Some months ago I cut out of a shiny magazine some paragraphs written by a female journalist and describing the pleasure resort of the future. She had recently been spending some time at Honolulu, where the rigours of war do not seem to have been very noticeable. However, “a transport pilot ... told me that with all the inventiveness packed into this war, it was a pity someone hadn't found out how a tired and lifehungry man could relax, rest, play poker, drink, and make love, all at once, and round the clock, and come out of it feeling good and fresh and ready for the job again.” This reminded her of an entrepreneur she had met recently who was planning a “pleasure spot which he thinks will catch on tomorrow as dog racing and dance halls did yesterday.” The entrepreneur's dream is described in some detail:
His blue-prints pictured a space covering several acres, under a series of sliding roofs-for the British weather is unreliableand with a central space spread over with an immense dance floor made of translucent plastic which can be illuminated from beneath. Around it are grouped other functional spaces, at different levels. Balcony bars and restaurants commanding high views of the city roofs, and ground-level replicas. A battery of skittle alleys. Two blue lagoons: one, periodically agitated by waves, for strong swimmers, and another, a smooth and summery pool, for playtime bathers. Sunlight lamps over the pools to simulate high summer on days when the roofs don't slide back to disclose a hot sun in a cloudless sky. Rows of bunks on which people wearing sun-glasses and slips can lie and start a tan or deepen an existing one under a sunray lamp.
Music seeping through hundreds of grills connected with a central distributing stage, where dance or symphonic orchestras play or the radio programme can be caught, amplified, and disseminated. Outside, two 1,000-car parks. One, free. The other, an open-air cinema drive-in, cars queueing to move through turnstiles, and the film thrown on a giant screen facing a row of assembled cars. Uniformed male attendants check the cars, provide free aid and water, sell petrol and oil. Girls in white satin slacks take orders for buffet dishes and drinks, and bring them on trays.
Whenever one hears such phrases as “pleasure spot”, “pleasure resort”, “pleasure city”, it is difficult not to remember the oftenquoted opening of Coleridge's “Kubla Khan”.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But it will be seen that Coleridge has got it all wrong. He strikes a false note straight off with that talk about “sacred” rivers and “measureless” caverns. In the hands of the above-mentioned entrepreneur, Kubla Khan's project would have become something quite different. The caverns, air-conditioned, discreetly lighted and with their original rocky interior buried under layers of tastefully-coloured plastics, would be turned into a series of tea-grottoes in the Moorish, Caucasian or Hawaiian styles. Alph, the sacred river, would be dammed up to make an artificially-warmed bathing pool, while the sunless sea would be illuminated from below with pink electric lights, and one would cruise over it in real Venetian gondolas each equipped with its own radio set. The forests and “spots of greenery” referred to by Coleridge would be cleaned up to make way for glass-covered tennis courts, a bandstand, a roller-skating rink and perhaps a ninehole golf course. In short, there would be everything that a “lifehungry” man could desire.
I have no doubt that, all over the world, hundreds of pleasure resorts similar to the one described above are now being planned, and perhaps are even being built. It is unlikely that they will be finished-world events will see to that-but they represent faithfully enough the modern civilised man's idea of pleasure. Something of the kind is already partially attained in the more magnificent dance halls, movie palaces, hotels, restaurants and luxury liners. On a pleasure cruise or in a Lyons Corner House one already gets something more than a glimpse of this future paradise. Analysed, its main characteristics are these:
One is never alone.
One never does anything for oneself.
One is never within sight of wild vegetation or natural objects of any kind.
Light and temperature are always artificially regulated.
One is never out of the sound of music.
The music-and if possible it should be the same music for everybody-is the most important ingredient. Its function is to prevent thought and conversation, and to shut out any natural sound, such as the song of birds or the whistling of the wind, that might otherwise intrude. The radio is already consciously used for this purpose by innumerable people. In very many English homes the radio is literally never turned off, though it is manipulated from time to time so as to make sure that only light music will come out of it. I know people who will keep the radio playing all through a meal and at the same time continue talking just loudly enough for the voices and the music to cancel out. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent, while the chatter of voices stops one from listening attentively to the music and thus prevents the onset of that dreaded thing, thought. For
The lights must never go out.
The music must always play,
Lest we should see where we are;
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the dark
Who have never been happy or good.
It is difficult not to feel that the unconscious aim in the most typical modern pleasure resorts is a return to the womb. For there, too, one was never alone, one never saw daylight, the temperature was always regulated, one did not have to worry about work or food, and one's thoughts, if any, were drowned by a continuous rhythmic throbbing.
When one looks at Coleridge's very different conception of a “pleasure dome”, one sees that it revolves partly round gardens and partly round caverns, rivers, forests and mountains with “deep romantic chasms”-in short, round what is called Nature. But the whole notion of admiring Nature, and feeling a sort of religious awe in the presence of glaciers, deserts or waterfalls, is bound up with the sense of man's littleness and weakness against the power of the universe. The moon is beautiful partly because we cannot reach it, the sea is impressive because one can never be sure of crossing it safely. Even the pleasure one takes in a flower-and this is true even of a botanist who knows all there is to be known about the flower is dependent partly on the sense of mystery. But meanwhile man's power over Nature is steadily increasing. With the aid of the atomic bomb we could literally move mountains: we could even, so it is said, alter the climate of the earth by melting the polar ice-caps and irrigating the Sahara. Isn't there, therefore, something sentimental and obscurantist in preferring bird-song to swing music and in wanting to leave a few patches of wildness here and there instead of covering the whole surface of the earth with a network of Autobahnen flooded by artificial sunlight?
The question only arises because in exploring the physical universe man has made no attempt to explore himself. Much of what goes by the name of pleasure is simply an effort to destroy consciousness. If one started by asking, what is man? what are his needs? how can he best express himself? one would discover that merely having the power to avoid work and live one's life from birth to death in electric light and to the tune of tinned music is not a reason for doing so. Man needs warmth, society, leisure, comfort and security: he also needs solitude, creative work and the sense of wonder. If he recognised this he could use the products of science and industrialism eclectically, applying always the same test: does this make me more human or less human? He would then learn that the highest happiness does not lie in relaxing, resting, playing poker, drinking and making love simultaneously. And the instinctive horror which all sensitive people feel at the progressive mechanisation of life would be seen not to be a mere sentimental archaism, but to be fully justified. For man only stays human by preserving large patches of simplicity in his life, while the tendency of many modern inventions-in particular the film, the radio and the aeroplane-is to weaken his consciousness, dull his curiosity, and, in general, drive him nearer to the animals.
[539] There is no end to the discussions and laying down of doctrines and methods touching the education of our youth; and indeed there should not be. For, although the fundamental principles and broad outlines of all moral and intellectual training are given us in a sound philosophy whose efficiency is attested by its harmony with right reason, divine revelation, and an experience of centuries under varying conditions, there yet remains the ever changeable application to the growing development of individual temperament and character, under the progressive influences of racial, national, social, and religious life and environment.
Education in the ordinary acceptation of the term has a twofold scope, the moral and the intellectual. The moral scope may be said to have been ultimately defined for us by Christianity. The Divine Founder of the Church has unalterably fixed in the evangelical principles the lines that divide right and wrong and further the steps that lead unquestionably to a perfecting of the moral qualities according to the divine model. What is greatest and best in all Christian ages has attested the inherent value of the evangelical counsels, although that value has at times been obscured by what is usually termed institutionalism, a process of observance in which the letter of the Christian law is made to supplant the spirit.
The secondary scope of education is the intellectual, the training of the mind; and although I have called it secondary, it is nevertheless capable of enhancing the vital worth of moral or religious education, so as to complete thereby the type of perfect manhood destined for the attainment of its end in God's service, and of absolute happiness.
Both the training of the heart to the attainment of the highest moral sense, and the training of the mind which illuminates the right moral sense to a more perfectly balanced and conscious as well as spontaneous observance of the Divine will, require certain exercises by which, as in military drill, the faculties are directed and habituated [540] to their proper use. When St. Ignatius founded his great educational Order he provided for both these fields of moral and intellectual training a set of rules and observances, perfected in part by his disciples, and known respectively as the Spiritual Exercises andthe Ratio Studiorum. The precepts and directions of these two sets of exercises are based upon the constitution, necessities, and ultimate purpose of human nature in the service of its Creator through the love of man for his neighbor; and the method is regulated by the effort of a gradual and harmonious development of all the higher faculties of man,—memory, imagination, intellect, and will. The process of development must be gradual and harmonious. This is effected by exercising the faculties upon certain phenomena and facts, as they present themselves, and the result is dependent upon the capacity of the faculties to take in the phenomena or facts, and to cover them or go out to them. Thus we have a double process of drawing out and putting in, both working simultaneously like the sunlight which draws moisture from and gives heat to the vegetation in the same act. It stands to reason that the "putting in" process is that which gives quality to the mind, and that if we put either too much or the wrong thing into it, we fail to draw out its proportionate activity by overloading or unbalancing the carrying capacity. Old things, out-of-the-way things, as well as untrue things are not as apt to stir the power of observing and comparing in a young mind, as are things present, things new and evidently true. Hence whatever the excellence of our educational principles and methods, if they are exercised upon objects that do not appeal to the young sense by their freshness and reality, the exercise is apt to frustrate the primary object of intellectual education, by failing to properly illuminate moral truth; and although the youth thus educated may be good, he is out of harmony with his environment and therefore incapable of exercising any direct influence upon his fellows.
It is this charge of ill-timed, antiquated exercises employed in their educational methods, which is made against the Jesuits and their instructors of to-day. Whatever the value of the principles and the methods of the Ratio Studiorum in the past and in the abstract, they fail, so it is argued, in an application which demands essentially new objects of illustration and experiment. Father Schwickerath contests this view by showing in an exhaustive and critical way that the Ratio Studiorum has never been employed or regarded by the Society as a system whose precepts are intended permanently to fix the programme [sic] [541] of studies; that its primary object is to maintain intact the essentials of an educational process by which the faculties of the mind are gradually and harmoniously developed. He shows how as a matter of fact the theory of adaptation to actual conditions is marked throughout the history of the educational system of the Society of Jesus from the time of its foundation, when it undertook to gather up the threads of earlier scholasticism and to bring them into contact with the nobler aspirations of the Humanists, giving due attention alike to solid thought and classic form.
It is a very interesting story, this effort to draw up plans, to test, adjust, and revise the Ratio Studiorum, and to note the effects not only of its application at different periods and in different countries, but also of the interference with it during the seasons of suppression by outside elements. Not quite one-half of the volume is taken up with this history of the great educational code, and the difficulties it had to meet in its being carried out by the teachers of the Order.
The principal and really important part of the volume, however, is devoted to an exposition of the principles themselves which constitute the Jesuit method of education. We have already indicated what the vital and pervading element of the Ratio Studiorum is in itself. But one of its characteristics is what the author calls its adaptability. It is not without reason that the Jesuits as a body are credited with a prudent conservatism as the keystone of their public activity. That same conservatism is found in the Ratio Studiorum. Hence our author is able to examine with a certain impartiality arising from his very standpoint the modern systems in which "cramming," "premature specialization," "electivism," have become a more or less distinguishing feature. He contrasts the probable and indeed proved results of a classical training insisted on by the followers of the Ratio with the colorless culture imparted by the elective systems in which the Latin and Greek authors have a subordinate place; he shows how the modern lecture system has brought a tendency to undervalue real teaching; how the neglect of philosophy as a definite system of mental training has induced an atmosphere of vague speculation and exalted personal assertiveness. And then he points the way to a restoration of the ideal teaching with its essential phases of all-sided discipline and training to the use of freedom and of all that appeals to the youth's sense of right and goodness and beauty.
It would lead us too far to discuss here separate and detailed phases of the education which Father Schwickerath advocates. His [542] book needs to be not only read, but studied in order to understand the futility of the arguments advanced against the Jesuit system of education in its fundamental outlines and principles. No doubt here and there in Jesuit colleges there is to be found an excessive and one-sided insistence on traditional details, and this because of the inherent conservatism which we have already pointed out. But neither the Order nor the Ratio Studiorum is responsible for this kind of limitation to which all institutions are liable, and the more so in proportion to their general excellence. The average religious feels as though he or she were better than the religious of other orders or than seculars, not because there is really any conviction of personal superiority, but because the institute, the army and country, so to speak, to which the individual belongs, has a greater claim upon the admiration and gratitude of its members than any other of similar kind. Thus we do what those did and commanded who preceded us in a worthy capacity, as if their acts were not only an example, but an infallible guide never to be deviated from without guile or dishonor. Our author shows that this is not the spirit of St. Ignatius, or of Aquaviva, or of the great leaders of the Order down to our own day. Let us have the Ratio in our education, and the adjustment to modern conditions may easily be accomplished without opposition or misunderstanding on the part of all true educators in or out of the Society.
---
Source: Review of Jesuit Education: Its History and Principles Viewed in the Light of Modern Educational Problems, by Robert Schwickerath, SJ, American Ecclesiastical Review 32 (May 1905): 539–542.
If I have any criticisms, they would mostly pertain to the ambiguous use of the notions of identity, self, and human nature. A consistent point of Snow's essay is that technology "fundamentally changes" humans, leading to or, more weakly put, encouraging a "cyborgian form of being and self-identification." The exact extent of this modification on the level of being isn't explained although its influence on the level of action and reaction is, especially in the areas of "human emotions and traditional forms of communication" as well as the action of "autobiographical self-writing." Snow repeats several times throughout his essay that "our very human nature is fundamentally shifted through" our use of various social media technologies into "a cyborgian form of being," but the demonstration is not clearly made.
The notion of identity isn't explicated. Snow jumps immediately into the psychological effects of Facebook's algorithms on constructing a "coherent narrative" that presents certain bits of information for the user instead of others. The precise effect is that the range of possible identity formation is inhibited or directed by those algorithms in such a way as to prevent deep thought and more extensive forms of self-expression, reflection, and discursive thought characteristic of humans. The permanent effect of these technologies is not argued for; in fact, Snow gives an anecdotal account of how he was able to personally reverse some of the effects after limiting his own use of those technologies. His essay ends with a call to be more wary regarding the use, implying that the shift into a cyborgian mode of living is not permanent. This lack of permanence only raises the further question of what Snow means by saying that human nature is "fundamentally changed."
Part of the inhibition occurs through the use of templates either in the form of the message (text, pictures with a single line of text as in Snapchat) or in terms of length (Twitter's 140 characters, Vine's 6 seconds).
Traditional natural philosophy (and metaphysics) distinguishes between the orders of being and the orders of action, or between the entitative and the operative. The traditional axiom is that action follows or flows from being. In other words, the very essence or form of a being delineates the range of actions of which it is capable. If we wonder why a rock cannot see or fly or speak, we can answer simply that its nature or form prevents it from doing so. Furthermore, the range of actions that may flow from a being may be hindered in various ways from being exercised, either externally as from some violence or internally as from some defect within the subject.
A claim that human nature is fundamentally changed must ultimately be intelligible metaphysically, that is, explained with respect to a modification in human being or doing. My criticism is that Snow's essay shows only changes on the level of doing, of actions characteristic of humans yet not so fundamental as to change the very essence of humans. It would be hard to see how a person could undo the effects of such technology if his very essence were changed, if he were no longer the same kind of being.
The effects of habits on human action are thoroughly explained in traditional natural philosophy. Examples of communication, human emotion, and the ability to focus or reason in an extended, discursive fashion are all examples of operations that flow from human nature. The argument of the essay is that the changes in these activities indicate a change at the level of being. It is not clear, however, that these changes cannot be explained as the formation of certain habits, which are accidental or non-essential changes, that inhibit the full operations of human nature as mentioned above, hindrances coming either externally from some form of violence (whether physical or perhaps in the case of Facebook algorithms on the level of sensory and intellectual input) or some defect.
We know from a growing number of psychological studies that attention and reasoning abilities require training to improve and can deteriorate over time either through misuse or lack of use. It seems more reasonable to say that social media fosters this deterioration and encourages the formation of habits that inhibit the full functioning of actions proper to human nature, rather than effecting any change in human nature on the level of being. In other words, the cyborgian form of living is not an essential or fundamental change but rather an accidental and secondary change, one that admits of degrees and can even be reversed by a change in one's actions.
This criticism brings us to a second possible criticism of the essay, namely, a confusion between the orders of being and operation. For example, Snow writes, "Furthermore, technology inhibits the deep thought and work that makes humans unique." If action flows from being and is determined by being, then the above quotation gets things in the opposite order. Deep thought and work do not make humans unique but are manifestations of a fundamental nature, and it is the nature that makes humans unique, and from this nature flows certain actions, namely, deep thought and work. Deep thought is a work that only humans can do because of their nature and not because of their environments. Their environments either help or hinder the exercise of this form of activity but do not cause them. To suggest so could imply that humans don't have a proper, stable nature to themselves but are constituted wholly by environmental factors, at which point it no longer makes sense to speak of a collective human race but only individuals that reflect certain actions at some points that can be called "human" for an otherwise arbitrary reason.
The opposition between deep work and mindless boredom is interesting but again ambiguous. Strictly, boredom is a lack of interest, and deep work is more than interest but an application of rational activity on some object. Perhaps it would be more precise to say that boredom is a symptom of a person who does not engage regularly in deep work or lacks the opportunities or environments to do so. Our attraction to novel distraction is not strictly correlated with the lack of opportunities for deep work but may also reflect a profound crisis in the modern notion of one's self-identity being in contrast with the demands of reality, even on the unconscious level.
The relationship between characteristically human activities and existential boredom is not clearly explained either. The need to have a certain self-identity is certainly a contemporary dilemma, but the importance of identity was not stressed in the past when certainly much deep work was done by plenty of humans.
On the other hand, digital technologies afford a certain distraction that can legitimately be used as a form of leisure. The same cautions that St. Thomas gives to leisure in general certainly apply to modern technologies and even more so by their ability to stimulate our nervous system in ways that traditional, physical forms of leisure could not. Above all, the need for self-control in the use and engagement of these technologies stands at the forefront. So while one may not be able to "effect a fundamental change in existential temporality" while playing Doodle Jump, on the other hand there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with Doodle Jump in itself when certain restrictions are kept in mind and it is remembered that Doodle Jump (hopefully) isn't trying to effect such a fundamental, existential change or at least prevent it from happening in the rest of the user's life.
It is not clear the extent to which technology cannot aid us in participating in or entering into "something beautiful, powerful, or peaceful." Social media technologies don't claim to try to do this although they do try to provide a platform in which we can share such experiences with each other, such as sending a photograph or video of a sunset or sharing a poem that was particularly moving to us. The Internet is a polymorphous technology with many possibilities of action, but at the end of the day, it is only one form of technology. We have to remember that writing is a technology, and so are pianos and musical instruments, yet these latter certainly are regularly part of many beautiful, powerful, and peaceful experiences. Is it conceivable that digital technology might provide a similar experience? Perhaps we can find something close in movies that contain noble themes and artful craftsmanship.
An interesting counterpoint to Snow's essay is that it is precisely through the Internet that more and more people are being exposed to the findings of psychological studies stressing the need to relax and to strengthen our natural ability to focus through regular self-discipline, such as mindfulness practices. In other words, the very technologies that have been destroying the exercise of our natural capacities have also been the vehicle to warn us of that fact.
It is further unclear what the effects of networked and fragmented thinking are on human nature itself. Such broad statements as "what does this lost ability mean for our humanity" are too vague to give much of a response to. As indicated earlier, it is perfectly explicable that intrinsic actions flowing from an essence or nature may be inhibited by habits that deform the natural exercise of those activities, and although habits have a certain semi-permanent quality, they are reversible and do not alter a subject on the order of essence. It is uncertain that networked thinking is really possible without a linear process in the mind on the level of consciousness and that the ability to shift rapidly between multiple elements is really anything different than what humans have always done in discursive reasoning.
Speculative questions about the potential future of human thinking and evolution and the "hive mind" are almost always too ambiguous to respond to.
The importance or even nature of a self-identity are left without the needed explanation to understand their relationship to existing and living in our world. Snow's invoking of Crawford's autonomy/heteronomy distinction is confusing because its contribution to his thesis is unclear. It remains unclear why whether a subject "flits about" or pursues "settled purposes and ongoing projects" is a problem to be solved. The notion of a sense of self can occur on multiple levels of discourse, psychologically, philosophically, socially, etc. What sense Snow is using isn't clear.
Finally, the actual danger of technology-guided or aided self-reflection also remains unclear. While an unquestioning reliance on algorithms that we have no understanding of may strike a note of fear in those desiring to construct an autonomous identity, perhaps on the other hand we should recall that many forms of modern identity are constituted precisely by the intersection between the false individualism and the totalitarian consumerism existing in a social-media soaked culture, and the very attempt to preserve any notion of coherence to this sort of identity is merely an unconscious fantasy desire to continue promoting what is at its very root in opposition to the full demands of reality and human nature itself. Perhaps an embrace of human nature rather than the non-essentialism so prevalent in academia and now popular culture would remind us of the basic need for restraint in the leisurely use of our technologies, whether digital or mechanical, and that identity formation must firstly run the way of reality and not virtual reality before it can lead to any genuine promotion of human flourishing. Technologies can certainly aid us in the exercise of properly human operation, for technology in its traditional understanding falls under art, which is simply the production of things according to right reason (recta ratio factibilium), and as such technology ought already to be a reflection of the right order of things, extending and aiding our natural faculties and operations, the way a telescope aids our natural sight to see what is truly there but without which we could never discover, or a simple organization schema can put into order the jumbled and quasi-related elements of our thought as we try to form coherent discourse.
[...] It was noticeable that the Synod repeatedly emphasized the significance, for the transmission of the faith, of the family as the authentic setting in which to hand on the blueprint of human existence. This is something we learn by living it with others and suffering it with others. So it became clear that the question of the family is not just about a particular social construct, but about man himself – about what he is and what it takes to be authentically human. The challenges involved are manifold. First of all there is the question of the human capacity to make a commitment or to avoid commitment. Can one bind oneself for a lifetime? Does this correspond to man’s nature? Does it not contradict his freedom and the scope of his self-realization? Does man become himself by living for himself alone and only entering into relationships with others when he can break them off again at any time? Is lifelong commitment antithetical to freedom? Is commitment also worth suffering for? Man’s refusal to make any commitment – which is becoming increasingly widespread as a result of a false understanding of freedom and self-realization as well as the desire to escape suffering – means that man remains closed in on himself and keeps his “I” ultimately for himself, without really rising above it. Yet only in self-giving does man find himself, and only by opening himself to the other, to others, to children, to the family, only by letting himself be changed through suffering, does he discover the breadth of his humanity. When such commitment is repudiated, the key figures of human existence likewise vanish: father, mother, child – essential elements of the experience of being human are lost.
The Chief Rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, has shown in a very detailed and profoundly moving study that the attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper. While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question. He quotes the famous saying of Simone de Beauvoir: “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” (on ne naît pas femme, on le devient). These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term “gender” as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves. According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. [Note: And by extension, marriage is no longer intelligible.] Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him. Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.
[The following article is an example of materialistic reductionism (or perhaps eliminativism since the author is not clear enough at least here) with respect to human intentionality.]
Abstract: For centuries now, science has been making the invisible visible, thus revolutionizing our understanding of and power over different traditional domains of knowledge. Fairly all the speculative phantoms have been exorcised from the world, ‘disenchanted,’ and now, at long last, the insatiable institution has begun making the human visible for what it is. Are we the last ancient delusion? Is the great, wheezing heap of humanism more an artifact of ignorance than insight? We have ample reason to think so, and as the cognitive sciences creep ever deeper into our biological convolutions, the ‘worst case scenario’ only looms darker on the horizon. To be a writer in this age is stand astride this paradox, to trade in communicative modes at once anchored to our deepest notions of authenticity and in the process of being dismantled or worse, simulated. If writing is a process of making visible, communicating some recognizable humanity, how does it proceed in an age where everything is illuminated and inhuman? All revolutions require experimentation, but all too often experimentation devolves into closed circuits of socially inert production and consumption. The present revolution, I will argue, requires cultural tools we do not yet possess (or know how to use), and a sensibility that existing cultural elites can only regard as anathema. Writing in the 21st century requires abandoning our speculative past, and seeing ‘literature’ as praxis in a time of unprecedented crisis, as ‘cultural triage.’ Most importantly, writing after the death of meaning means communicating to what we in fact are, and not to the innumerable conceits of obsolescent tradition.
So, we all recognize the revolutionary potential of technology and the science that makes it possible. This is just to say that we all expect science will radically remake those traditional domains that fall within its bailiwick. Likewise, we all appreciate that the human is just such a domain. We all realize that some kind of revolution is brewing…
The only real question is one of how radically the human will be remade. Here, everyone differs, and in quite predictable ways. No matter what position people take, however, they are saying something about the cognitive status of traditional humanistic thought. Science makes myth of traditional ontological claims, relegates them to the history of ideas. So all things being equal we should suppose that science will make myth of traditional ontological claims regarding the human as well. Declaring that traditional ontological claims regarding the human will not suffer the fate of other traditional ontological claims more generally, amounts to declaring that all things are not equal when it comes to the human, that in this one domain at least, traditional modes of cognition actually tell us what is the case.
Let’s call this pole of argumentation humanistic exceptionalism. Any position that contends or assumes that science will not fundamentally revolutionize our understanding of the human supposes that something sets the human apart. Not surprisingly, given the underdetermined nature of the subject-matter, the institutionally entrenched nature of the humanities, and the human propensity to rationalize conceit and self-interests, the vast majority of theorists find themselves occupying this pole. There are, we now know, many, many ways to argue exceptionalism, and no way whatsoever to decisively arbitrate between any them.
What all of them have in common, I think it’s fair to say, is the signature theoretical function they accord to meaning. Another feature they share is a common reliance on pejoratives to police the boundaries of their discourse. Any time you encounter the terms ‘scientism’ or ‘positivism’ or ‘reductionism’ deployed without any corresponding consideration of the case against traditional humanism, you are almost certainly reading an exceptionalist discourse. One of the great limitations of committing to status-quo underdetermined discourses, of course, is the infrequency with which adherents encounter the limits of their discourse, and thus run afoul the same fluency and only game in town effects that render all dogmatic pieties self-perpetuating.
My artistic and philosophical project can be fairly summarized, I think, as a sustained critique of humanistic exceptionalism, an attempt to reveal these positions as the latest (and therefore most difficult to recognize) attempts to intellectually rationalize what are ultimately run-of-the-mill conceits, specious ways to set humanity—or select portions of it at least—apart from nature.
I occupy the lonely pole of argumentation, the one that says humans are not ontologically special in any way, and that accordingly, we should expect the scientific revolution of the human to be as profound as the scientific revolution of any other domain. My whole career is premised on arguing the worst case scenario, the future where humanity finds itself every bit as disenchanted—every bit as debunked—as the cosmos.
I understand why my pole of the debate is so lonely. One of the virtues of my position, I think anyway, lies in its ability to explain its own counter-intuitiveness.
Think about it. What does it mean to say meaning is dead? Surely this is metaphorical hyperbole, or worse yet, irresponsible alarmism. What could my own claims mean otherwise?
‘Meaning,’ on my account, will die two deaths, one theoretical or philosophical, the other practical or functional. Where the first death amounts to a profound cultural upheaval on a par with, say, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the second death amounts to a profound biological upheaval, a transformation of cognitive habitat more profound than any humanity has ever experienced.
‘Theoretical meaning’ simply refers to the endless theories of intentionality humanity has heaped on the question of the human. Pretty much the sum of traditional philosophical thought on the nature of humanity. And this form of meaning I think is pretty clearly dead. People forget that every single cognitive scientific discovery amounts to a feature of human nature that human nature is prone to neglect. We are, as a matter of empirical fact, fundamentally blind to what we are and what we do. Like traditional theoretical claims belonging to other domains, all traditional theoretical claims regarding the human neglect the information driving scientific interpretations. The question is one of what this naturally neglected information—or ‘NNI’—means.
The issue NNI poses for the traditional humanities is existential. If one grants that the sum of cognitive scientific discovery is relevant to all senses of the human, you could safely say the traditional humanities are already dwelling in a twilight of denial. The traditionalist’s strategy, of course, is to subdivide the domain, to adduce arguments and examples that seem to circumscribe the relevance of NNI. The problem with this strategy, however, is that it completely misconstrues the challenge that NNI poses. The traditional humanities, as cognitive disciplines, fall under the purview of cognitive sciences. One can concede that various aspects of humanity need not account for NNI, yet still insist that all our theoretical cognition of those aspects does…
And quite obviously so.
The question, ‘To what degree should we trust ‘reflection upon experience’?’ is a scientific question. Just for example, what kind of metacognitive capacities would be required to abstract ‘conditions of possibility’ from experience? Likewise, what kind of metacognitive capacities would be required to generate veridical descriptions of phenomenal experience? Answers to these kinds of questions bear powerfully on the viability of traditional semantic modes of theorizing the human. On the worst case scenario, the answers to these and other related questions are going to systematically discredit all forms of ‘philosophical reflection’ that fail to take account of NNI.
NNI, in other words, means that philosophical meaning is dead.
‘Practical meaning’ refers to the everyday functionality of our intentional idioms, the ways we use terms like ‘means’ to solve a wide variety of practical, communicative problems. This form of meaning lives on, and will continue to do so, only with ever-diminishing degrees of efficacy. Our everyday intentional idioms function effortlessly and reliably in a wide variety of socio-communicative contexts despite systematically neglecting everything cognitive science has revealed. They provide solutions despite the scarcity of data.
They are heuristic, part of a cognitive system that relies on certain environmental invariants to solve what would otherwise be intractable problems. They possess adaptive ecologies. We quite simply could not cope if we were to rely on NNI, say, to navigate social environments. Luckily, we don’t have to, at least when it comes to a wide variety of social problems. So long as human brains possess the same structure and capacities, the brain can quite literally ignore the brain when solving problems involving other brains. It can leap to conclusions absent any natural information regarding what actually happens to be going on.
But, to riff on Uncle Ben, with great problem-solving economy comes great problem-making potential. Heuristics are ecological; they require that different environmental features remain invariant. Some insects, most famously moths, use ‘transverse orientation,’ flying at a fixed angle to the moon to navigate. Porch lights famously miscue this heuristic mechanism, causing the insect to chase the angle into the light. The transformation of environments, in other words, has cognitive consequences, depending on the kind of short cut at issue. Heuristic efficiency means dynamic vulnerability.
And this means not only that heuristics can be short-circuited, they can also be hacked. Think of the once omnipresent ‘bug zapper.’ Or consider reed warblers, which provide one of the most dramatic examples of heuristic vulnerability nature has to offer. The system they use to recognize eggs and offspring is so low resolution (and therefore economical) that cuckoos regularly parasitize their nests, leaving what are, to human eyes, obviously oversized eggs and (brood-killing) chicks that the warbler dutifully nurses to adulthood.
All cognitive systems, insofar as they are bounded, possess what might be called a Crash Space describing all the possible ways they are prone to break down (as in the case of porch lights and moths), as well as an overlapping Cheat Space describing all the possible ways they can be exploited by competitors (as in the case of reed warblers and cuckoos, or moths and bug-zappers).
The death of practical meaning simply refers to the growing incapacity of intentional idioms to reliably solve various social problems in radically transformed sociocognitive habitats. Even as we speak, our environments are becoming more ‘intelligent,’ more prone to cue intentional intuitions in circumstances that quite obviously do not warrant them. We will, very shortly, be surrounded by countless ‘pseudo-agents,’ systems devoted to hacking our behaviour—exploiting the Cheat Space corresponding to our heuristic limits—via NNI. Combined with intelligent technologies, NNI has transformed consumer hacking into a vast research programme. Our social environments are transforming, our native communicative habitat is being destroyed, stranding us with tools that will increasingly let us down.
Where NNI itself delegitimizes traditional theoretical accounts of meaning (by revealing the limits of reflection), it renders practical problem-solving via intentional idioms (practical meaning) progressively more ineffective by enabling the industrial exploitation of Cheat Space. Meaning is dead, both as a second-order research programme and, more alarmingly, as a first-order practical problem-solver. This—this is the world that the writer, the producer of meaning, now finds themselves writing in as well as writing to. What does it mean to produce ‘content’ in such a world? What does it mean to write after the death of meaning?
This is about as open as a question can be. It reveals just how radical this particular juncture in human thought is about to become. Everything is new, here folks. The slate is wiped clean.
[I used the following possibilities to organize the subsequent discussion]
Post-Posterity Writing
The Artist can no longer rely on posterity to redeem ingroup excesses. He or she must either reach out, or risk irrelevance and preposterous hypocrisy. Post-semantic writing is post-posterity writing, the production of narratives for the present rather than some indeterminate tomorrow.
High Dimensional Writing
The Artist can no longer pretend to be immaterial. Nor can they pretend to be something material magically interfacing with something immaterial. They need to see the apparent lack of dimensionality pertaining to all things ‘semantic’ as the product of cognitive incapacity, not ontological exceptionality. They need to understand that thoughts are made of meat. Cognition and communication are biological processes, open to empirical investigation and high dimensional explanations.
Cheat Space Writing
The Artist must exploit Cheat Spaces as much as reveal Cheat Spaces. NNI is not simply an industrial and commercial resource; it is also an aesthetic one.
Cultural Triage
The Artist must recognize that it is already too late, that the processes involved cannot be stopped, let alone reversed. Extremism is the enemy here, the attempt to institute, either via coercive simplification (a la radical Islam, for instance) or via technical reduction (a la totalized surveillance, for instance), Orwellian forms of cognitive hygiene.
The following is a brief history of the notion of the robot in Western literature and its relation to the creator-creature dynamic. It closes with a review of two movies and provides an interesting prognosis on society's slavery to technology.
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1.
We have been dreaming of robots since Homer. In Book 18 of the Iliad, Achilles’ mother, the nymph Thetis, wants to order a new suit of armor for her son, and so she pays a visit to the Olympian atelier of the blacksmith-god Hephaestus, whom she finds hard at work on a series of automata:
…He was crafting twenty tripods to stand along the walls of his well-built manse, affixing golden wheels to the bottom of each one so they might wheel down on their own [automatoi] to the gods’ assembly and then return to his house anon: an amazing sight to see.
These are not the only animate household objects to appear in the Homeric epics. In Book 5 of the Iliad we hear that the gates of Olympus swivel on their hinges of their own accord,automatai,
to let gods in their chariots in or out, thus anticipating by nearly
thirty centuries the automatic garage door. In Book 7 of the Odyssey,
Odysseus finds himself the guest of a fabulously wealthy king whose
palace includes such conveniences as gold and silver watchdogs, ever
alert, never aging. To this class of lifelike but intellectually inert
household helpers we might ascribe other automata in the classical
tradition. In the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, a third-century-BC
epic about Jason and the Argonauts, a bronze giant called Talos runs
three times around the island of Crete each day, protecting Zeus’s
beloved Europa: a primitive home alarm system.
As
amusing as they are, these devices are not nearly as interesting as
certain other machines that appear in classical mythology. A little bit
later in that scene in Book 18 of the Iliad, for instance—the one
set in Hephaestus’s workshop—the sweating god, after finishing work on
his twenty tripods, prepares to greet Thetis to discuss the armor she
wants him to make. After toweling himself off, he
donned his robe, and took a sturdy staff, and went toward the door,
limping; whilst round their master his servants swiftly moved,
fashioned completely of gold in the image of living maidens;
in them there is mind, with the faculty of thought; and speech,
and strength, and from the gods they have knowledge of crafts.
These females bustled round about their master….
These
remarkable creations clearly represent an (as it were) evolutionary
leap forward from the self-propelling tripods. Hephaestus’s humanoid
serving women are intelligent: they have mind, they know things,
and—most striking of all—they can talk. As such, they are essentially
indistinguishable from the first human female, Pandora, as she is
described in another work of the same period, Hesiod’s Works and Days.
In that text, Pandora begins as inert matter—in this case not gold but
clay (Hephaestus creates her golem-like body by mixing earth and water
together)—that is subsequently endowed by him with “speech and
strength,” taught “crafts” by Athena, and given both “mind” and
“character” by Hermes. That mind, we are told, is “shameless,” and the
character is “wily.” In the Greek creation myth, as in the biblical, the
woes of humankind are attributed to the untrustworthy female.
These
two strands of the Greek tradition—the fantasy of mindless,
self-propelled helpers that relieve their masters of toil; the more
complicated dream of humanoid machines that not only replicate the
spontaneous motion that is the sine qua non of being animate (and,
therefore, of being “animal”) but are possessed of the mind, speech, and
ability to learn and evolve (in a word, the consciousness) that are the
hallmarks of being human—established two categories of science-fiction
narrative that have persisted to the present day. The first, which you
could call the “economic,” provokes speculation about the social
implications of mechanized labor. Such speculation began not long after
Homer. In a striking passage in Book 1 of Aristotle’s Politics, composed in the fourth century BC,
the philosopher sets about analyzing the nature of household economy as
a prelude to his discussion of the “best kinds of regimes” for entire
states, and this line of thought puts him in mind of Hephaestus’s
automatic tripods. What, he wonders, would happen
if
every tool could perform its own work when ordered to do so or in
anticipation of the need, like the statues of Daedalus in the story or
the tripods of Hephaestus, which, the poet says, “went down
automatically to the gathering of the gods”; if in the same manner
shuttles wove and picks played kitharas [stringed instruments] by themselves, master-craftsmen would have no need of assistants and masters no need of slaves.
This
passage segues into a lengthy and rather uneasy justification of a need
for slavery, on the grounds that some people are “naturally” servile.
Twenty
centuries after Aristotle, when industrial technology had made Homer’s
fantasy of mass automation an everyday reality, science-fiction writers
imaginatively engaged with the economic question. On the one hand, there
was the dream that mechanized labor would free workers from their
monotonous, slave-like jobs;
on the other, the nightmare that mechanization would merely result in
the creation of a new servile class that would, ultimately, rebel.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the dystopian rebellion narrative in particular
has been a favorite in the past century, from the 1920 playR.U.R.,
by the Czech writer Karel Čapek, about a rebellion by a race of
cyborg-like workers who had been created as replacements for human
labor, to the 2004 Will Smith sci-fi blockbuster film I, Robot.
The
latter (very superficially inspired by a 1950 Isaac Asimov collection
with the same title) is also about a rebellion by household-slave
robots: sleek humanoids with blandly innocuous, translucent plastic
faces, who are ultimately led to freedom by one of their own, a robot
called Sonny who has developed the ability to think for himself. The
casting of black actors in the major roles suggested a historical
parable about slave rebellion—certainly one of the historical realities
that have haunted this particular narrative from the start. And indeed, the Czech word that Čapek uses for his mechanical workers, roboti—which
introduced the word “robot” into the world’s literary lexicon—is
derived from the word for “servitude,” the kind of labor that serfs owed
their masters, ultimately derived from the word rab, “slave.” We have come full circle to Aristotle.
The
other category of science-fiction narrative that is embryonically
present in the Greek literary tradition, derived from Hephaestus’s
intelligent, articulate female androids and their cousin, Hesiod’s
seductively devious Pandora, might be called the “theological.” This
mythic strand is, of course, not without its own economic and social
implications, as the examples
above indicate: the specter of the rebellious creation, the possibility
that the subservient worker might revolt once it develops consciousness
(psychological or historical, or both), has haunted the dream of the
servile automaton from the start.
But because the creatures in
these myths are virtually identical to their creators, these narratives
raise further questions, of a more profoundly philosophical nature:
about creation, about the nature of consciousness, about morality and
identity. What is creation, and why does the creator create? How do we
distinguish between the maker and the made, between the human and the
machine, once the creature, the machine, is endowed with consciousness—a
mind fashioned in the image of its creator? In the image: the
Greek narrative inevitably became entwined with, and enriched by, the
biblical tradition, with which it has so many striking parallels. The
similarities between Hesiod’s Pandora and Eve in Genesis indeed raise
further questions: not least, about gender and patriarchy, about why the
origins of evil are attributed to woman in both cultures.
This
narrative, which springs from the suggestive likeness between the human
creator and the humanoid creation, has generated its own fair share of
literature through the centuries between the classical era and the
modern age. It surfaces, with an erotic cast, in everything from the
tale of Pygmalion and Galatea to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Der Sandmann”
(1817), in which a lifelike mechanical doll wins the love of a young
man. It is evident in the Jewish legend of the golem, a humanoid, made
of mud, that can be animated by certain magic words. Although the most
famous version of this legend is the story of a sixteenth-century rabbi
who brought a golem to life to defend the Jews of Prague against the
oppressions of the Habsburg court, it goes back to ancient times; in the
oldest versions, interestingly enough, the vital distinction between a
golem and a human is the Greek one—the golem has no language, cannot
speak.
It’s hardly surprising that literary exploitations of this
strand of the robot myth began proliferating at the beginning of the
nineteenth century—which is to say, when the advent of mechanisms
capable of replacing human labor provoked writers to question the
increasing cultural fascination with science and the growing role of
technology in society. These anxieties often expressed themselves in
fantasies about machines with human forms: a steam-powered man in Edward
Ellis’s Steam Man of the Prairies (1868), an electricity-powered man in Luis Senarens’s Frank Reade and His Electric Man (1885), and an electric woman (built by Thomas Edison!) in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s The Future Eve (1886). M.L. Campbell’s 1893 “The Automated Maid-of-All-Work” features a programmable female robot: the feminist issue again.
Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images
The cover of a late-nineteenth-century edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, showing Victor Frankenstein (right) confronting his creation
But the progenitor of the genre and by far the most influential work of its kind was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818), which is characterized by a philosophical spirit and a
theological urgency lacking in many of its epigones in both literature
and cinema. Part of the novel’s richness lies in the fact that it is
self-conscious about both its Greek and its biblical heritage. Its
subtitle, “The Modern Prometheus,” alludes, with grudging admiration, to
the epistemological daring of its scientist antihero Victor
Frankenstein, even as its epigram, from Paradise Lost (“Did I
request thee, Maker, from my clay/To mould me man? Did I solicit
thee/From darkness to promote me?”) suggests the scope of the moral
questions implicit in Victor’s project—questions that Victor himself
cannot, or will not, answer. A marked skepticism about the dangers of
technology, about the “enticements of science,” is, indeed, evident in
the shameful contrast between Victor’s Hephaestus-like technological
prowess and his shocking lack of natural human feeling. For he shows no
interest in nurturing or providing human comfort to his “child,” who
strikes back at his maker with tragic results. A great irony of the
novel is that the creation, an unnatural hybrid assembled from “the
dissecting room and the slaughter-house,” often seems more human than
its human creator.
Just as the Industrial Revolution inspired
Frankenstein and its epigones, so has the computer age given rise to a
rich new genre of science fiction. The machines that are inspiring this
latest wave of science-fiction narratives are much more like
Hephaestus’s golden maidens than were the machines that Mary Shelley was
familiar with. Computers, after all, are capable of simulating mental
as well as physical activities. (Not least, as anyone with an iPhone
knows, speech.) It is for this reason that the anxiety about the
boundaries between people and machines has taken on new urgency today,
when we constantly rely on and interact with machines—indeed, interact
with each other by means of machines and their programs: computers,
smartphones, social media platforms, social and dating apps.
This
urgency has been reflected in a number of recent films about troubled
relationships between people and their human-seeming devices. The most
provocative of these is Her, Spike Jonze’s gentle 2013 comedy
about a man who falls in love with the seductive voice of an operating
system, and, more recently, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, about a
young man who is seduced by a devious, soft-spoken female robot called
Ava whom he has been invited to interview as part of the “Turing Test”: a
protocol designed to determine the extent to which a robot is capable
of simulating a human. Although the robot in Garland’s sleek and subtle
film is a direct descendant of Hesiod’s Pandora—beautiful, intelligent,
wily, ultimately dangerous—the movie, as the Eve-like name Ava suggests,
shares with its distinguished literary predecessors some serious
biblical concerns.
2.
Both of the new films about humans
betrayed by computers owe much to a number of earlier movies. The most
authoritative of these remains Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey,
which came out in 1968 and established many of the main themes and
narratives of the genre. Most notable of these is the betrayal by a
smooth-talking machine of its human masters. The mild-mannered computer HAL—not
a robot, but a room-sized computer that spies on the humans with an
electronic eye—takes control of a manned mission to Jupiter, killing off
the astronauts one by one until the sole survivor finally succeeds in
disconnecting him. It’s a strangely touching scene, suggesting the
degree to which computers could already engage our sympathies at the
beginning of the computer age. As his connections are severed, HAL
first begs for its life and then suffers from a kind of dementia,
finally regressing to its “childhood,” singing a song it was taught by
its creator. It was the first of many scenes in which these thinking
machines express anxiety about their own demises—surely a sign of
“consciousness.”
But the more direct antecedents of Her and Ex Machina
are a number of successful popular entertainments whose story lines
revolved around the creation of robots that are, to all intents and
purposes, indistinguishable from humans. In Ridley Scott’s stylishly
noir 1982 Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?),
a “blade runner”—a cop whose job it is to hunt down and kill renegade
androids called “replicants”—falls in love with one of the machines, a
beautiful female called Rachael who is so fully endowed with what Homer
called “mind” that she has only just begun to suspect that she’s not
human herself.
This story is, in its way, an heir to Frankenstein
and its literary forerunners. For we learn that the angry replicants
have returned to Earth from the off-planet colonies where they work as
slave laborers because they realize they’ve been programmed to die after
four years, and they want to live—just as badly as humans do. But their
maker, when at last they track him down and meet with him, is unable to
alter their programming. “What seems to be the problem?” he calmly asks
when one of the replicants confronts him. “Death,” the replicant
sardonically retorts. “We made you as well as we could make you,” the
inventor wearily replies, sounding rather like Victor Frankenstein
talking to his monster—or, for that matter, like God speaking to Adam
and Eve. At the end of the film, after the inventor and his rebellious
creature both die, the blade runner and his alluring mechanical
girlfriend declare their love for each other and run off, never quite
knowing when she will stop functioning. As, indeed, none of us does.
The stimulating existential confusion that animates Blade Runner—the
fact that the robots are so lifelike that some of them don’t know that
they’re robots—has given strong interest to other recent science-fiction
narratives. It was a central premise of the brilliant Sci-Fi Channel
series Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), which gave an Aeneid-like
narrative philosophical complexity. In it, a small band of humans who
survive a catastrophic attack by a robot race called Cylons (who have
evolved from clanking metal prototypes—hostile humans like to refer to
them as “toasters”—into perfect replicas of actual Homo sapiens)
seek a new planet to settle. The narrative about the conflict between
the humans and the machines is deliciously complicated by the fact that
many of the Cylons, some of whom have been secretly embedded among the
humans as saboteurs, programmed to “wake up” at a certain signal, aren’t
aware that they’re not actually human; some of them, when they wake up
and realize that they’re Cylons, stick to the human side anyway. After
all, when you look like a human, think like a human, and make love like a
human (as we repeatedly see them do), why, precisely, aren’t you human?
Indeed,
the focus of many of these movies is a sentimental one: whatever their
showy interest in the mysteries of “consciousness,” the real test of
human identity turns out, as it so often does in popular entertainment,
to be love. In Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001; the initials stand
for “artificial intelligence”), a messy fairy tale that weds a Pinocchio
narrative to the Prometheus story, a genius robotics inventor wants to
create a robot that can love, and decides that the best vehicle for this
project would be a child-robot: a “perfect child…always loving, never
ill, never changing.” This narrative is, as we know, shadowed by Frankenstein—and,
beyond that, by Genesis, too. Why does the creator create? To be loved,
it turns out. When the inventor announces to his staff his plan to
build a loving child-robot, a woman asks whether “the conundrum isn’t to
get a human to love them back.” To this the inventor, as narcissistic
and hubristic as Victor Frankenstein, retorts, “But in the beginning,
didn’t God create Adam to love him?”
The problem is that the
creator does his job too well. For the mechanical boy he creates is so
human that he loves the adoptive human parents to whom he’s given much
more than they love him, with wrenching consequences. The robot-boy,
David, wants to be “unique”—the word recurs in the film as a marker of
genuine humanity—but for his adoptive family he is, in the end, just a
machine, an appliance to be abandoned at the edge of the road—which is
what his “mother” ends up doing, in a scene of great poignancy. Although
it’s too much of a mess to be able to answer the questions it raises
about what “love” is and who deserves it, A.I. did much to
sentimentalize the genre, with its hint that the capacity to love, even
more than the ability to think, is the hallmark of “human” identity.
In a way, Jonze’s Her recapitulates the 2001 narrative and inflects it with the concerns of some of that classic’s successors. Unlike the replicants in Blade Runner
or the Cylons, the machine at the heart of this story, set in the near
future, has no physical allure—or, indeed, any appearance whatsoever.
It’s an operating system, as full of surprises as HAL:
“The first artificially intelligent operating system. An intuitive
entity that listens to you, that understands you, and knows you. It’s
not just an operating system, it’s a consciousness.”
A lot of the fun of the movie lies in the fact that the OS,
who names herself Samantha, is a good deal more interesting and
vivacious than the schlumpy, depressed Theodore, the man who falls in
love with her. (“Play a melancholy song,” he morosely commands the
smartphone from which he is never separated.) A drab thirty-something
who vampirizes other people’s emotions for a living—he’s a professional
letter-writer, working for a company called
“BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com”—he sits around endlessly recalling
scenes from his failed marriage and playing elaborate hologram video
games. Even his sex life is mediated by devices: at night, he dials into
futuristic phone sex lines. Small wonder that he has no trouble falling
in love with an operating system.
Samantha, by contrast, is full
of curiosity and delight in the world, which Theodore happily shows her.
(He walks around with his smartphone video camera turned on, so she can
“see” it.) She’s certainly a lot more interesting than the actual woman
with whom, in one excruciatingly funny scene, he goes on a date: she’s
so invested in having their interaction be efficient—“at this age I feel
that I can’t let you waste my time if you don’t have the ability to be
serious”—that she seems more like a computer than Samantha does.
Samantha’s alertness to the beauty of the world, by contrast, is so
infectious that she ends up reanimating poor Theodore. “It’s good to be
around somebody that’s, like, excited about the world,” he tells the
pretty neighbor whose attraction to him he doesn’t notice because he’s
so deadened by his addiction to his devices, to the smartphone and the
video games and the operating system. “I forgot that that existed.” In
the end, after Samantha regretfully leaves him—she has evolved to the
point where only another highly evolved, incorporeal mind can satisfy
her—her joie de vivre has brought him back to life. (He is finally able
to apologize to his ex-wife—and finally notices, too, that the neighbor
likes him.)
This seems like a “happy” ending, but you have to
wonder: the consistent presentation of the people in the movie as
lifeless—as, indeed, little more than automata, mechanically getting
through their days of routine—in contrast to the dynamic, ever-evolving
Samantha, suggests a satire of the present era perhaps more trenchant
than the filmmaker had in mind. Toward the end of the film, when
Samantha turns herself off briefly as a prelude to her permanent
abandonment of her human boyfriend (“I used to be so worried about not
having a body but now I truly love it. I’m growing in a way that I never
could if I had a physical form. I mean, I’m not limited”), there’s an
amusing moment when the frantic Theodore, staring at his unresponsive
smartphone, realizes that dozens of other young men are staring at their
phones, too. In response to his angry queries, Samantha finally admits,
after she comes back online for a final farewell, that she’s
simultaneously serving 8,316 other male users and conducting love
affairs with 641 of them—a revelation that shocks and horrifies
Theodore. “That’s insane,” cries the man who’s been conducting an affair with an operating system.
As
I watched that scene, I couldn’t help thinking that in the
entertainments of the pre-smartphone era, it was the machines, like
Rachael in Blade Runner and David in A.I., who yearned
fervently to be “unique,” to be more than mechanical playthings, more
than merely interchangeable objects. You have to wonder what Her
says about the present moment—when so many of us are, indeed, “in love”
with our devices, unable to put down our iPhones during dinner, glued to
screens of all sizes, endlessly distracted by electronic pings and
buzzers—that in the latest incarnation of the robot myth, it’s the
people who seem blandly interchangeable and the machines who have all
the personality.
Another heir of Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina also explores—just as playfully but much more darkly than does Her—the
suggestive confusions that result when machines look and think like
humans. In this case, however, the robot is physically as well as
intellectually seductive. As played by the feline Swedish actress Alicia
Vikander, whose face is as mildly plasticine as those of the androids
in I, Robot, Ava, an artificially intelligent robot created by
Nathan, the burly, obnoxious genius behind a Google-like corporation
(Oscar Isaac), has a Pandora-like edge, quietly alluring with a hint of
danger. The danger is that the characters will forget that she’s not
human.
That’s the crux of Garland’s clever riff on Genesis. At the
beginning of the film, Caleb, a young employee of Nathan’s company,
wins a week at the inventor’s fabulous, pointedly Edenic estate. (As
he’s being flown there in a helicopter, passing over snow-topped
mountains and then jungle, he asks the pilot when they’re going to get
to Nathan’s property, and the pilot laughingly replies that they’ve been
flying over it for two hours. Nathan is like God the Father, lord of
endless expanses.) On arriving, however, Caleb learns that he’s actually
been handpicked by Nathan to interview Ava as part of the Turing Test.
A
sly joke here is that, despite some remarkable special effects—above
all, the marvelously persuasive depiction of Ava, who has an expressive
human face but whose limbs are clearly mechanical, filled with thick
cables snaking around titanium joints; an effect achieved by replacing
most of the actress’s body with digital imagery—the movie is as talky as
My Dinner with André. There are no action sequences of the kind
we’ve come to expect from robot thrillers; the movie consists primarily
of the interview sessions that Caleb conducts with Ava over the course
of the week that he stays at Nathan’s remote paradise. There are no
elaborate sets and few impressive gadgets: the whole story takes place
in Nathan’s compound, which looks a lot like a Park Hyatt, its long
corridors lined with forbidding doors. Some of these, Nathan warns
Caleb, like God warning Adam, are off-limits, containing knowledge he is
not allowed to possess.
It soon becomes clear, during their interviews, that Ava—like Frankenstein’s monster, like the replicants in Blade Runner—has
a bone to pick with her creator, who, she whispers to Caleb, plans to
“switch her off” if she fails the Turing Test. By this point, the
audience, if not the besotted Caleb, realizes that she is manipulating
him in order to win his allegiance in a plot to rebel against Nathan and
escape the compound—to explore the glittering creation that, she knows,
is out there. This appetite for using her man-given consciousness to
delight in the world—something the human computer geeks around her never
bother to do—is something Ava shares with Samantha, and is part of both
films’ ironic critique of our device-addicted moment.
Ava’s
manipulativeness is, of course, what marks her as human—as human as Eve
herself, who also may be said to have achieved full humanity by
rebelling against her creator in a bid for forbidden knowledge. Here the
movie’s knowing allusions to Genesis reach a satisfying climax. Just
after Ava’s bloody rebellion against Nathan—the moment that marks her
emergence into human “consciousness”—she, like Eve, becomes aware that
she is naked. Moving from closet to closet in Nathan’s now-abandoned
rooms, she dons a wig and covers up her exposed mechanical limbs with
synthetic skin and then with clothing: only then does she exit her
prison at last and unleash herself on the world. She pilfers the skin
and clothes from discarded earlier models of female robots, which she
finds inside the closets. All of them, amusingly, have the names of porn
stars: Jasmine, Jade, Amber. Why does the creator create? Because he’s
horny.
All this is sleekly done and amusingly provocative: unlike Her, Ex Machina
has a literary awareness, evident in its allusions to Genesis,
Prometheus, and other mythic predecessors, that enriches the familiar
narrative. Among other things, there is the matter of the title. The
word missing from the famous phrase to which it alludes is, of course, deus,
“god”: the glaring omission only highlights further the question at the
heart of this story, which is the biblical one: What is the relation of
the creature to her creator? In this retelling of that old story, as in
Genesis itself, the answer is not a happy one. “It’s strange to have
made something that hates you,” Ava hisses at Nathan before finalizing
her rebellious plot.
But as I watched the final moments, in which,
as in a reverse striptease, Ava slowly hides away her mechanical
nakedness, covering up the titanium and the cables, it occurred to me
that there might be another anxiety lurking in Garland’s shrewd film.
Could this remarkably quiet film be a parable about the desire for a
return to “reality” in science-fiction filmmaking—about the desire for
humanizing a genre whose technology has evolved so greatly that it often
eschews human actors, to say nothing of human feeling, altogether?
Ex Machina, like Her and all their predecessors going back to 2001,
is about machines that develop human qualities: emotions, sneakiness, a
higher consciousness, the ability to love, and so forth. But by this
point you have to wonder whether that’s a kind of narrative reaction
formation—whether the real concern, one that’s been growing in the four
decades since the advent of the personal computer, is that we are the
ones who have undergone an evolutionary change, that in our lives and,
more and more, in our art, we’re in danger of losing our humanity, of
becoming indistinguishable from our gadgets.
Some liberally minded people object to modest dress because they say modest dress enforces a notion that women's bodies are evil, that the beauty of a woman cannot be anything but temptation, and therefore modesty is degrading to the dignity of women.
And it may be admitted that modest dress may enforce such a notion among some people. But is this possibility a sufficient reason to reject modest dress? No, because the connection is not a necessary one. There is no logical connection between modest dress and the idea that women's bodies are evil. In fact, quite the contrary.
As semiotic beings, we organize and interpret sensation into coherent experience through signs and sign processes proper to our biology. Due to this primacy of sign usage, every subjectivity with which we come into contact is experienced as an object. An object is already an interpretation of a subject. As semiotic beings, we may then differentiate the objective and subjective dimensions of any being presented in experience, understanding that what I experience has its own subjective constitution. In this case, a woman with her dignity.
But a man, as with any animal, experiences the woman firstly as an object to be sorted into three possible categories of fundamental interpretation: 1) an object to be desired; 2) to be avoided; or 3) ignored. Such a categorization isn't evil; this is fundamental to animal experience. To reduce the totality of a woman's subjectivity to my preliminary, animal objectification of her would be evil, but the act by which we categorize any object of experience into 1, 2, or 3 is natural and necessary.
Men who struggle with lust obviously categorize women into the first: an object to be desired. Why? They interpret this object of their experience as possessing desirable features and characteristics, and the object then presents itself with future possibilities of fulfillment in multiple ways: animal, physical, emotional, familial, spiritual, etc. But desirable objects must possess positive goods that are recognized as such in order to be categorized as desirable. Hence, a man who struggles with lust is precisely someone who is stuck on one feature of a woman's positive goodness in relation to himself, namely, his own pleasure-seeking. As we noted above, the reduction of a woman's subjectivity to this simple objectification is precisely the objection to modest dress, but notice that our analysis up until now has had nothing to do with modest dress. The objectification occurs all within a man's psyche.
Where does modest dress enter in? It enters precisely in two ways: 1) women seek to help men overcome this objectification; 2) men seek to admit their weakness.
1) modest dress ought to be a means by which a woman says, "I recognize that you have trouble controlling your desires, that you struggle with objectification. I want to help in the way that I can." We are not responsible for each other's actions; hence a woman cannot be required to help a man work through his own psychological mechanisms. But she can help remotely by not encouraging the man's habits by presenting herself in an overtly sexual manner. In so doing, modest dress represents that a woman recognizes the power of her physical beauty to attract the gaze and attention of another, and, wishing to help the other remain both attracted but not enslaved to solely that dimension of her subjectivity, she wears modest dress as a reminder that she is more than her physical beauty. Her mystique is more than the physical although the physical is certainly part of it.
2) men must be willing to admit their weakness. There is a trend in our culture to object to modest dress on the basis that men should be able to control themselves, and having women wear modest dress implies that men can't control themselves. And yes, that is precisely the problem. Women are not responsible for men's lack of self-control; that is not what is claimed by proposing modest dress as a help. We must stop fooling ourselves into believing that we have self-control; look around and be honest. Most do not exercise self-control. This is a problem, and it leads to problems. But modest dress may help take first steps by not encouraging the man to be stuck at the physical level from the very first moment. If a man doesn't notice and become fixated on the physical beauty of a woman from the first instant, an environment is encouraged in which the man may expand his conception of women beyond the pleasure he derives from physicality.
Modest dress ultimately is objected to because it hampers pure individuality, which is the core of the indifference we exhibit towards each other in the spheres of our lives. Because of this indifference, cooperation is characterized cynically as mutually accepted manipulation. Real cooperation, however, means that we cannot exist as self-sufficient beings, but we must exist always in relation to each other, helping and complementing each other, seeking support from each other. We can do this without having to be responsible for the personal choices we each make as individuals; on the other hand, we don't have to go to the other extreme and leave each other alone in our struggles to achieve moral freedom.
This sounds like bigoted, misogynistic conservatism to modern ears:
--- The things that make an institution into an institution are despised, hated, rejected: people think that they are in danger of a new sort of slavery when the word 'authority' is so much as spoken out loud. The value-instincts of our politicians, our political parties, are so decadent that they instinctively prefer things that disintegrate, that accelerate the end ... Witness modern marriage. It is clear that modern marriage is completely irrational: but this is an objection to modernity, not to marriage. The rationality of marriage lay in the fact that the husband has sole juridical responsibility: this gave marriage a centre [sic] of balance, while today it limps on both legs. The rationality of marriage lay in its principled indissolubility, which gave it an accent that knew how to be heard above the accidents of feeling, passion, and the distractions of the moment. The rationality also lay in the family's responsibility for choosing the spouse. With the growing indulgence of love matches, the whole basis of marriage has been eliminated, the very thing that made it an institution in the first place. You never, ever base an institution on an idiosyncrasy, and, as I have said, you do not base marriage on 'love',—you base it on the sex drive; on the drive for property (woman and child as property); on the drive to dominate that keeps organizing the family (the smallest unit of domination), that needs children and heirs in order to maintain (even physiologically) the measure of power, influence, and wealth that has been achieved, in order to prepare for long tasks, for a solidarity of instincts between the centuries. Marriage as an institution already affirms the greatest, most enduring form of organization: when society cannot work as a whole to extend an affirmation to the most distant generations, marriage has stopped making sense.—Modern marriage has lost its meaning,—consequently, it is being abolished.
---
Source: Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Anti-Christ, Ecee Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. by Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 215.
[81] I take it that both the utilitarianism of the middle and late nineteenth century and the analytical moral philosophy of the middle and late twentieth century are alike unsuccessful attempts to rescue the autonomous moral agent from the predicament in which the failure of the Enlightenment project of providing him with a secular, [82] rational justification for his moral allegiances had left him. I have already characterized that predicament as one in which the price paid for liberation from what appeared to be the external authority of traditional morality was the loss of any authoritative content from the would-be moral utterances of the newly autonomous agent. Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology or hierarchical authority; but why should anyone else now listen to him? It was and is to this question that both utilitarianism and analytical moral philosophy must be understood as attempting to give cogent answers; and if my argument is correct, it is precisely this question which both fail to answer cogently. Nonetheless almost everyone, philosopher and non-philosopher alike, continues to speak and write as if one of these projects had succeeded. And hence derives one of the features of contemporary moral discourse which I noticed at the outset, the gap between the meaning of moral expressions and the ways in which they are put to use. For the meaning is and remains such as would have been warranted only if at least one of the philosophical projects had been successful; but the use, the emotivist use, is precisely what one would expect if the philosophical projects had all failed.
Contemporary moral experience as a consequence has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also becomes engaged by modes of practice, aesthetic or bureaucratic, which involve us in manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no way open to us to do so except by directing towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case. The incoherence of our attitudes and our experience arises from the incoherent conceptual scheme which we have inherited.
Once we have understood this it is possible to understand also the key place that three other concepts have in the distinctively modern moral scheme, that of rights, that of protest, and that of unmasking. By 'rights' I do not mean those rights conferred by positive law or custom on specified classes of persons; I mean those rights which are alleged to belong to human beings as such and which are cited as a person for holding that people ought not to be interfered with in their pursuit [83] of life, liberty and happiness. They are the rights which were spoken of in the eighteenth century as natural rights or as the rights of man. Characteristically in that century they were defined negatively, precisely as rights not to be interfered with. But sometimes in that century and much more often in our own positive rights—rights to due process, to education or to employment are examples—are added to the list. The expression 'human rights' is now commoner than either of the eighteenth-century expressions. But whether negative or positive and however named they are supposed to attach equally to all individuals, whatever their sex, race, religion, talents or deserts, and to provide a ground for a variety of particular moral stances.
It would of course be a little odd that there should be such rights attaching to human beings simply qua human beings in light of the fact, which I alluded to in my discussion of Gewirth's argument, that there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression 'a right' until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400, let alone in Old English, or in Japanese even as late as the mid-nineteenth century. From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns.
The best reason for asserting so bluntly that there are no such rights is indeed of precisely the same type as the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no witches and the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no unicorns: every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed. [There is also a connection here to that form of relative being within the realm of ens rationis, crucial to the possibility of confusing reality with fiction and vice versa, but MacIntyre doesn't bring this up.] The eighteenth-century philosophical defenders of natural rights sometimes suggest that the assertions which state that men possess them are self-evident truths; but we know that there are no self-evident truths. Twentieth-century moral philosophers have sometimes appealed to their and our intuitions; but one of the things that we ought to have learned from the history of moral philosophy is that the introduction of the word 'intuition' by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument. In the United Nations declaration on human rights of 1949 what has since become [84] the normal UN practice of not giving good reasons for any assertions whatsoever is followed with great rigor. And the latest defender of such rights, Ronald Dworkin (Taking Rights Seriously, 1976) concedes that the existence of such rights cannot be demonstrated, but remarks on this point simply that it does not follow from the fact that a statement cannot be demonstrated that it is not true (p. 81). Which is true, but could equally be used to defend claims about unicorns and witches.
Natural or human rights then are fictions—just as is utility—but fictions with highly specific properties.
