The Invention of Invention

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

It’s tempting to think that the experience of rapid technological change is something novel to our own time. In fact, I know I’ve been guilty of giving that impression myself. But consider this passage* from a sermon delivered by Dominican Fra Giordano of Pisa at Santa Maria Novella in Florence on February 23, 1306:

“Not all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end of finding them. Everyday one could discover a new art … indeed they are being found all the time. It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art of making spectacles which help you to see well, and which is one of the best and most necessary in the world. And that is such a short time ago that a new art, which never before existed, was invented …. I myself saw the man who discovered and practiced it, and I talked with him.”

We might debate the real pace of technological advance then and now, but the phenomenological experience of change described by Giordano has a rather contemporary ring. According to historian of technology Lynn White, not only does this passage give us the best evidence for the appearance of eye glasses, it also gives witness to the “invention of invention.” According to White, it was at the height of the much maligned Medieval period that, “Technicians … in large numbers began to consider systematically all the imaginable ways of solving a problem.”

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* Lynn White cites this passage in his essay, “Cultural Climates and Technological Advance,” found in Medieval Religion and Technology.

The Art of Technology and Empire

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 9 Comments

The phrase “Manifest Destiny” is likely one of those bits from high school history class that lingers on in most Americans’ memory for no obvious reason; in much the same way, for example, that I remember William Katt’s name (you know, the guy who starred in Greatest American Hero). If our memory serves us a little better than most, we’ll recall that the destiny that was so plainly manifest was America’s destiny to possess all of the territory between the eastern states and Pacific Ocean. “Go West young man!” and all of that.

What you may not immediately think of even if you do remember your American history class lucidly is the important role that technology played in the ideology of Westward expansion. In Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission, Michael Adas lays out that case in convincing detail. If David Nye’s American Technological Sublime successfully argues that the experience of the technological sublime has been America’s civil religion, then Adas has documented the attendant missionary project.

In the likely event that you don’t have time to read Adas’ sizable book, here’s the “Manifest Destiny” portion of his argument in a visual nutshell:

John Gast, “American Progress” (1872)

Yes, that is telegraph line that she is stringing out. I tend to think that the old line, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” is generally misleading, but in this case, it just might work. The portrait, according to historian Merritt Roe Smith*, was commissioned by publicist George Crofutt who tasked John Gast with painting a “beautiful and charming female … floating westward through the air, bearing on her forehead the ‘Star of Empire.'” The beautiful female was to carry a book in her right hand symbolizing the “common school — the emblem of education” while with her left she “unfolds and stretches the slender wires of the telegraph, that are to flash intelligence throughout the land …”

Crofutt also wanted Gast to depict certain elements “fleeing from ‘Progress'”; these included “the Indians, buffalo, wild horses, bears and other game.” The Indians were to “turn their despairing faces toward the setting sun, as they flee from the presence of wondrous vision. The ‘Star’ is too much for them.” We should, by now, know this unfortunate part of the story well.

Smith neatly summarizes the significance of the painting: “As art goes, ‘American Progress’ is not a work of great distinction. But as a popular allegory that amalgamates the idea of America’s Manifest Destiny with an old republican symbol (the goddess Liberty, now identified as Progress) and associates progress with technological change (represented by telegraph lines, the railroads, the steam ships, the cable bridge, and the urban landscape in the background), it is a remarkable achievement.”

One could read a political allegory into the evolution of goddess Liberty into goddess Progress. A similar sort of allegory that might arise if we were to compare John Trumbull’s famous (if not quite accurate) paining of the signing of the Declaration of Independence with this later painting by Christian Schussele, “Men of Progress”:

Christian Schussele, “Men of Progress” (1863)

The two paintings are linked by the image of Benjamin Franklin who, in Trumbull’s paining, is positioned prominently before the Declaration of Independence by the side of John Hancock and, in Schussele’s work, appears in the portrait in the top left of the scene watching approvingly over these 19th century men of progress. These men included Samuel Colt, Cyrus McCormick, Charles Goodyear, Elias Howe, and Samuel Morse. We might safely call this the American Pantheon, and may not be too far off the mark if we gather that the reverence paid the Founders had been, by the middle of the 19th century, transferred to these “men of progress.”

And, of course, the century was all about Progress. That sentiment was captured in this lithograph by Currier and Ives from 1876:

Currier and Ives, “The Progress of the Century” (1876)

The telegraph tape reads, “Liberty and Union, Now and Forever” along with “One and Inseparable” and “Glory to God in the Highest, On Earth Peace and Good Will Toward Men.” These political and religious sentiments are not only conveyed by the telegraph; the realities they articulate are effectively secured by the telegraph — and the railroad, and the steam boat, etc. It is technology that binds the nation together and the whole project is given a theological hue (further reinforcing Nye’s thesis).

James P. Boyd, writing in 1899, looked back upon the 19th century and marveled: “Indeed, it may be said that along many lines of invention and progress which have most intimately affected the life and civilization of the world, the nineteenth century has achieved triumphs and accomplished wonders equal, if not superior, to all other centuries combined.” This was a rose colored assessment, to be sure; it glossed over some of the century’s darker shades and, of course, seemed oblivious to the cataclysms that lay ahead.

What Boyd’s rhetoric does capture is the reduction of the notion of Progress to the narrow channel of technical advance. All other measures — be they political, religious, or cultural — are subsumed within the grand narrative of the evolution of technology. The lineaments of what Neil Postman termed technopoly have, by the close of the 19th century, begun to appear.

Early into the 21st century, we may find a painting like “American Progress” naive at best, if not offensive and misguided. Boyd’s rhetoric may strike us as grandiose and a bit too earnest. Both together suffering from a bad case of what Adas has called techno-hubris. And yet, how far do we have to go back to find similarly effusive and eschatological hopes attached to the World Wide Web and the Information Superhighway? To what degree have we continued to measure progress by the single measure of technical innovation, forsaking more demanding political and ethical standards? And haven’t we also paid homage to the goddess of technological progress, stripped perhaps of some of her earlier glory, no longer radiant, illuminated now by the lesser light of some backlit screen?

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*Citations from Merritt Roe Smith are drawn from his essay, “Technological Determinism in American Culture,” in Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism.

“It’s okay, the Internet will be just fine without you”

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

Occasionally I’ve enjoyed taking a television commercial as an invitation to explore some dynamic of the social-technological milieu. For example, a Droid commercial offered an opportunity to explore the technology as prosthetic metaphor. A Visa commercial allowed me to rail against the mindless pace of contemporary consumer culture. And finally, unless I’m forgetting a post, a Jeep commercial spoke better than it knew (most likely) when it claimed that the things we make, make us.

Now a new Dodge commercial offers another occasion to reflect, although this time in a slightly different direction. The commercial plays off of our love affair with the great outdoors, although one has to wonder how sincere that love affair may be since we often seem quite untroubled by our infidelity to our would-be lover. Nonetheless, this commercial positions the great outdoors as an antidote to the Internet, or perhaps better yet, to Internet fatigue.

“People don’t make a list of websties they want to see before they die,” we are told in the commercial’s opening line. “Like being there” is not “like being there,” the commercial continues. And, we are assured, “It’s okay, the Internet will be just fine without you.” Finally, we are invited to think of the Dodge Journey as a “search engine for the World Wide World.”

Its somewhat noteworthy that our marketing geniuses believe appealing to Internet fatigue or to some otherwise nondescript unease with digital life an effective sales strategy. The aura of technology, especially novel digital technology, is more often than not a selling point. Of course, in the commercial it is a GPS that gets you were you need to go, so you are tacitly reassured that the technology is there when you need it.

So sure, they’re selling you something, something you certainly don’t need to have a fuller experience of the world. But at this juncture, I’ll applaud the advice to unplug wherever it may come from. The real issue, after all, may not be whether the Internet will be just fine without us, but whether we will be just fine without the Internet.

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Update: Courtesy of Nick Carr, lest we credit Chrsyler too much, here’s the uber-connected Grand Caravan. At least the Journey’s presentation is a bit more evocative.

Weekend Reading, 11/19/11

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ Leave a comment

With apologies for not posting any suggested reading last weekend, here a good list to make up for it. Be sure to check out the Robinson piece and the three essays reviewing recent books on what ails the academy. The video is pretty cool too

“Difference Engine: Luddite Legacy” at The Economist technology blog, “Babbit”: The title is not much help in this case. The post examines the possibility that what has been known as the Luddite Fallacy, that increased automation leads to fewer jobs, may no longer be so fallacious. It suggests that the stubbornly high rate of unemployment might be owed to the increasing number of white collar jobs that can be done by computers running AI. The post ends in rather hopeful fashion, but the compelling case made throughout seemed to me to make the hope rather like wishful thinking.

“Engineering the 10,000-Year Clock” by David Kushner at Spectrum: Great story about how two engineers with the backing of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos set out to design and build a clock that would run on its own power for 10,000 years. When it is completed, it will certainly count as a marvel of engineering. They’re goal? To get us to thinking more long term. No argument here.

“Teens, Kindness, and Cruelty on Social Network Sites” by Pew Internet and American Life Project: Title tells you all you need to know. Information on adults as well. The link takes you to the summary of findings.

“King James Bible” by Adam Nicolson in National Geographic: Explores the global legacy of the King James translation from Westminster Abbey to an American rodeo to Jamaican Rastafarians. Well done, with a lovely photo gallery as you would expect from National Geographic.

Three important reviews of recent books on education, they are each worth your time if you are at all interested in education:

“The Educational Lottery” by Steven Brint in the Los Angles Review of Books

“Out Universities: Why are they failing?” by Anthony Grafton in the New York Review of Books

“Can Teaching Really Matter?” by Peter Lawler

“Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist” by Marilynne Robinson at The Nation: I linked this in my post yesterday, but I wanted to put in your way one more time. It is a piece worthy of your consideration.

“Brain Scan Overload” by Jonah Lehrer in the Wall Street Journal: Lehrer cautions, wisely it seems to me, against grounding too much speculative stock in brain imaging.

Finally, here is a video you’ll want to take a look at if you haven’t already seen it or one like it. Three dimensional copying. Ink + Light = 3D object: “2D Patterns Self Assemble Into 3D Objects” courtesy of Wired UK.

After Stories (and Poems): The Forgotten Aesthetics of Persuasion

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

In the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible if you prefer, there is a story about a king and his excesses and a prophet who, as we would say today, spoke truth to power. The story is found in the book attributed to Samuel and the king was David, the most famous and revered of ancient Israel’s rulers. As is almost to be expected of men in power, David was infected with the notion that he might, with impunity, take all that his eyes desired, including the wife of another man — a good and loyal man who served David honorably. The king sleeps with Bathsheeba, the man’s wife, and she becomes pregnant. Hoping to cover up his rapaciousness, David recalls the husband, Uriah, from the battlefield and allows him the night with his wife expecting that he will do what all soldiers home from war would do given a night with the woman they love. Uriah would suppose the baby his, and all would be hidden from sight. Unfortunately for David, Uriah cannot bear the unfair advantage he has been granted over his comrades at the front and refuses to sleep with his wife. Getting Uriah drunk made little difference; he was a rock. So David had him killed.

Again, following an all too familiar pattern, David refused to acknowledge his guilt and his power shielded him from consequences and shame. That is until he meets with a prophet named Nathan. Nathan claims to bring news of a great injustice that had been perpetrated in the land. He tells David of a poor shepherd whose lone sheep was seized by a wealthy man in order to feed his guests, and this despite owning a great number of his own sheep. David is outraged; he demands to know who this man is that he may be brought to justice. Nathan, having artfully laid the trap, replies, “You are that man.” With that simple story Nathan bypassed David’s arrogant blindness and brought him to a startled recognition of the vileness of his actions.

I recount this well-known story because I have, in recent conversations, found myself expressing the need to gracefully articulate the virtue and necessity of making what would be very hard and unpopular choices for the sake our own personal well-being and the health of our society. Much of what I write, whether on matters relating to technology or in my occasional ramblings on other diverse topics, is premised on the assumption that human flourishing demands the recognition and acceptance of certain limits. I assume that the highest form of freedom is not the ability to pursue whatever whim or fancy may strike us at any given moment, but rather the freedom to make choices which will promote our well being and the well being of our communities. And such choices often involve sacrifice and the curtailment of our own autonomy. To put this another way, happiness, that elusive state which according to Aristotle is the highest good we all pursue, lies not at the end of a journey at which every turn we have chosen for ourselves, but along the path marked by choices for others and in accord with a moral order that may at times require the reordering rather than immediate satisfaction of our desires.

Put more practically, perhaps, the health of our society may now rest on our learning to live within constraints — economic, political, natural — that we have spent the last few decades ignoring or otherwise refusing. But no sooner do those words cross my lips or appear before my eyes as I type them, than I realize that they are likely to be unwelcome and unappealing words. And concurrently I realize that the language of limits may be misconstrued to mean that we must not pursue legitimate forms of material and social progress. On this point I endorse once more the distinction made by Albert Borgmann between troubles (read limits) that we accept in practice but oppose in principle, and those troubles (limits) we accept both in practice and in principle because we are ultimately better for accepting them. But this is all a hard sell.

On more than one occasion I have referred to an essay by Wendell Berry that appeared in Harper’s three years ago. The essay was titled “Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits.” I refer to it often because I believe there are few writers who articulate the case for limits so well as he. Berry succeeds because he is able not only to criticize the ideology of limitlessness and point to its often disastrous consequences, but also to make a positive case for the possibilities of beauty and flourishing that arise from a life that embraces rather than refuses certain kinds of limits. Berry frames our limits as “inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.” And it is this framing that is essential to the public case for any reorientation of our thinking and living in and with this world.

With her recent essay in The Nation, “Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist,” Marilynne Robinson matches Berry’s gift for speaking hard words with a grace that allows them to be heard, even if they are finally rejected. As I read Robinson’s words I marveled at what was unfolding line by line. Here she was dismantling our idols and stripping our altars, speaking to us with a seriousness and gravity that is wholly absent from our political and cultural discourse, and yet it was all done with mesmerizing artfulness. It was pungent medicine going down with sweet delight.

We need more writers, thinkers, and leaders in the mold of Berry and Robinson. It is a testament to their winsomeness and wisdom that both articulated essentially conservative (although not Republican) and religiously intoned visions which were published in decidedly left-of-center publications. It is, of course, also a testimony to the poverty of our categories.

It occurred to me, then, that it was little wonder they were able to make their case so well since both were novelists and one a poet as well. Little wonder because it seems to me that the case for limits is best shown rather than told. In other words, it is best conveyed by a story rather than a lecture. Like David, we need our prophets to weave their critique of our deeply entrenched disorders into a narrative that would bypass our self-righteous defenses. Moreover, these narratives need also to capture, in the manner that only a story can capture, the beauty and love that attend to lives lived by the counterintuitive logic of restraint, moderation, self-sacrifice, and regard for neighbor and place.

That it is the novelist and the poet that is best positioned to make such a case is also not surprising since their work is a constant affirmation of the inexhaustible beauty that arises from the formal elaboration of endless possibilities within a field of real and imposed limitations. Consider language itself as the primordial model of a limited and bounded but inexhaustible resource. The use of language is bounded by the grammar that allows for intelligibility and poets have since times immemorial bound themselves to structures that have called forth rather than foreclosed boundless creativity. Little wonder then that daily finding and making beauty within the limits of language, novelists and poets are best positioned to articulate the fulfillment and joy that may arise from the refusal to prioritize personal autonomy and the unencumbered life. After all, just as the frictionless life is also a life without traction, the life that refuses all burdens and attachments is, to borrow a phrase, unbearably light.

My hope is that we have not altogether lost our taste for stories and poems, that the sun has not yet set on literary sensibility. It would be tragic if for clarity and simplicity’s sake we sought our answers from technocrats with bullet-points and found that we could not hear or be moved to action by what they had to say. Although, perhaps that would be for the better since the technocratic logic that refuses complexity is more a part of the problem than of any credible solution. Worse still would be to find that our habits of attention, as some of our more pessimistic critics have warned, had become so attenuated that we could not follow an artful plot nor give a poem the loving, patient care that it demands before it will yield its wisdom.

Reviewing Robert Bellah’s “Religion in Human Evolution,” sociologist David Martin summarizes the book’s central message as follows: “‘We’ are inveterate story tellers as well as theoreticians … As ever in Bellah, his rigorous commitment to objectivity emits a normative aura: it is not a matter of putting stories behind us as childish but of telling the best stories to frame our collective existence.”

Indeed, and we might even put the matter more urgently. “It is difficult to get the news from poems,” William Carlos Williams admitted in a line from “Asphodel,” “yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

Alasdair MacIntyre famously concluded his ground breaking After Virtue by leaving us waiting “not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict.” It would seem, however, that we would do better to wait for another, doubtless very different, Nathan to penetrate through our blindness and awaken us to the possibilities offered by St. Benedict.