Once upon a time, I was asked precisely where my politics were. My tongue-in-cheek answer as somewhere between Wendell Berry and Theodore Kascynski. The latter because he broadly and correctly identified the problems of the technological age in his manifesto, the former because of his tendencies towards people and the tactile over the false facade of what he termed as surrogate activities.
In fact, though this was written 30 years ago, Kascynski’s line is more prophetic with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI):
The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.
The core of what Kascynski was trying to address was that technological societies by their very nature erode individual autonomy as we commonly understand it to be. Certainly one can use (or abuse) technology — transhumanism in very broad strokes — but at core the individual is utterly dependent upon technology for that autonomy, which is certainly a type of individualism, but it is by no means by definition a law (nomos) unto one’s self (auto).
For Kaszynski, technology becomes a more powerful force than the aspiration to freedom. On their own, each advance seems like there is more upside than downside, yet when taken in the aggregate, all of these advances — electricity, plumbing, automobiles, smartphones, stormwater management, sanitation, health care, the welfare state — begin to exist for their own sake rather than for us:
It would have been absurd to resist the introduction of the telephone, for example. It offered many advantages and no disadvantages. Yet, as we explained . . . all these technical advances taken together have created a world in which the average man’s fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his neighbors and friends, but in those of politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence.
Kaszynski’s solution for the industrial-technological age is nothing short of a revolution — not a violent one despite his own actions — but one that repudiates the relationship between human economy and technology. Reform is limited and impossible for Kaszynski precisely because the nature of technology conforms us to a dilemma of false choices. You can have the Model-T in any color so long as it is black. AT&T or Verizon. Pepsi or Coke. Either way, the system itself modifies us as consumers to drive cars, use smartphones, and consume soft drinks. Like boiling a frog, it is done by degrees.
In short, what is required is revolution — not unilateral disarmament, but a global resistance to the spirit of the age and the industrial-technological framework that conditions human beings to technology. Or worse, conditions human beings to treat virtue as cheap and the elimination of vice as the highest good.
Nathan Beacom writes in The Dispatch about the very real tension between Aristotelian virtue and Machiavellian virtu in our tensions between self-government and government:
Republican government relies on the self-government of citizens and leaders, because it is a form of rule in which the citizens have a wide latitude of freedom and a voice in the direction of their own community. Montesquieu, one of the key influences on America’s founding, put it this way in his Spirit of the Laws: “There is no great share of virtue necessary to support a monarchical or despotic government: the force of laws, in one, and the prince’s arm, in the other, are sufficient to direct and maintain the whole: but, in a popular state, one spring more is necessary, namely, virtue. When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community.”
John Adams, in a letter to his friend Mercy Otis Warren in 1776, put the relationship between public and private virtue in a republic plainly: “Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.” Public and private virtue are not severable; they are manifestations of one and the same moral character. One cannot be an Aristotelian at home and a Machiavellian in the office.
We have two concepts in front of us. The first being that technology has a corrupting force that conditions those who use it. The second is that technology that connects ultimately concentrates autonomy and freedom into fewer hands, confusing individual liberty with a certain permissive licentiousness which seems liberating, but in truth is more pacification than empowerment. Montesquieu and Adams were right.
Wendell Berry and the Mad Farmer Liberation Front
So much for the objections. Let’s talk a bit about the frenzy over data centers for just a moment. Personally, I am no troglodyte, but the debate seems to be centered around four very distinct and even separate problems:
- Virginia has not improved its energy grid in nearly six decades. We have held moratoria on hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, the Mountain Valley Pipeline, we have torn down coal plants, we have built no new energy resources, the Virginia Clean Energy Act strove to divert resources to non-performing energy plants, our windmills off the Virginia coast are presently producing 0kW per hour of electricity, and finally our governor has re-included us into RGGI — making the problem of affordability worse.
- Data centers have been around for three decades now. The net benefits to cash-strapped local governments are indeed astounding. Tax burdens are lower, capital projects are being built, and yes — they pay into an energy grid where power must be provided regardless as to whether or not it is actually used (thus lowering energy costs). This is not a new technology, but thanks to online services across the board — Netflix, YouTube, smartphones, GPS — the reindustrialization of America is underway.
- Artificial intelligence is about to change the nature of work in a very real way and no one seems ready for the change. The Greeks are already piling out of the Trojan Horse. Amazon and Tesla are already working on autonomous robots at the price tag of $15,000 per bot to perform tasks such as warehousing, construction, household chores, manufacturing, even providing basic home care. They require no HR, show up to work on time, and require no minimum wage. Higher end versions will allow specialists such as doctors or mechanics to virtually log in and perform tasks on the other side of the world. Pharmaceutical firms are on the cusp of creating bespoke treatments. Cancer detection is light years ahead of what it was even five years ago. Agriculture can fly a drone over their fields and figure out which areas need more water or fertilizer.
- The rise of the surveillance state. Flock cameras already aggregate your driving patterns to both law enforcement, private businesses, and marketers. Linked with Wi-Fi sniffers, the technology has been around for over two decades and only now are people figuring it out. Airports already scan your biometric data. Marketing firms develop a psychological profile of you as a person based on your search history, what you read, where you eat, your social media searches, how long you spend on certain articles, your subscriptions, even your credit history — all of this readily at hand.
Sounds ominous? Allow me to put it into verse:
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
That’s Wendell Berry in the beginning of a poem entitled “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” written in 1973, when the artificial intelligence craze first arrived and was subsequently buried by Herbert Dreyfus in a masterful book which still befuddles the architects. In short, AI can “know that” but they can never “know how” to do a thing. Caveat lector.
Berry diagnoses the problem out of the gate. We become cogs in the machine where economy exists for its own sake rather than for the definition of the word itself — quite literally the law (nomos) of families (oikos) or households. People over politics, so to speak.
Unlike Kaszynski who argues for mass movement, Berry offers something a bit more grounded and, dare I say, autonomous and non-materialistic. It’s a rejection of productivity, efficiency, and all things measured. In fact, it goes deeper into the things machines can’t do and never will do — love, value, cherish, suffer, and all we attribute to the idea of Aristotelian virtue vs. Machiavellian virtu:
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
If the economy we are in conditions us to be consumers and even treats us as objects to be consumed by the economy itself, the resistance — or revolution — is a Solzhenitsyn-style refusal of the lie itself.
Reason and science have given us a great deal over the last 500 years. Back then, if we got sick or ill, we prayed to God and treated it as a punishment for sin. Even 200 years ago, the idea of balancing the humors went back to the Greek physicians such as Galen. Today we have antibiotics, antihistamines, surgeons, radiation therapies, and even mRNA therapeutics that can target cancer cells.
There is no real need to do a line-by-line exegesis of Wendell Berry’s poem — though one is invited to read it all — other than to bring things back to his final and closing verse:
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
One wonders whether we even know what resurrection is in an era where too many strive to live forever. Or in an era where fruits and vegetables are grown out of season and delivered to the modern miracle we call the supermarket.
Solzhenitsyn used to remark that the Western media was worse than the KGB. One could only imagine what the East German Stasi would have done with the internet at its disposal. Is the modern surveillance state worse than the KGB? Perhaps so — and perhaps as we come upon the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we can reassess the freedoms we have exchanged for the safety we have maintained in a far more dangerous world than the one we knew in 2001.
Yet insofar as there can still be an interior life — in our homes, our written journals, in planting a garden, reading or exchanging books, prayer and reflection — so too are the advantages of modern society. Berry himself was no stranger to it. Despite choosing the rural over the urban and the agrarian over the technological, Berry still had a farm, taught English as a professor, and published over 55 books of poetry and prose.
Berry’s 1971 polemic The Unsettling of America was perhaps the last fulmination of the last of the Southern agrarians against our technological age. Yet where Berry diverges from Kaszynski isn’t necessarily in the polemic against technology — both saw the dangers in equal terms — yet where Kaszynski saw the threat against individual autonomy, Berry saw the threat against community and family bonds. Each applied their solutions proportionate to the threat.
Whereas Kaszynski bombed his way to notoriety and lived in a shack, Berry nurtured the soil and raised a family. Berry was no stranger to technology per se, yet there modern conveniences reasonably tolerated as he writes to a friend, “I hope you don’t mind being written to with a pencil. I no longer have the courage to write if I can’t erase,” pace Milton Friedman.
Technology for Virtue or In Virtu
Yet there is an intentionality that we have lost in the exchange of doing things the hard way in exchange for doing things the easy way. Having a small patch of land which struggles to define itself as a farm, there absolute miracle of a tractor plowing up the field in March is infinitely easier than the slow tendition of a tiller. Forget broadforking a row. As my small army of children leave for their respective towers of ivory, the ambitions for the garden grow smaller each year.
At least until the Optimus Robot: Garden Edition arrives.
Even if I choose the deliberate and intentional life, who could follow? After all, aren’t all the trust fund babies who can afford 40 acres and live the Joel Salatin lifestyle to sell to a few restaurants really just reclining into the decadence of others who subsidize this lifestyle as a cheap means of being more moral and ethical than their peers? Would that everyone could write, teach, and farm in such a way that could pay our real estate taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, federal taxes, state taxes, tariffs on everything. Air conditioning doesn’t sound so bad when it is 100 degrees outside.
Thomas Sowell — perhaps the last great economist still alive today — reminds us that most things are a tradeoff, and there’s wisdom to this. Technology offers us a series of advantages to the good life. Life expectancies are up, true poverty is gone in America, food takes up less of a percentage of our income than it did 50 years ago, incomes are up, standards of living are higher. If we have forgotten intentionality or meaning in work, is the fault not our own?
Alexander Karp tries to grapple with the problem in his book The Technological Republic and settles on some admixture of Straussianism — that is to say, obscuring the question for minds suited to tangle with the problem of technology — and patriotism. Yet at the core of what is being raised isn’t so much that Americans aren’t getting what we want out of the rise of artificial intelligence, or that energy costs are too high thanks to good intentions and bad outcomes, or even that the Trojan Horses on the horizon are less a gift and more a threat.
Yet there is one answer to the riddle.
We can solve a lot of problems in the world with economic growth than without it. Whether it is data centers or artificial intelligence, these are still tools in the hands of humans who can choose — and will choose — to use it either for good or ill. Montesquieu and Adams were right to extend the finger in the direction of virtue in the pursuit of prosperity and were equally correct to point out that this pursuit of virtue is discerned by every generation moving forward and rarely achieved.
If we are afraid of technological progress, it isn’t that we are afraid of the neutral tools themselves, but rather those using it. That’s us — that’s citizens. Whether we are good thieves or bad thieves is ultimately our decision, but the technology will only “know that” a thing can be done. It will never understand the “know how” that we give to the tools at hand.
Which brings us full circle. In a New Yorker interview with Wendell Berry in 2022, there is a story about a someone who breaks into Berry’s writing shed — his “long legged cabin” full of pencils and time — attempting to break into a safe. Dorothy Wickenden shares the story about the mishap:
The place was so inviting, I wondered if anyone had ever broken in—seeking, perhaps, a little food and a furtive night’s rest. “Yes, once,” Berry said. He was pretty sure he knew the culprit. “Someone took out a few panes and tried to get into my safe. I wrote him a note—‘Dear Thief, if you’re in trouble, don’t tear this place up. Come to the house, and I’ll give you what you need.’ ”
And so to my fellow thieves: perhaps we are in trouble as technology adheres to Moore’s Law and culture progresses incrementally in the face of such change. Let’s not tear the place up trying to make sense of it all. Come to the house and let’s talk about it — and we can figure out what we need.
One suspects this is a far better solution than Kaszynski’s method. We have punted on energy for six decades, the technology is already here, the key word to artificial intelligence is artifice and not intellect, and the surveillance state — law enforcement, marketing, social media, and our unknowing and unaware participation in it — can be separated out and discussed in turn.
Thomas Jefferson once remarked that the boisterous sea of liberty is never without a wave and that he would rather attend to the problem of too much liberty rather too small a degree of it. One suspects those sentiments are still alive and well and that we would rather brave the storm rather than sit in the harbor.
Yet there is an intentionality behind Wendell Berry’s work which we have set aside — not traded but set aside — for the ease of advantages technology brings. Will the world change rapidly? As sure as automobiles, electricity, sanitation, antibiotics, and microprocessors changed things.
If we use these advances to improve the human condition, then Aristotelian virtue wins. If we use these advances for personal gain, then Machiavellian self-interest wins. Yet how it changes us — ourselves, our families, our communities — is really a question only we can answer.
Personally, I’ll take the risk as a good Jeffersonian conservative and put a little bit more faith in the future. Technological ends to agrarian means, so to speak — and if that gets me back in my garden and the governance of 10 acres of Virginia, then I suspect that would be the life of intentionality Berry sought to define and live.
