laws are not just inadequate but, in a real sense, wrong. Their rightness, their “truth,” was spoken into a smaller world that no longer exists.[5] Indeed, a child is not wrong to think that God is a kind old man in the clouds, but a grown man is wrong to think so. A master potter who attempted to follow all the rules that he lays down for an apprentice would be working against his own mastery, against himself; this could only be a lie or a joke.
The same thing occurs in all rulership, though at different levels of scale. The ruler calls his men out into their wilderness, into places that are not their homes, into practices and relationships that they have not yet internalized within themselves, places that are dangerous because they are unknown. In this space the ruler must use mechanism, law: “if A then B; if C then D.” He must organize his men and his tools in such a manner that his will is transmitted into collective action.
There are two movements here. First, the wilderness is often populated with criminals and bandits, with mercenaries and tyrannies, as well as with wild animals and dangerous terrain, all of which must be driven out or subdued. The ruler sees what his men cannot see and so they must act as an extension of himself. They must be organized in a martial manner. They are, in this narrow regard, interchangeable. The second movement is aimed at the interior of the men venturing out into the wilderness. As the world is extended, they must become the men who make it home. These men may not understand the ends of the ruler, but they trust that the ruler’s end is a more complete formulation of their own, and so pursue the proximate ends that are given them in faith. Here we find repetitions of the master/apprentice or father/son relationships. Here the men are most certainly not interchangeable, even though they are subject to mechanism.
I am thinking of conquest and war, but wildernesses are everywhere. They would exist quite without sin, violence, and disobedience. Wildernesses are what lie in the “ever-greater difference,” beyond or behind the “similarity however great.” Every relationship has a wilderness, as does every skill, every enterprise, and every individual in the interior of his own soul. The immanent world, the world of human construction is a world of analogical coherence and so a world permeated everywhere with ever-greater difference—with wilderness. And this world is situated in creation, surrounded with the ever-greater difference of the natures of things, each pointing to its divine source. This means that integral to the peace of the humane world is always the martial world, the world of rulers and the ruled, the world of expansion, of creativity, of danger and so of valor.
Every piece of the whole is called out into the wilderness from its own position within the humane world. The whole moves, not in a direction it comprehends, not with some quantifiable velocity along a measured trajectory, but into what is beyond, into a new dimension—supernature, we call it. Each and every person prays: the master prays, the apprentice prays, everyone invites God into their little worlds and listens to his utterance of truth spoken in their simple idioms—as a child listens to his father. Grace touches each and every person directly, moving them to rule beyond their ability and to obey beyond their ability. The obediential response of each person is the deepening of the whole humane world in the direction of the “ever-greater difference,” which makes the world an ever-more perfect, and so ever-more beautiful, image of God. This expansion of the humane world is not merely an enlargement of territory from a static center, like the pushing out of city walls. It is more like the expansion of the universe, in which every piece is pushing out. Every piece of the humane world moves in an ever-deepening dynamic of friendship—of father and son, master and apprentice—between men and between men and God. The temporal order of artifact is “pulled” into the ever-greater difference of the spiritual order at every point. More expansion of the humane world reveals more wilderness to be subdued, even as every art that subdues its wilderness renders the greatness of God and his creation more “real.” As the similarity moves into the ever-greater difference, what was once transcendence gains increasing concreteness in a now inhabited world of increased subtlety and depth, offset by an increased wonder at the even greater transcendence which the similarity now intimates.
All of this takes mechanism, takes laws, takes procedures: “if A then B” and “if C then D.” It takes positive commands, rules that those who are destined to grow in depth do not yet understand: “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.” But this subjugation is temporary, subordinated to what it would achieve: mastery, dwelling, a world in which man is at home. Man constructs the world into a temple to be with God and neighbor. But as he constructs, he delights in knowing that he will never finish. As he moves deeper into every art, every science, and every relationship, he finds no back wall; no mechanism which is “all there is”; no idol of stone which would abruptly halt his movements, ground the infinite in the finite, and so turn the whole back on itself, rendering reason (which grasps that there is always more) into a ruse. Instead, God is always present and always beyond. Man’s ideas are always present and yet always pointing beyond, always gesturing into the wilderness. This is what it means to have a spiritual soul, to be rational. In such an order, the future isn’t always worse than you think it is going to be, but quite the opposite: it is always greater than you think it is going to be.
Machines within the Humane World
Nevertheless, because the humane world is ordered to its expansion into the ever-greater difference, mechanism is always present, always useful, always demanded. This mechanism begins in the ordering of men through law, in the martial. But once men are so ordered, their labor becomes available for replacement by material machines. Men working as parts of a human mechanism, within “if A then B, if C then D,” can be replaced with mechanical devices because their work is not in this narrow respect human work, technê, at all. It is a similitude of nature: again, they need not know what the master is doing. Their rationality is not in play. They may operate as a “force.” The ruler of the mechanism imposes an idea, an exemplar, on nature. He is imaged indirectly in the product of the mechanism in a manner analogous to how God is imaged in the laws of nature themselves. To make a machine is to concretize a time and manner in which man operates as a force of the physical world for the sake of his art, and to replace man with an arrangement of the physical world that attains the same ends.
A machine, then, is a sort of infrastructure for human art as it struggles into the wilderness. Machines operate in the martial sphere, in the borders between the humane and the wilderness. They do not replace art but the work of the laws of human mechanism. Nevertheless, they replace only a piece of the martial ordering of men: the piece within which men are ordered interchangeably and not the piece ordered toward the integration of men into the newly subdued wilderness. The gun enables men to fight more effectively than does the sword. The gun makes war more efficient. But the gun adds nothing to the purpose of war, which is peace. Insofar as the fighting of men is mechanised, parts of that fighting can be turned into material machines, but the fighting of men is ordered always toward the dwelling of those men in peace. The gun does not achieve the end of the art of war any more than does the drilling of soldiers into interchangeable fighting units. If machines are truly operating within the martial movements of a humane world, they are working toward expanding the world of the ruler, of the designer of the machine, to include the machine’s operators, to include the mechanized men who run the machines. The machines need not go away—the martial is always and everywhere present—but the mystery of the machines must, and does, diminish. The machines become less amazing, less opaque, as they are brought up into the humane world, as the slave who knows not what his master is doing is transformed into the son or the friend, as the operators of the machines become masters of them—masters who are able to freely and creatively use them for the sake of their art.
An expanding humane world, then, is a world that may well produce more and more machines as the infrastructure for its ever-deepening arts. In the process, the skills of the apprentice are forgotten. But the arts that made use of the skills are not. The machine is a point of decision: to automate some of the laws of an art, so that its artists may push the art in a particular direction.
Consider the art of making music. The deep art is a mastery of tone and harmony, of the emotions that respond to sound and of the symbolism that sound is mysteriously capable of carrying. Such art can be mastered through voice, through singing. But the voice has physical limitations—it is capable of only so much. In a society without musical instruments the masters of the art of music have the skill of song; they must because this is the medium that is available for the art. The choir master, in order to deepen the art of music, in order to push it into the wilderness, organizes singers, trains them in his vision—mechanizes them in part. But only in part. Around the boundaries of the “if A then B, if C then D,” every singer in the choir pushes the art of singing, now of choral singing, out and deeper. Nevertheless, something of “song” has been made available for the activity of machines. When musical instruments are developed, the masters of music are capable of expanding the art, of doing things that were not possible before, of going deeper. The musicians may in the process forget some of the skill of singing, but they do not give up the art of music. Rather the music machines serve the art and the musician is capable of using or not using them, of understanding their value as ordered to the art. He is the master of the machines because he is the master of the art to which they are ordered. All true arts, then, are architectonic. They order lesser arts and lesser skills and so lesser mechanism toward the higher art, aimed at a higher end. The composer, who no longer knows the skill of singing, who no longer knows the skill of the piano or the violin or the oboe, nevertheless can come to occupy the highest position in the art of music, can become the ruler of music, the architect of the symphony. But this does not make the members of the symphony mere technicians of machines—submission to law is only the first step in learning an instrument. Rather, the machines provide a new “place” from which to push out of the entire art of music into God’s infinity.
I am not thinking of some utopian ideal. The humane world is the world in which human beings actually live—always. It is the world that appears to them as coherent, the world of objects available for their activities. It is the world in which their language works and in which meaning exists. Men can live in little worlds or in big worlds, in simple worlds or complex worlds, in shrinking worlds or expanding worlds, but they always live in a world of analogical coherence and are therefore aware that there is more beyond it. This means that the humane world has a certain anxiety within it, a trepidation that is the space for courage and hope as it seeks always to move more perfectly into reality.
Technocracy
A technocratic world moves in the opposite direction of the humane world. As I have explained, in a humane world mechanism is necessary for subduing and establishing dominion over the ever-present wilderness to construct an ever-more unified whole—a world for men to dwell in. This dynamic can be turned around, however: man can be subdued. The world can gain dominion over him. As Nietzsche explained, power is always equally the power to give or to take.[6] When mechanism is turned inwards, not to expand the humane world but to mine its value, we enter the realm of the technocratic, which is, in its essence, exploitation.
The temptation toward exploitation is present at every border between the humane and the wilderness. The tradition calls this exploitation “sin,” a turn inwards, the construction of a world that rests on human standards rather than divine[7], a world built on the “similarity however great” (the human side of the analogy of being) as if it were the “ever-greater difference” (the divine side of the analogy). This is the process of dismembering wholes, fracturing coherences, transforming worlds into mere groupings of interchangeable parts without a prime analogate to unite them intrinsically. Rather, in sin, unities become united extrinsically, from without—as mechanisms operated by masters who would never cease to be the masters of their “apprentices.” Technocratic mechanism apes the move into the wilderness and so works within the humane world, but it is in actuality the inverse—an extension of the wilderness which destroys the humane world which made such mechanism possible.[8] This no doubt seems obscure, but it is really a matter of our everyday experience.
Take, for example, a lie. Language rests on a faith in the world in which it operates, a faith that cannot be derived from the use of language itself but is a step out into what exceeds it. The shared art of language operates, like all arts, only in a shared world that was built exactly as the art was perfected. Language operates on excess, on the bizarre reality that when two people have a conversation, somehow both leave with more than they came—somehow a surplus is generated. The fact that language works in this way is a demonstration that those using it are ordered together toward something greater than the world in which it subsists. It is this ordering toward something greater, toward something that is not “captured” in the immediate coherence of the world, that makes someone susceptible to a lie. How so?
Language is full of bits and pieces of mechanism. This is why it can be taught with grammar books, why children can be drilled and trained in the “language arts.” But these bits and pieces of mechanism only become language proper when they are elevated into the art of language, of communication—which rests entirely on a shared humane world. Language makes use of mechanism, of shorthands and conventions, of words and grammars, in order to convey excessive meaning—meaning that exceeds the knowledge of the one receiving it. Language uses mechanism to tell the child things he doesn’t already know. How is he to judge whether this “something new” is true? How is he to judge whether the speaker is deploying the mechanics of language according to the art of language, aimed at the expansion of the humane? The reception of speech is an exercise in trust and obedience—an act of faith. The liar can manipulate the victim into obeying his will precisely because the victim still has trust, as does the child jumping off the playground equipment into his father’s arms. The victim still views the liar as integral to his world, as a ruler using a mechanism to lead him out deeper into the wilderness—he trusts that the mechanism is aimed at more. Without this substrate of coherence and unity, lies don’t work. Lies turn the mechanics of language around. Instead of working within trust to convey surplus, the lie mines this trust, harvests its value—it uses up the love and peace “stored up” within the humane world. At the same time, the lie steadily destroys the conditions of its own possibility. As trust is exploited and value is scraped out of the humane world, faith becomes suspicion, and a new kind of wilderness returns to what was once subdued—the art of language stops working because the world in which it worked has been destroyed. What is left is the mechanisms, mechanisms that have now become foreign, outside the realm of coherent meaning. When the liar speaks, the mechanisms are deployed, the listener hears them and knows what they mean in true language, but no longer trusts that that is what they mean. The original meaning is only integral to the speaker’s agenda. He is using these mechanisms for some reason—whatever it may be. There emerges now a fracture, a dismembering. Meaning comes from two directions, bearing on the mechanism in the middle, but without crossing over. The lie initially worked because the liar and the victim were still friends. When the lie has thoroughly mined this friendship of all its power, it must shift to a threat. (Here is the classical distinction between the sophist and the philosopher, the same distinction between the tyrant and the king.) Through the lie, the ruler becomes a mere power which one resists or submits to or perhaps attempts to manipulate. The ruler is pushed out of the world of the ruled—he is no longer a father, but a wild beast; no longer a master, but a tyrant; no longer a friend, but man as wolf to man.
The wilderness that returns as the arts are dismembered is not the wilderness of God, calling out through its countless, unfathomable, inter-related natures for man to creatively extend his dominion into the infinite; it is a finite wilderness full of categories that interact as a mechanism, that have no mysterious ground of unity behind them, but are experienced as ungrounded power itself. The child in the humane world does not know what his father is doing, at one level, but his faith and love assure him of exactly what his father is doing at a deeper level. The child knows that he is being called into “more,” into deeper perfection. In this new wilderness, he no longer trusts that the ends of the mechanism are deeper and more complete instantiations of his own ends, an analogous expression of his own understanding. He becomes a slave who does not know what his master is doing—full stop. Such a slave seeks to protect his own ends, to protect his little, integral humane world, his home where he dwells, over against the ever-encroaching power, which makes no sense and yet is felt and yet causes pain or—if treated properly—grants rewards.
In other words, instead of being the wilderness of God, the “ever-greater difference” of an analogical whole, man faces a mechanized wilderness of “if A then B” and “if C then D,” a wilderness rent with equivocation, with univocities that cannot be bridged, with separation. This is the realm dominated by the human “knowledge of good and evil” as the Bible calls it, of the similitude of nature masquerading as the divine nature. The mechanisms and machines, the work of human hands, are experienced as foreign powers and feared as if they are gods. The essence of the technocratic is extension and maintenance of mechanisms which do not fade away, or shift to a deeper purpose, which do not make the world into a dwelling and do not call children into the “beyond” of their own perfection, mastery, and fatherhood. The men who build and maintain such permanent mechanisms do so to be “like God,” and they are not fools in this sense—the master is “as God” to the apprentice and the father is as God to the son. The mechanisms that both build are “as nature” to the apprentice and the son. But, again, the techniques which serve as courageous projects of the humane world are analogous participations in divinity—the ruler is as God to the ruled that those ruled might rise, might grow, might move beyond their childhood into equality, putting aside childish things and taking on the full power and glory of their own rule. This requires the courage and virtue of the ruler: requires him to serve, to teach, to not fear the distribution of his power and the strength of his sons. It is precisely in this moment of danger that the technocratic is a temptation: “you shall be like gods,” that is, “you shall establish mechanisms, not as means to humane ends, but in order to permanently fix your higher status vis-à-vis all others.” The mechanism becomes permanent and so men’s service becomes slavery—his work becomes labor and his own power, ordered mysteriously from without, holds him in subjugation.
Man, under such mechanisms, is forced to dwell in a truncated humane world, a remnant of humanity—maybe his tribe, his village, his family—that contends against, as St. Paul put it: “the principalities, against powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.”[9] He dwells “as an alien sojourner,” as St. Augustine puts it.[10] His home, the place where he dwells, is not at home in the world; his home is dwelled in as in danger. The trepidation that naturally marks the boundary between home and wilderness is converted through the technocratic to outright fear, but this fear remains “native” to his home—it is the home’s reaction to a foreign power. This motivates a man to serve the mechanism. But, as in the case of the lie, such a turning inwards of the mechanism is a form of cannibalism. It ultimately fails. One can compel a man into serving as an instrument only through a fear that resides in the world in which he dwells, the humane world, wherever it is found. First this world is lied to, then, when that stops working, it is threatened. Eventually it is torn asunder, and the mechanism runs out of fuel because it receives none from above. When the humane world of the family is finally exhausted, for example, love of family is no longer available to motivate men or women to serve in mechanisms of profit or mechanisms of war. Sin is murder, and the sinner is, in the end, a patricide—killing the source of his life.
In the humane world, mechanism is always less than the world into which it leads. It is always operated by those who create it and so comprehend it from deeper within the ever-greater difference—that is to say that mechanism is created by fathers, masters and rulers for the sake of pulling their sons into greater mastery, wisdom, and power. It is precisely this orientation that renders mechanism efficacious—it is always aimed at an end beyond itself. In the technocratic world, mechanism is “turned inward” in the same movement by which masters turn away from their art, away from wonder and humility and the rhythm that moves them forward into the wilderness. The technocrat posits his mechanism as “it,” as “nature,” as “the world.” The technocrat denies that there is any “beyond” to be pulled into, and so places a finite ceiling on his art’s infinite penetration into the wilderness of God—“the fool says in his heart, there is no God.” In this idolatrous manner, mechanism loses its servant-like quality and becomes greater than its master. Mechanism increases while the humane world, which gave its purpose and possibility, shrinks. The machine becomes greater than the world: a means pretending to be an end. It retains efficacy but loses agency—that is, it loses its orientation toward ends that surpass it. To the extent this occurs, the rulers are no longer masters of the machine but merely those who more successfully manipulate it and placate it. They, like the men they exploit, live in some humane world, but the machine creates a gap between the two, tearing asunder that coherent world and replacing it with two uncomprehending worlds, both made up of men and yet escaping the control of men who can no longer understand “beyond” them.
Literally, man forgets how he made his mechanisms. I am not claiming that he can’t take an internal combustion engine apart and see how it works, take its parts and rearrange them into some other engine. There can certainly be new inventions—at first, anyways. Rather, man no longer sees in the internal combustion engine any of the universals of the master who built it. In a technocratic gaze, man sees only the particulars. The art, the technê that produced the conditions of possibility for engines and rendered engines as means to an ever-greater end—the “beyond” of engines is forgotten. The technocratic man might build any number of different types of engines, making use of all sorts of new “technologies,” but he will never break out into the beyond of the “engine world”—that world is no longer where he dwells and that over which he has mastery. Instead it feels bigger than him, beyond him, structured by laws that he does not create and cannot dispense with but which are imposed upon him. He becomes consumed by a low-scale panic, living under the cloud of an impending disaster. He senses that he is losing control, and yet endlessly tries to assuage the anxiety of human existence by rearranging the same mechanisms, seeking new terrain to exploit: an exploitation that is the expansion of the technocracy and so the deepening of that anxiety into outright fear.
Perhaps the point could be explicated by an example from a space of human activity that we are still used to treating as true technê—the fine arts. I can imagine the masters of Renaissance painting devising machines or mechanistic procedures to help them produce their works. Let’s say these machines became so powerful that they could produce an exact replica of the Mona Lisa. Let’s imagine that they become so powerful that they duplicate not only the physical technique of the painter, but even his ability to recreate shadow and color—but always according to the type of rules that the master painter lays down for his apprentice. I can imagine such a machine producing new paintings, not exact copies of the Mona Lisa, let’s say, but the portrait of some other woman, some woman that no master painter ever laid eyes on. There would be no limits to the number of portraits such a machine could produce. To a man who does not have the art of painting, the machine would appear to replace the painter, to render him obsolete because he sees only the particulars in painting and so cannot see beyond what has already been painted. He might suppose that there is no sort of painting that the machine could not produce—and produce better, with more precision, more flawlessly than any human painter. Such a man might be able to take the machine apart and understand how it works, he might even be able to rearrange it to produce something other than fine art, perhaps to produce blueprints. He might suppose that great innovation was occurring, great invention. But it isn’t. The world as constructed by the arts that included Renaissance painting is not expanding, but shrinking. The painting machine will never, for example, come up with Impressionism. It will never come up with a work of art, properly speaking: a true innovation, a true development that occurs within the art but does not leave the art the same. In fact, as the machine is used to replace the Renaissance painters, the art of painting itself would be forgotten and the machine would appear to do something greater than any man could do.
Because sin, and so technocracy, penetrates human nature itself, we must add a layer to our understanding of the humane world. The humane world that is pushing out into God’s wilderness is not moving into nature, simply. It is at the same time fighting a counter-offensive against fallen nature. The martial structures that the humane world builds in order to expand are always at war, always tempted to turn inwards and they always, to a certain extent, give in to this temptation. This means that the wilderness of God and the wilderness of men co-exist. Before the openness of God’s wilderness can be found, the closedness of human technocracy must often be driven out, and so the soft anxiety within which courage works and the hard anxiety in which fear works are hard to distinguish. The City of God and the City of Man are confused and intermingled.[11] The distinction between a humane world and a technocratic world is not whether or not there is mechanism or whether or not there is technocratic corruption—there is always both. The distinction lies in the direction in which the whole is moving. Is the humane expanding or is the technocratic? Is wholeness being deepened or is it being torn apart? Is grace being received more than it is being rejected? There is nothing utopian, then, about this understanding of the humane. But there is also nothing dualist about it. It is always the case that the technocratic City of Man is parasitic on the humane City of God. It can only expand its war onto ground that has already been subdued because it cannot discover new truths; it cannot create, it can only use; it is not rational but merely mechanical. But—and here is a great irony—the greater the extent of the humane world, the more wholeness there is, and so the more potential fuel there is for technocracy: the bigger and stronger it can grow before it becomes exhausted. The corruption of the best is the worst.
Christendom
Christendom was the on-going construction of an integral whole. Christendom sought to unite the human arts into a whole of remarkable analogical complexity: from those governing agriculture and marriage, to philosophy, mysticism, stone work, and rulership. To the extent the project was realized, the peasant’s life was a different mode of living in the same world as the priest, the monk, or the nobleman, because all these modes of living in the world were images of a prime analogate that lay beyond them all. They all, in their own way, aimed at the same transcendent end. Christendom unified, combined, and merged the countless arts that make up the temporal realm into a single world. The great accomplishment of the medieval centuries was the uniting of differences, of unity without sameness. This great project of synthesis expanded the intelligible world deeper into the wilderness, subduing nature and pushing back the technocratic “powers” that infected it. I am not claiming that the craftsmen, nobles, scholars, and saints of the Middle Ages knew more about the physical cosmos (in the sense of sheer quantity of facts) than modern men. What I am arguing is that they knew how to know more than modern men. Their humane world was deeper and more complete and had greater potential than our own. They lived in a bigger world than we do—even if they hadn’t measured and cataloged very much of it.
As we have already seen, the wholeness of the humane world is prerequisite for technocratic dismemberment. Pottery must exist as an art in order for the procedures, skills, and tools of the potter to be torn from each other, for labor to be divided, for small mechanisms to be built that can be assembled into larger mechanisms that produce what seem to be pots. But they aren’t really the pots of pottery—they are forgeries that do not construct the world of intelligibility that makes them possible, but deconstruct it. It is because pin-makers made pins that Adam Smith’s example of one man drawing out the wire, another straightening it, a third cutting it, a fourth pointing it, a fifth grinding it to receive the head, and so on for eighteen steps, can become possible. As this division occurs, the art is forgotten and we mistakenly think that the old pin-makers were simply assembling the steps of our machines in a primitive and inefficient manner. In fact, they were doing nothing of the sort. As the machines do more, the scope of possibility collapses, because the machines do nothing new, even if they do the old things ever faster and with more complexity. The humane is the fuel for the construction of the mechanism, and this fuel is burned up in the process. Wherever the humane lingers, wholes remain that can be dismembered, fuel is available, and so a further expansion of the technocratic is possible. Francis Bacon wrote about torturing nature, about putting her on the rack and tearing her apart to learn her secrets. But this “nature” that Bacon encountered was not the raw nature he supposed it to be; it was nature already unified into a whole, into a body available for his dismembering.
A historical example might help us understand. One of the great humanizing feats of Christendom was the integration of the warrior class into the humane world. The chivalric knight ventured out into the wilderness, fighting the criminals and mercenaries, so that it could be subdued and brought into the peace. His form of warfare was humane. It included possibilities we can scarcely imagine: consider a form of warfare in which it was even possible that the “Truce of God” could be conceived of, let alone lived. As the Second Lateran Council explained the Truce in 1139: “We decree that the truce is to be inviolably observed by all from sunset on Wednesday until sunrise on Monday, and from Advent until the octave of Epiphany, and from Quinquagesima until the octave of Easter.”[12] Warfare was integrated into the liturgical calendar. Even on the days that they were allowed to fight, fighting was governed by an ethos of honor that dramatically reduced its lethality. Taking an enemy ransom was always preferred to killing him. The choosing of champions to fight in the place of armies was frequently done and the results respected. Christendom even outlawed the “murderous art of crossbowmen and archers, which is hateful to God, to be employed against Christians” because such weapons were too deadly and put too much distance between the combatants.[13]
Warfare is a far more subtle and complex phenomenon than we suppose. It is often assumed that when faced with danger, men enter into a “fight or flight” response. While this is a true description of human instinct when facing a bear or a wolf, it is not a true description of men facing other men. Intraspecies conflict has a whole different layer to it. Psychologists of warfare refer to it as “posturing.”[14] Posturing occurs when conflict is integrated into a symbolic world governed by rules through which relative strength can be measured without killing or seriously hurting the combatants. We see this in the animal world. Consider, for example, two bucks sparring during the rut. They are really contending, but they are not fighting to the death or even to serious injury. Rather, they test each other in such a way that the weaker buck can almost always back out and walk away. The same sort of thing happens with men. I grew up with brothers, and we fought a lot. But we had rules. We engaged in real struggle, with immense effort being put forward on both sides, but if one of us hit the other in the face with a closed fist, it was a violation of a serious taboo. We fought seriously without even considering punching each other in the face. We fought on a substrate of a humane world—there was an art to the fighting, we might say. My point is that the conflicts that inevitably erupt because of sin are themselves capable of being humanized; it is possible for the ground of conflict to shift in the direction of a humane world, to be fought on a substrate of a deeper peace. The humane world is not a utopia; it is a movement. Crossbows were outlawed within Christendom because, relative to its push out into the wilderness, they could only be a technocratic push in the opposite direction, against humanization. How could the crossbowman show mercy? How could he give quarter when his opponent had been disarmed or knocked from his horse? The crossbow was designed to inflict as much damage as possible with as little risk as possible. It was designed to remove the humane element in war. It was, therefore, dishonorable, immoral, and outlawed—like punching your brother in the face.
This humanization of war was the ironic precondition for its modern technologization. In the fourteenth century, kingdoms started lying to their knights. To be a martyr on the battlefield for Christ was a motivating value and a holy purpose which Christendom’s sons had been taught and trained to love and desire. This value was called upon, and this powerful trust was used, not in truth, but as a means for making men “martyrs” for their kingdoms. To fight for truth, goodness, and justice (and so for the whole) was shifted to fighting for one’s king. The mechanism that once pushed out was turned in. The warrior’s intense conviction that war could be meritorious, right, and good was the basis of the mechanism’s power. The knight was told that the men of his king’s rivals were not fellow Christians fighting on a substrate of peace but heretics and infidels, the sources of all disorder and wickedness that threatened that substrate. All the old honor codes had to be suspended: these were not fights between brothers but fights to defend the family itself—crusades.
The wars between Christians in the late Middle Ages became crusades on all sides. These wars culminated in the disastrous wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which killed millions. In this great transition, the humanized world of the warriors was steadily exploited, depleted, and replaced with technocracy. Religion and honor were used up at the exact same rate that bureaucracy was built and disciplinary regimes of rewards and punishments were deployed. By the end, only a fool still believed that he was fighting in God’s cause. The individual knights with their heraldry, their reputations for prowess, united in their persons through honor and fealty, were replaced with infantry, dressed in uniforms, wielding identical weapons, and following orders with no notion of what was going on, united through discipline—or worse, through pay. The warrior had become a soldier, an interchangeable, expendable part of a vast mechanism of death that did not give quarter. The old knights had been integrated into an integral world, perfected in virtue—in what was truly human. Any humanity in the new soldier was a flaw, a defect that the masters of the mechanism tried to train out of him, that he might become an ever more perfect instrument, a mere part of an extrinsically united machine. War became total war: a contest to the death fought between machines. It is not that technology made us better at waging the types of wars fought by the chivalric knights. Technocracy de-humanized war. We degraded ourselves to waging war in the manner in which technological power is ever-more efficacious. War changed because we changed to conform to the mechanism. The increased power of the technocracy requires the diminution of our humanity.
Andrew Ure, an important engineer behind the construction of the factory system, was explicit about this. He stated:
By the infirmity of human nature it happens, that the more skillful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become, and, of course, the less fit a component of a mechanical system… the grand object therefore of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his work-people to the exercise of vigilance and dexterity.[15]
In the move into modernity, the intelligibility of the world was re-deployed in such a way that the sources of that intelligibility, the arts, were necessarily destroyed. Our world has gotten more powerful as it has gotten smaller. Technocracy is imperialistic. The late medieval and early modern driving out of the humane on the battlefield was an instrument of the political classes who were engaged in conflicts that remained built, for a little while, on a more humane substrate. The infantryman of the eighteenth century was ideally a robot, moving as a mechanism to the orders of the officers. But the officers themselves operated on a lingering substrate of humanity. They operated according to rules of honor, which united who they were as persons with who they were as officers. The battlefield was not a senseless orgy of unchecked violence, because the officers were still following ethical rules that structured the conflict as it structured their life; there was still order beneath the disorder. There was still posturing, still an art to it all and so a sort of beauty. But the mechanization of war increased the power an army could bring to bear. As this mechanization grew, the lingering honor of the officer became a drag on this power: in the same way that the skill of the craftsman was used up and driven out of the factory, in favor of efficiency, tactics, and policies (in favor of parts assembled into various mechanisms) so the way of the officer was used up and driven out of the art of war. By the end of the Napoleonic wars, the noble officer of the eighteenth century was already anachronistic. By the end of the nineteenth century, his honor was a pageantry he indulged among his fellows in their (now private) lives, a memory which had little to do with the manner in which war was actually fought. Rather, the newly formed officer training programs taught the science of combat, turning the officer into a managerial professional, a higher-functioning yet predictable cog in the machine.
But this wasn’t the limit of the value that Christendom had stored up for exploitation. Through the nineteenth century, the relatively small ruling class of Europe was really a large extended family. This class was governed by a code of honor that gave them confidence in each other’s good faith. They retained control of the diplomatic corps and they deployed the machine of war against each other somewhat like professional football coaches deploying their teams against each other on the field. The competition was real, but they certainly didn’t mean to destroy each other: even in the midst of war, they could always get together and talk about bringing the “grand game” to an end over a nice, formal dinner. Their little world remained far more humane than the technocratic world of the army or factory over which they ruled. But a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. Either the humane drives out the technocratic or the technocratic drives out the humane, increasing raw power as it decreases that power’s scope of action.
The lead up to World War I was a victory for the technocratic. Over the course of the late nineteenth century, the mechanism of war had expanded from battlefield tactics and infantry training to logistics. The railroad made it possible to move millions of men and their supplies, but in order for it to work, meticulous plans and unbelievably complex timetables had to be worked out. The powers of Europe established “Staff Colleges” where officers learned how to construct these plans. They worked out multiple scenarios and drew up deployment plans to correspond: if France did A, then Germany would respond with B. If England did C, Russia would respond with D. The construction of these plans was part of the arms-race of the late nineteenth century through which the elites of Europe played their game of posturing, testing each other’s strength, and pushing each other back and forth like two bucks during the rut.
There could be only a finite number of these plans, and each interacted with each other in such a way that human creativity, decision-making, and posturing were ultimately evacuated from the art of warfare. Once a plan was initiated, every rival plan was initiated. Any delay, any pause would destroy the functioning of the mechanism and lead to defeat. The game of brinkmanship, the arts of politics and diplomacy still exercised by the elites of Europe within their little humane world of kinship and quasi-friendship was, therefore, driven out. The Tsar could not smirk at the Kaiser and move some troops close to the border, suggesting a possible attack—while really communicating, through this posturing, that some concession on the part of his distant cousin was in order. Rather, any twitch toward mobilization required, by the logic of the machine, that the appropriate counterplan be immediately put into action. The humane substrate on which the conflict operated was suppressed: the killing of a single man on the fringes of Europe initiated a multitude of prearranged plans and led to four years of war and 22 million dead. The old families that ruled Europe through their shared culture and code of conduct, which still bore the inertia of Christendom, were swept away by an extension of bureaucracy, expertise, and mechanism.
Once the technocratic is welcomed into the superstructure of the humane world, it introduces a cleavage, a contradiction that cannot stand. The City of God cannot “use” the City of Man. Either the humane world sets about driving the technocratic out or the technocratic continues its conquest of the humane. In which case the tool becomes the master and slavery expands. This is so because in a humane world, the craftsman images himself in the products of his craft; he is in the things he makes, essentially. He is supposed to be there. This is the very meaning of his art. By it, the world is rendered more human, more united and integral, more whole—art elevates the material world beyond itself, beyond its nature, so that it becomes a human thing, an artifact that welcomes man because it proceeds from him. The technocratic dynamic reverses this transformation of the material world into a home for man: wholes are dismembered and any residue of the worker in the product is a flaw, a defect to be minimized and driven out. This is the alienation of the human from the products of his work. Man is reduced below his nature; he ceases to become welcome within a world which works to erase rather than contain his image; he shrinks and his world shrinks with him, down to those little places where he is not alienated: perhaps with his family and friends. The mechanization of the worker moves on to the managers and engineers, whose arts are necessarily a flaw in the next higher level of mechanism, no less of a flaw than the self-willed intractability of the skilled workman below them in the factory. Mechanism is extended, eating up the humane that designed it from above even as it eats up the humane that fuels it from below.
Technocracy is neither rule from above nor from below: It is a regime that subsists within the gaps, in the wilderness between pockets of the humane, and it pushes those gaps out from the inside. This is why the future in a technocratic society is always worse than we think it is going to be. We always anticipate future technology from our current position, our current level of attained humanity, as if the new technology will just come join us here without changing our world. But this isn’t what happens. The expansion of technocracy is always at the expense of our humanity and of the world that it has built.
Our Future
Science will stop working. This is because science as the modern world understood it was a technocratic endeavor fueled by a lingering humane substrate. Scientists were enlisted into technocratic mechanisms; their discoveries were certainly exploited by these mechanisms. But the scientists themselves, at work in their labs, made true paradigm-shifting discoveries, exactly because their work was not technocratic: It remained an art, an expansion into the ever-greater difference. This is why, for so long, the natural sciences remained tied to educational institutions whose foundations were in the humanities. This is why people trusted scientists even though we no longer trusted politicians, businessmen, or even priests. It always seemed like most scientists were after the truth. This trust has been almost completely used up, a fact evident in the now popular call to “trust science”—something that no one, until recently, felt the need to say. The prestige of science was a lingering humane value that our technocracy is in the process of exploiting, of harvesting for an increase in power. Because we trusted science, “Science” is a useful slogan of propaganda. Money pours into laboratories, marketing and propaganda come to dominate first research initiatives and then research “results.” Belief in science increasingly means nothing more than devotion to the powers of the technocracy. Like the knights who continued to cling to chivalry in the cynical wars of the late Middle Ages, true scientists keep coming to the laboratory, trying to make things work through their creativity and rationality, discovering more through their imaging of themselves in the fruit of their work. But all this will stop. In the same sort of way that military technocracy drove out the honor of the officers and then of the diplomats, the humanity of science will be driven out. First, we will fill in the gaps between discoveries we have already made, reducing science to a cataloguing of uncatalogued and only potentially-useful facts. Eventually, we will forget how to do science altogether, and just become engineers and mechanics, maintaining the mechanism we already have and building ever more complex and powerful machines that never really do anything new. The fruits of past science will become alienated from us, and we will serve them like slaves who know not what their master is doing. The mechanism will advance out of control, but with great power—like a thunderstorm, fate: the fruit of human hands in the guise of nature itself.
Artificial intelligence will destroy the creative arts. It is commonplace to acknowledge the fine arts as the last holdout of true human creativity, where beauty is still found. But this is not quite true. Even in the most bureaucratic corporations and the most technocratic and cynical of endeavors—say, contemporary marketing—human artistic creativity has maintained a place. Somewhere along the line a graphic designer designed, a copy writer wrote, a jingle singer sang a jingle, and a director of videography worried about the lighting. All of these were little pockets of the humane—little stores of value that fueled the larger mechanism. AI will exploit all this; it will “train” on the artists’ creativity and then drive the artists out. As they fade away, we will first forget what genius in these arts looked like, then we will forget how to design, how to write, and how to film altogether. As we do, the ground on which AI stands will be mined to exhaustion. The generative AI bots will start training on their own productions, endlessly producing more with less until what they produce is unrecognizable as art—an event that will occur right as we forget altogether what art is or ever was. (If there is any importance to the notion of the so-called singularity, the convergence of computer intelligence with human intelligence, it is found in these movements through which our machines become our masters—not because the machines have risen to the level of the human, but because we are reduced to the level of the machines.)
The technocratic world is being constructed on the ruins of the humane world. It will expand for as long as there are resources there to exploit, worlds to be dismembered. It will then settle into the conquered territory and “run” as if nature itself. This is possible only because as long as humanity exists the humane world will not be completely destroyed; and human beings, in order to live at all, will always build little outposts of humanity, little worlds in which to dwell. These remnants, the remnants of the lowest level of human culture, little rump worlds of the humane, will be the fuel continuously exploited but never completely exhausted to keep the technocratic running.
Generative AI is an extremely interesting case. It is hard to imagine a more perfectly technocratic move than the mechanization of conversation itself. As the philosophy of the twentieth century came to profoundly understand, language is at the very deepest foundations of human sociality, identity, and rationality. Indeed our very experience of being human seems bound up in the art of language, of discourse. As the machines take over not only writing but reading, as they speak for us and understand for us, it is hard to see what of the humane will be left to mine. My suspicion is that if generative AI continues on the trajectory that it is on, society will inevitably divide into two classes: on one hand, a ruling class that becomes nearly completely subsumed into the AI governed world, a class of mere technocratic administrators, bureaucratic executors of the machine’s will; and on the other hand, an under-class, a class that must be kept beneath and outside the world maintained by the machines, the members of which will be compelled to talk to each other the old-fashioned way, to continue to use and abuse language, to innovate in expression, to live in a world that is in some way prior to the machines. This class will be necessary, so the language computers will have data to train on and value to mine: a helot class, not, as in the ancient world, a society of slaves forced to produce the material surplus for a parasitic consumer class, but a society of slaves forced to live in a world that is more humane, more “real,” so that the machines at the top don’t spiral into “model collapse.” The technocratic power at the top, if it is to expand the raw power of its machines, will be forced to limit its spread through society—to cut sections of society off from its increased power. This will create the class of “natural slaves” needed for AI training and will give the ruling class someone to “lord it over”: a return, in a new mode, of the situation of late paganism. Things could keep running in this way for a long time, but dreams of endless dynamic progress are delusional. Creativity comes from humans, and as the humane is eaten up it will become rarer and rarer—and more likely to be hidden away and kept secret. Our rulers will become the caretakers of static mechanisms, like the priests and god-kings of the ancient pagan regimes. This technocratic power will be experienced by the remnant of the humane—the helots that fuel it—as a vast, powerful, and hostile wilderness, outside the walls of their little world and yet always pressing in, always demanding sacrifices that the humans will not dare to fail to offer, services that they won’t dare refuse because, while they will hate that wilderness, they will believe themselves to be completely at its mercy. It will be a wilderness that is experienced as if it is nature, but not the nature created by the transcendent God, the nature of diversity finding unity through its constant gesturing into the “ever-greater difference” and motivated by the always-being-realized promise of abundance. It will be a nature built by human hands, a finite nature full of self-referential “similarities however great,” a nature of limitation, separation, and scarcity, full of finite and yet terrifying powers whom we both fear and beg for rewards. That is to say that the future will be full of gods. One technocratic arrangement may peter out as it is replaced with another. One pocket of particularly intense humanity may emerge, destroy a nearly spent technocracy, and then set about using up its humane resources, only to fall to a competitor in the same manner, in a cycle of which the pagans were acutely aware.
Again, the corruption of the best is the worst. The new paganism will be far more powerful than the old paganism because it is being built by burning the fuel of the profoundly humane world of Christendom. But nothing new will happen. Ivan Illich once argued that we don’t live in a post-Christian world, but rather in an apocalyptic world.[16] This seems right to me.
I have been a little gloomy throughout this essay in order to prove my point. In truth, all is not without hope. Technocracy is always parasitic on the humane. Humane societies always have technocratic impulses within them and technocratic societies are always built on a humane world. This means victory is always within reach. Humanity can win over our own creations, always. It is rather simple, actually. As the prophet Isaiah expressed with exasperated sarcasm: “Shall I fall down before a block of wood?”[17] We will always have the beachhead that we need for the counter-offensive. We will always have some friends, we will always have the Church, making the power of God’s grace available to us. This is all we need: the potency and the act necessary for the courage to expand the humane world at the expense of the technocratic. Christianity is this counter-attack and Christianity isn’t going anywhere.
Andrew Willard Jones is provost of the College of St. Joseph the Worker and senior editor of New Polity.
Notes
On conversation as concorporation see: Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (Bloomsbury: London, 2014), especially pages 77, 99, and 167.
“quia inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitude notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda.”
This is, of course, the definition of beauty which Hans Urs von Balthasar develops in great depth in his theological aesthetics. Aidan Nichols summarizes Balthasar’s understanding: “For Balthasar, the dimensions of the beautiful are ‘vertically’, an infinite depth of splendour, which, ‘horizontally’, is expressed in a materially graspable extension of form. The beautiful unifies – on the one hand – the definitely shaped form of something present, something on which the mind can come to rest, with – on the other hand – an endless sea of radiant intelligibility in which the mind can move without limitation. The beautiful is, as he would put it, the meeting-place of finite form with infinite light.” A Key to Balthasar (Baker Academic, 2011) 18.
See as representative of the long tradition: St. Thomas Aquinas, De regno, II.1.
We can see, here, the dynamic of the Old and New Testaments.
The Will to Power (Vintage, 1968) 193.
City of God, XIV.9.
c.f. Plato, Gorgias, 464d-465a.
Ephesians 6:12
City of God, 18.1
City of God, X.32, XI.1, XVIII.54; Exposition of the Psalms, Psalm 51; The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 11.15.20.
Tanner, I, 199.
Tanner, I, 203.
See, Dave Grossman, On Killing (Back Bay Books, 2009).
The Philosophy of Manufactures (London, 1835) 20-1.
The Rivers North of the Future (Anansi Press, 2005) 169-70.
Isaiah 44:15.