A Ramble on Technology, Tradition and Nature
When I held faith with the idea of some reconciliation between modern technology and traditional values - that there existed some modern world animated with the spirit of the past - I thought of how technology could manifest that same spirit.
My aims were naïve. I now understand, and I hope here to show how the two are entirely irreconcilable - that modern technology is itself the negation of such value. As it happens, my older, discarded thoughts on the matter are very illustrative of this conclusion.
Among the most invasive and widespread impositions of modernity is the road. These monolithic tarmac tentacles extend across the planet, transforming anywhere and everywhere into nowhere. Have you ever thought about roads - I mean really thought about them? There are 33 billion metres of road upon the Earth. These aren’t organic trodden-paths, wrought from the footfall of a thousand years, they’re something grossly artificial. There exists, I claim, an entirely distinct spirit to this modern phenomenon from those earlier. Our traditional road arises out of a nameless, composite mind, embedded in the land it runs through, where the modern road is placed according to a perceived and planned need on the part of committees and suits and extremely serious people who go to meetings and use words like “networking”. They are the product of decisions; of conscious rationality. The great lie of post-Enlightenment thought is that rationality can comprehend the totality of things in such a way as to engineer ideal outcomes; outcomes more perfect than the mind of nature can manage. Unfortunately, the rationality of man cannot possibly account for every subtlety and conceit of the world, it is not the foresight that it is touted to be. What it can do is get more immediate, and engineered results, technical boons that speed things up or propel them further. Like modern gamified social media apps, technology pumps out short and sharp bursts of feedback. Of course, latent within every technology is the demand for more technology. Like a biblical genealogy, one begets the next.
How many quiet and quaint villages and towns are entirely defaced by the intrusion of a road? Castle Combe - often touted as England’s most picturesque village, is shot through with the same concrete tarpaulin as anywhere else in this land. And how entirely does that transform the sense of the place. For all its tarnishing from overtourism, is Venice not such a delightful wonder precisely because there is not an inch of road, nor a single car among the lagoons? Even the motorboats proved an annoyance to me… All the same, the presence of a road can strangle a town, and, like a boot through a painting, shatter the entire sense of place that once resided there. On top of the roads themselves, there’s the matter of their accoutrements. Road signs are fugly, the visual equivalent of an early 2000s webpage, stapled onto a scene as if the world were a 2D postcard. Blocky and minimal, they tell you “where” something is in the sense of its coordinates. “Where” in the very most profane and unworlded sense; its coordinates, in a standard font, and its physical relation to the other stops along the conveyor belt. Ironically, every location being thus represented in the same standardised format on these signs gives me the very opposite of a sense of “where”. You couldn't exactly try and beautify road signs though, because they have to be legible at high speeds, they have to be standardised entirely, they have to represent the world as they do. Because the road and the signs embody the spirit of efficiency, they can't retain their function without adhering to these design requirements. Ancient road signs are beautiful, but inefficient for modern purposes.
Utterly unlike the organic trodden paths of old, or even cobbled streets for that matter, it’s hard to imagine something more evocative of the hollow soul of our age than a road. A grey-black deposit of polymered gravel (some asphalts contain petroleum products) vomited in a great procession to whereverland. A uniform “mineral aggregate”; pulped rock, mountains chewed and regurgitated. The old road would inhabit an ecology of forms, bound by the natural limitation of what was there. A modern road bears no relation to its surroundings. I call this process “unworlding”, (creds to Heidegger) when the essential and enduring nature of a place is nullified by “technique”, as Jacques Ellul would call it, or whatever variation on this same concept you wish to use. The nameless force that standardises and autistically places the stuff of the world into colour-coded rows like a nerd with his mint-condish pop vinyl dolls.
We are presented today with the means to obliterate the Earth, in transit to another part of the Earth. To step, as it were, into nowhere, on your way to somewhere. These vast unworlded spaces are void of the real stuff of life, and of being itself. All particularity and organic distinctness that once lay there is gone.
The car was meant to free us, let us travel further than ever and liberate us from natural limitation. And where are we now? The land is netted with grey chains, and our natural ability to roam is cut short. We find ourselves standing at a crossing, waiting for the cars to deign to let us walk - themselves mindlessly obeying the multicoloured jobsworths that guard each crossing. This is a characteristic difference between the natural and technological. Natural outcomes are by definition in communion with the totality of the “world” in a way that technology simply is not. An organism which evolves to a distinct ecology will, by necessity, be suited to that ecology in ways that rationality cannot even guess at. That unconscious and nameless intelligence that forms the natural world inevitably creates outcomes more perfect than rationality can hope to - and further still - the attempt to force outcomes will inevitably give rise to “bugs” that cannot be foreseen, by definition - by the fact that rationality cannot ever fully map out and comprehend nature, by the fact that nature is not a machine that can be fully blueprinted and deconstructed. The car was flawless, making countless improvements to lives, but a century or so later, it transformed human lives in a drastic and traumatic way that could never have been foreseen.
In a very real sense - the road is no longer space as previously understood. Until the “sanctity” if you like, of a motorway is broken by protestors or what have you, intentionally blocking it, it remains a total limbo, void by intention. And when such an event occurs, and the road is reclaimed as a part of the actual world, the feeling is uncanny, and apocalyptic - precisely because the intent of the road is so anti-natural, intending no living thing to make contact with its ground, intending itself to remain entirely empty, as a vacant space to conduct cargo here and there.
I used to wonder: was all this essential to the nature of modern roads? Could the road be re-made? Reconceived according to a traditional spirit? My optimism led me unwittingly to an “instrumentalist” conception of technology. As defined by Andrew Feenberg, this denotes the idea that technology lacks any inherent sociological content or ramifications in itself, but rather is neutral to the intent of the user, this running contrary to substantivism, which claims the inverse. Another essay may discuss this distinction in greater depth, but let that suffice for now. Unfortunately, the problem with roads is not that their designers have built them in the wrong spirit. On the contrary, nations with ideas as contradictory to one another as Eisenhower’s USA and Hitler’s Germany have prided themselves on their impressive networks of autobahns and interstates. Sure, there are different speed limits and other inconsequential micro-disparities between the roads in this or that country, but a fundamental commonality remains across the world. Hitler and Eisenhower were, both of them, slaves to a technological mindset that necessitated radical projects of this kind. Indeed - the very survival of a modern nation-state depends on furthering the aims of tech itself. This is what Ellul names the “one best way in the world”; where once civilisations existed with discrete modes of being, as “technique” takes hold as the driving force behind history, that which accords with the spirit of efficiency is uniquely able to flourish, and conscripts the whole world into following suit. This soft coercion is responsible not only for our modern world at large, but also the attitude among many reactionary/right wing thinkers regarding technology, as a neutral tool (re. Feenberg) that simply needs a right-thinking helmsman in charge. This is how you have to think in order to believe that you can change anything within a technological system. Folk are understandably hesitant to decry technology itself. Doing so is increasingly not just “a bit eccentric”, but seen in some courts as a full-blown heresy akin to waycism or any of the other nonsense words modern zealots are wont to regurgitate at apostates.
The modern road is not only different from the traditional road, it is of course its undoing. Any artificial attempt to jerryrig the technological beast into a traditional shape would be just that, artificial. These attempts aren’t hypothetical, they’re everywhere. The desire for the spontaneous, un-engineered, alive and particular in all things has itself been technologised and sold back to the authenticity-starved population as hipster commodities, to sate their natural desire for the natural/traditional itself. Your artsy delicatessen in Shoreditch, or a dank and dusty record shop in the Brighton Lanes, all of these exploit the technologically engendered pining for ever-elusive “authenticity”. But there’s a great hollowness to it all, it hums to high heaven of affectation and status-signalling, because what’s missing from the picture is the necessity for these items to be made in the way they are. It’s at best an imitation of true tradition. In the traditional world, bakery bread and handmade clothes aren’t “artisanal”, they’re just bread and clothes. In an identical way, any attempt to wring tradition out of a technological behemoth like a road will not yield tradition, it will at best yield a sad facsimile. Like riding a horse today, something only hobbyists (gypsies notwithstanding) ever do, and something that no one would do without artificially choosing to. Both horse-travel and the roads that supported it can only now exist in a little paddling pool to one side of the technological juggernaut. These things only exist so that modern people might recharge themselves and fulfill their needs for what their technical addiction is destroying, before boarding another train to work.
So you see - all your archæofuturists; your visionaries of a science-fantasy, technofeudal future with Greco-Roman characteristics; everyone who hates all the products of technology, but can’t admit that tech is itself the problem, is just a philosophical hipster - cleaving to aspects of the past as ostentatious luxuries while endorsing the very thing that destroys them. As mentioned in my post about the Incredibles, Kaczysnki harshly criticises modern conservatives along the same lines, although without my references to hipsters and the like. To make things yet more controversial, Julius Evola levelled similar criticisms at Fascism, although less focused on technology itself,
“Increasingly renouncing their traditions, which date back for ages, these (non European) peoples have Westernised, adopting the culture, ideologies, political forms and lifestyles of White peoples, therefore increasingly capitulating to the pseudo-civilisation of Whites, with no other ambition than ‘development’ and self-affirmation, as so many grotesque facsimiles of the states of White peoples, and opposing them only on these terms. So everything converges towards a general levelling, and only the ugliest relationships of power and spheres of influence can be the determining factor of their development, even more so than in the past. [NOTE: Until just the other day it was possible to see an interesting exception in Japan: the coexistence of a traditional culture and external modernisation. After the Second World War, however, this equilibrium has been increasingly altered to the advantage of modernisation, and the last bulwarks against it are falling, one after the other.]”
The case of Japan, as mentioned by Evola here, makes a firm argument against the possibility of technology coexisting with tradition. Look at Japan now - while there exist surface level differences in “culture”, the texture and tone and style of life has been utterly levelled. A grand shade of uniformity looms where once there was an exciting and endless world of undiscovered and radically different forms from one land to the next. Please forgive my long-winded quotations, but I feel that abridging this next paragraph further would do it a grave injustice. I only implore you to read the book yourself. (Charles Kingsley’s excellent Hereward the Wake).
“It was a fine world in the Bruneswald. What was it then outside? Not to him, as to us, a world circular, sailed round, circumscribed, mapped, botanized, zoologized; a tiny planet about which everybody knows, or thinks they know everything: but a world infinite, magical, supernatural,—because unknown; a vast flat plain reaching no one knew whence or where, save that the mountains stood on the four corners thereof to keep it steady, and the four winds of heaven blew out of them; and in the centre, which was to him the Bruneswald, such things as he saw; but beyond, things unspeakable,—dragons, giants, rocs, orcs, witch-whales, griffins, chimeras, satyrs, enchanters, Paynims, Saracen Emirs and Sultans, Kaisers of Constantinople, Kaisers of Ind and of Cathay, and beyond them again of lands as yet unknown. At the very least he could go to Brittany, to the forest of Brocheliaunde, where (so all men said) fairies might be seen bathing in the fountains, and possibly be won and wedded by a bold and dexterous knight after the fashion of Sir Gruelan. What was there not to be seen and conquered? Where would he go? Where would he not go? For the spirit of Odin the Goer, the spirit which has sent his children round the world, was strong within him.”
The true insight here is that Tradition, or rather, the conditions under which Tradition can and does exist, is itself made impossible precisely by technology, and the mental technologies of rationalisation - to know or rather think we know everything about the world. Only technological society could be so arrogant. The spirit that many wish could be harnessed to redress the maladies of modernity is exactly what is crushed by modernity, and any attempt to reinstate Tradition as some kind of secondary option misses the point that Tradition can only exist if only it exists. It can’t be some elective choice, alongside others - some other ideology on the pile, it must have total and complete dominion over the Earth, otherwise it is not tradition. Folk music in this country exists now as a fossilised museum of recordings of songs from an “authentic” period, when people didn’t just shelve it as a curiosity, they lived it. The folk tradition was a living tradition precisely when it wasn’t just some niche genre among all the others, but when it was just music. Tradition and ecology are, to me, more or less identical things, and Ted Kaczsynki makes a great point in tandem with my own.
In paragraphs 183-184 of his Manifesto, Kaczynski notes the difference between "WILD" nature and the tamed "nature" of a national park or camp ground.
"The positive ideal that we propose is Nature. That is, WILD nature: those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and its living things that are independent of human management and free of human interference and control."
The spectre of mankind's implicit control looms over these places, and they are in this way unworlded. Danger and unpredictability are essential to true nature. In the Peak District today, they have blokes in jetpacks shoot up a mountain to rescue those in peril, and a perfect mobile data connection all throughout. So much for the wild, eh? These places become tame simulacra of the true wilderness, a little sample of authentic nature, of the authentic state of being prior to the encroachment of technological system upon all things. Like the hipster's artisanal coffee, or the modern conservative's "nuclear family" and "traditional values", these are little bitesize samples of what we miss, what we once took for granted, marketed back to us in response to our longing. These are, if you like, the controlled oppositions to technology. But the most frightening thing is - barely anyone who engages in these things actually realises that they are reacting to a technologised way of life.
We used to build enormous things to be grand. Technology has given us the means to be flippant with the incredible, to shrug at the Herculean. The fable-like quality of sojourns across the world that pertained in times when to go somewhere else meant to walk or ride through the land, as land, not the cardboard façade that today flanks the motorways, while what we really traverse is a long strip of nowhere. There’s an uncanny quality to modern travel, where we almost teleport to our destination, and the entire thing is left feeling somewhat unreal. There’s a sense of two dimensionality to the experience, where the world lies on either side, as a separate entity entirely.
How much more true is this of air travel? I have been dwelling on this for some time now - we are remarkably nonchalant these days about literally walking the skies. Think on that - we have achieved the power of flight! And yet I, as you, am unamazed each time I spot a plane in the sky, I don’t sit in giddiness at the airport or gape in awe on the plane. We are bored by flying. Technology promises the incredible, the impossible, the wonderful, but all it ever does is make a chore of the fantastical. It’s like music today, the infinite availability of every song you could dream of has destroyed the discrete and personal relationship we once had with music. Rather than ascending to the heavens as gods, we have transformed the sky into a conveyor belt - it’s not so much that we have leapt into the sky, but that we have tugged it down to the ground and integrated it into the grid along with the rest of the world. How magical was the heavens? How unfathomable and holy? And now it’s a demystified and dull queue that happens to be positioned over our heads. This is why I loathe talk of space colonisation. One reason is that it’s impossible and ridiculous, and just a product of addiction to fossil-fuel reinforced expectations of infinite growth, but largely also because were it to succeed we would just see the same result imposed on the stars themselves. All the universe would be a fucking traffic jam, entirely robbed of mystique or magic. Hell - our desacralised view of the universe has already done just this in a mental sense. All else is just the material manifestation of an earlier spiritual fall.
I don’t know if you remember that godawful pop song from 2010ish, but I recall it was on everyone’s iPods for a bit. It went something like “could we pretend that airplanes in the night sky were like shooting stars?” As annoying a song as it was, I can’t be alone in thinking it reveals something fascinating and disturbing about technology. We have the power to make lights in the sky, to make shooting stars, but this is perceived as infinitely less amazing, less magical than actual shooting stars. You make a wish on them because their appearance is un-engineerable; they aren’t just the expression of some profane mechanical witchcraft. According to a technophile, planes should be twice as fascinating and beloved, and yet, they are seen for the mundane things they are. No one would make a wish on something so planned and artificial. Because human beings aren’t the machines technophiles wish they were; all the gadgets and gizmos in the world will never fulfil our spiritual needs, our immortal longings.
Technology removes what Chad Haag names the “hermeneutical gap” between the subject and phenomena. The world of tradition exists without the imposition of an artificial, clockwork blueprint upon itself. In other words, it exists as a world, and not a desacralised sphere at x and y coordinates in a hollow universe with no centre. The gap that existed prior to modernity, the gap of hermeneutics; interpretation of the world, is exactly the space in which life and Tradition existed. The obliteration of this gap produces a dull uniformity in all things, as one single interpretation exists of phenomena - the technical quantification of things. Man is now a “hackable animal”, according to one Yuval Noah Harari, without the discrete and unpredictable elements of the soul, he is just a machine that can be mapped out by complex algorithms. This is the telos of the modern project, to quantify all things. To use insights from Heidegger’s essay on technology, the world reveals itself as a stockpile of bestand (standing reserve), to be manipulated for the best material ends. The sky, like the ground before it, has been integrated into a quantitative view of the world. It’s like the mystique of the opposite sex during adolescence - you know only rumours and whispers of the sacred mystery of woman, and this makes the journey to discovery a wonderful and human experience. Unless of course you grew up when I did, and the world presented you with a big fat spoiler aged around 11, and your child’s mind was exposed to hardcore pornography. Not only utterly removing the wonder and mystique of the hermeneutic gap, but prescribing a technologised and distorted image of what sex - and woman - actually is, and as a result permanently robbing you of an authentic encounter with human sexuality as it has always been. I consider the effect of porn on my generation to be a crime of monumental proportions, and among the greatest unsung tragedies in history. Porn addicts are all too aware of the diminishing returns of their perverted habit, losing interest in even beautiful real women, because they are pursuing the same mystique and eros that they themselves have obliterated through using pornography. The amazement and desire of men exists precisely in the obscure and mysterious nature of sex, once that is removed, we are confronted with two lumps of flesh knocking into eachother, and recoil in “post-nut clarity”.
Likewise, the bored traveller on a 747 who tries to doze off in order to kill his time spent literally flying can be said to be experiencing the post-nut clarity of air-travel. A grand technological promise, a phenomenal achievement, a godlike aim. A technological eros. And then, once you’re there, soaring through the clouds faster than eagles dream of, you find yourself bored and tired and wishing for the entire experience to be over. It is remarkable that technology can at once give us the impossible, and the most impressive feats of all time, and simultaneously leave us entirely unimpressed and even bored at the spectacle.
I could go on; I'm itching to bring in ideas from the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade on the desacralisation of space in modernity, but that can wait for another blog - this one's long enough as is. I'd like to say now that I get it. I get why people who agree with me that the modern world is a rotten place are still hesitant to throw the technological baby out with the bathwater. While many of us are willing to discard the absurdities of what modernity requires us to think to be proper "integrated" subjects to her benevolence, condemning technology itself seems so... Philistine? I'm not sure how to put it. So often I'm told "we can't go back", as an axiom so fundamentally true it needn't be demonstrated, but I never receive a satisfactory answer to my "why"? In fact - I'd say that this misses the point entirely. The point isn't that we ought to go back or forward, it's that we must reverse the technologisation of our world in order to avoid ultimate catastrophe. Once again - tradition/nature etc aren't "choices", it's not just another brand of IPA on draught at your trendy local. Until right wing or anti-modern people accept this, and stop billing themselves as just another choice among many ideological brands, no fundamental challenge will be presented.
P.S. Yes I know it's been ages and yes I will try and be more regular :p