Doing anything to my car makes me nervous. Not because I have no skills or experience. I have both. But I don’t have many skills finely-honed enough to do things to a car that are as good as what the people who made it did. Sometimes a car feels like something that came from outer space—like something so advanced, so precisely-made, so “unnatural”—meaning, so unlike a rough piece of wood or a rock—that a mere human such as myself has no business monkeying about with it. After all, speaking of monkeys, I am just a tall relatively-hairless ape with an overdeveloped brain (though it must be said that in important ways, our brains are actually under-developed—just look around …)
And then I think, with more than a little wonder, actually it was humans, like me, who built this from nothing. Or, more accurately, from stuff we found on and in the Earth. From the burlwood dash to the soft leather seats to the mirror-finish chrome wheels. To the circuit boards and the glass and the shaped steel panels. All of it. Yes, ultimately it all came from outer space, but we found all of it right here on our own planet.
Of course, one does not find mirror-finish chrome wheels under a rock, or dig Pirelli tires out of the ground ready to mount. We take stuff we find and do stuff to it and mix it up and make other stuff. We commonly distinguish between “organic” and “inorganic,” and that distinction is frequently useful, but it has a limit. Ultimately, it’s all earth-stuff.
We use robots to perform some of the precision tasks involved in building a car. But we built the robots, and we maintain them, and we invented the tasks they are doing.
Those of us who have some awareness of what’s going on in the world—those of us who have brainspace for something besides day-to-day survival, and who aren’t vapid idiots—still live in the hangover from the heady days of, say, 1870 to 1914—and, to some extent, 1945 to the 1970s, when our societies internalized the naïve wishful thinking that “technology” and “progress” would solve all our problems eventually. Even the world wars and the atomic bomb didn’t shake that completely. It remains to be seen if the climate and ecological crises we’re in will do it.
To some extent—bear with me—we shouldn’t let them.
Technology, however you define it, will not solve our problems. Only we can do that. The distinction matters; technological determinism, the fallacy that assigns to technology an agency of its own, distinct from ours, is one of the more destructive modern intellectual mistakes. (Intellectual mistakes do not only affect “intellectuals”—they can affect the very direction a society takes en masse—and that one did.)
But neither is technology “the enemy.” “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral,” wrote Melvin Kranzberg. It has no inherent moral value, but it is employed in the service of some moral value or another by those who use it a certain way. I don’t want humans to return to the Stone Age, and I’m not going to listen to anyone who does—or anyone who doesn’t realize that their agenda inclines that way. (Besides, it’s pretty likely that, in the Stone Age, we exterminated our share of other megafauna to eat their flesh and make stuff out of the rest of them, so we weren’t exactly technologically harmless even then.)
We need technology—we need our cleverness and our inventiveness—to help us solve some problems we have. Yes, we created the most urgent of those problems, and Ian Hodder is right that the history of technology is the history of our making something without realizing all the ramifications of it and then making something else to try to deal with those unexpected ramifications. We can’t ever fully escape that, because we can’t ever completely predict the future. But we can certainly do a much better job of foresight than we have in the past. Every experience we have makes us better at that—if we let it.
We need some new technology, and we need to re-discover the usefulness of some older things—perhaps re-purposed somewhat, but stuff we already know how to do—or can re-learn.
It’s easy to villainize the petroleum-powered automobile right now. It has become a symbol of greenhouse-gas emissions. Before that, it was a symbol of air pollution—until we learned how to clean it up, and low-emissions became the standard, at least in the wealthier societies. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with the machine—just as there’s nothing inherently wrong with a campfire, which also puts gases and particulates into the atmosphere. What’s wrong is using the petroleum-powered automobile as mass transportation for billions of humans. That’s not sustainable. A campfire is one thing; a coal-fired power plant is another. Scale is what matters. It’s not the technology. It’s how we use it.
Luddites will not get us where we need to go right now. A reaction to “technology” would be a repudiation of human ingenuity—and, more than that, a blindness to beauty.
Some people have very little aesthetic sensibility, but for those of us who have a lot of that, a life filled with beauty is the only life worth living. And the things we humans can make can be so very beautiful. I don’t even have to drive my car to enjoy its beauty. I can sit in the porch swing and just look at it. Even with the cover on, its shape is clear. The bottom halves of the chrome wheels peek out below the hem. But being in it takes it to another level, and driving it to another still. It is not a hybrid, it is not an EV, it is not powered by hydrogen; it’s not a diesel, or a hyper-efficient small turbocharged four-cylinder that gets 45 mpg. It weighs two tons and gets down the road pulled by a V8—an engine that’s going away, because we have made too many cars for too many people. But an engine that sounds and feels like no other. And one that will run and run, longer than I will live, and thus stay out of a scrap heap. Unless someone besides me wrecks it, someone after me will enjoy it.
Every soundly-made car in every driveway is an astounding human achievement. Every well-built house. The vaccinations we get so we don’t, for example, choke to death with diphtheria the way my Mom’s aunt did at 13. Every dishwasher, every pair of trainers. We might want to stop taking so much of this for granted and actually consciously appreciate it as the everyday manifestations of our ingenuity—and, in many cases, our art. Technology is so much more than computers, and art is so much more than paintings in a gallery. Technology will equip us to solve even our biggest challenges, used wisely. Art will help make it worth doing. And we’d do well to appreciate that some things we make are both.
nice