Transcending Technique: Spiritual Resistance in the Technological Age

September 2024

“The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like insects, having the incredible strength of insects. They crawled over the ground, laying the track and rolling on it and picking it up. Diesel tractors, puttering while they stood idle; they thundered when they moved, and then settled down to a droning roar. Snub-nosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. They did not run on the ground, but on their own roadbeds. They ignored hills and gulches, water courses, fences, houses.

The man sitting in the iron seat didn’t look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat. The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the air and the earth, so that earth and air muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver could not control it—straight across the country it went, cutting through a dozen farms and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the driver’s hands could not twitch because the monster that built the tractor, the monster that sent the tractor out, had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had goggled him and muzzled him—goggled his mind, muzzled his speech, goggled his perception, muzzled his protest. He could not see the land as it was, he could not smell the land as it smelled; his feet did not stamp the clods or feel the warmth and power of the earth. He sat in an iron seat and stepped on iron pedals. He could not cheer or beat or curse or encourage the extension of his power, and because of this he could not cheer or whip or curse or encourage himself. He did not know or own or trust or beseech the land. If a seed dropped did not germinate, it was no skin off his ass. If the young trusting plant withered in drought or drowned in a flood of rain, it was no more to the driver than to the tractor.

He loved the land no more than the bank loved the land. He could admire the tractor—its machined surfaces, its surge of power, the roar of its detonating cylinders; but it was not his tractor. Behind the tractor rolled the shining disks, cutting the earth with blades—not plowing but surgery, pushing the cut earth to the right where the second row of disks cut it and pushed it to the left; slicing blades shining, polished by the cut earth. And pulled behind the disks, the harrows combing with iron teeth so that the little clods broke up and the earth lay smooth. Behind there harrows, the long seeders—twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gears, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver stayed in his iron seat and he was proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when the crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses.”

- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

While I won’t be able to indict the technological society as beautifully as Steinbeck does in The Grapes of Wrath, I hope to make explicit some of the foundational threats it poses to modern man (in Part 1 of this essay) and suggest two ways that he might combat this onslaught (in Part 2).

It is necessary first to explain the nature, scope, and definition of technology in the modern age as it expands far beyond its narrow mechanical manifestation in Steinbeck’s passage above.

Part 1: The Technological Society

The Nature of Technology in Modernity

In almost every society before the Scientific Revolution, the concept of technology was limited to physical tools and a few more abstract concepts and organizational principles like alphabets and agricultural techniques. But even in these eras when technology was of secondary importance to matters of religion, power, politics, and survival, it still had profound impacts on how the world unfolded. Marx expresses this insight in posing the following questions: “Is Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press, not to mention the printing machine? Do not the song and saga of the muse necessarily come to an end with the printer's bar, hence do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry vanish?” [0].

The total effect of a new technology, discovery, process, or tool can not be tabulated on some sheet of benefits and externalities. If a tool’s effect on man were this simple, the honest evaluation and responsible deployment of a new tool or technology would be straightforward. Unfortunately, no tool, not even one as simple as a shovel, can be evaluated on this one-dimensional axis. No tool can be evaluated in isolation. This is especially true in modernity, where our tools tend to be highly complex compared to those of the pre-industrial world.

A society with the addition of a new tool is not simply the old society plus the new tool. It is a completely different society. It is useful to think of technology as an ecological force, as opposed to a purely additive or subtractive one. A new species or animal or plant introduced to an environment can have myriad effects; it can wipe out a keystone species, it can act symbiotically with a certain tree, it can antagonistically affect the mineral balance of the water, all of which act nonlinearly on the system. Because of this, one cannot look at the modern world and declare its superiority to all past epochs due to the fact that we have a cure for AIDS, contraception, water purification, the internet, and air conditioning. One must look at the effects of any given technology as it relates holistically to the entire ecosystem.

After all, what good is it to enumerate all of these atomized victories over nature when we stand on the precipice of blowing it all to pieces? Or when we have no higher ideal that spurns the achievement of any of these victories in the first place? Indeed, Richard Weaver makes this very point in his short and thought-provoking book, Ideas Have Consequences>: “Whoever desires to praise some modern achievement should wait until he has related it to the professed aims of our civilization as rigorously as the Schoolmen related a corollary to their doctrine of the nature of God. All demonstrations lacking this are pointless” [1]. This statement begs the question of what the higher aims of our technological progress are, or if there are any at all.

This brings us face-to-face with the problem of the technological society—there are no higher aims beyond the further propagation of technologies>. Our technologies—which once served as a means to higher transcendental ends—have become the ends. We have come to be used by our tools. We serve them. Technology, paradoxically, has become the only means with which to achieve the goal of its self-augmentation and perpetuation in a sort of infinite loop.

While discussing the technological society—which we may define broadly as a society with no substantive ends other than the development of technology for sake of propagating technology—one must carefully avoid an overly narrow definition of technology itself, one that views only machines, computers, and code as technology.

The words technology and technique both share a common root in the Greek word technē, which means “skill” or “craft.” Technique, defined by Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society> as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity,” [2] is a fundamental concept to grasp in evaluating the modern predicament. Technology encompasses not only mechanical and digital innovations, but also all dimensions of life that involve the broad concept of technique. In modernity, the scope is nearly total. Companies, schools, governing agencies must all undergo infinite optimization and bureaucratization. And the rigorous deployment of techniques does not just apply at the organization-level. Individuals now fastidiously apply techniques to optimize their fitness, diets, and productivity. Even the primordial and impossibly simple act of sleep must be tracked biometrically, tweaked, and optimized [3].

The development of techniques over the last 400 years has been just as (or more) fundamental to the creation of the modern world as the Industrial Revolution itself. In fact, the Industrial Revolution was only made possible by the systemization of thought and devotion to rationality that was more or less invented during the Enlightenment. Viewed in this light, the Industrial Revolution was not some anomalous event transforming the world, but the logical progression of technique, seeking the utmost efficiency in every dimension. And what are the modes of thinking that utilize reason and rationality developed during the Enlightenment but techniques, technologies, themselves?

Two things should now be clear:

1. New tools/technologies do not act linearly within a system. They are an ecological force that introduce highly complex and transformative effects to the system within which they are introduced.
2. Technology is not bounded to mechanical systems, computers, and code. When we speak of technology, we need to acknowledge not just physical and digital technologies, but also techniques and the systematization of processes.

The public—and especially our experts—fail to acknowledge the complex nature and enormous scope of technology. They only consider the philosophy of technology when some new existential threat emerges, like nuclear weapons or artificial intelligence. The public’s attention is monopolized by this discussion of an atomized technology for a few months until it is just as quickly forgotten. Eventually, the technology become ubiquitous, and thus invisible, and the monotonic march towards more, more, more continues. David Foster Wallace clarifies this phenomenon with the following allegory: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How's the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’” [4]. Water is electricity. Water is the nuclear bomb. Water is industrial agriculture. Water is contraception. Water is the alphabet.

For this reason, there is no debate these days about the ethics of forks, as they are a technology so embedded into our milieu, our subconscious, our soul that we don’t even consciously acknowledge their existence despite using them daily. This trivial example may seem almost comical, but when one swaps “fork” out for other historical examples such as “car,” “clock,” or the concept of “time,” it becomes a more thought-provoking exercise. And the example becomes downright frightening when contemporary examples are substituted in such as “artificial intelligence,” “thermonuclear arms,” “neural augmentation,” “in-vitro fertilization,”or “cryogenics.”

A robust discussion about a given technology (let alone the technological milieu it exists in)—its promises, its threats—is absent from the West because the benevolence of technological progress remains an unscrutinized, fundamental assumption. The vague notion of Progress is the foremost ideology of our time. And this is nothing more than the assertion that we are subordinate to our tools, we are serving the ends dictated to us by technology itself. Unfortunately the modern world has forgotten that progress involves more dimensions than just seeking greater efficiency. The social, the moral, the religious have been lost.

Despite our impressive leaps in material progress, the modern individual senses that something is amiss. No amount of data [5] showing objectively how great life has become is able to allay the growing unease in the modern psyche (in fact, the rapid proliferation and superabundance of facts—made possible by technological advancements—may be having the opposite effect). Man seems to be becoming more neurotic, more isolated, more anxious, more unsettled, more uncertain.

Is Technology a Problem? Winners and Losers

But is technology to blame for the myriad ailments, the universal unease, so thematic of modernity? Had we not made the technological leap from oral to written language, or from hunting and foraging to agriculture and animal husbandry, and so on, one would not be in the privileged position to sit in front of a computer—a computer!>—and type polemic after polemic. Indeed, technological advancements, large and small, are the forces responsible for the improvement of our material lot in this world. This is obvious when looking at poverty rates [6], or the sheer amount of material wealth that exists today [7], or even our very conception of money compared to the Middle Ages [8]. Even incremental enhancements in small, seemingly trivial ways contribute to an increased quality of life as the essayist Gwern points out [9]. This technological arc allows us to stand on the shoulders of giants and contribute to the sum of human achievement. Steve Jobs puts it thus:

“What drove me? I think most creative people want to express appreciation for being able to take advantage of the work that’s been done by others before us. I didn’t invent the language or mathematics I use. Make little of my own food, none of my own clothes. Everything I do depends on other members of our species and the shoulder that we stand on. And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species and to add something to the flow. It’s about trying to express something in the only way that most of us know how—because we can’t write Bob Dylan songs or Tom Stoppard plays. We try to use the talents we do have to express our deep feelings, to show our appreciation of all the contributions that came before us, and to add something to that flow. That’s what has driven me” [10].

But perhaps we should not be studying the upper tail of the distribution. Perhaps people like Steve Jobs and Gwern are bad examples of how technology affects us, because they are so clearly the winners of the technological revolution. I mean, just look at Gwern’s website, his essays, and his following. He lives online in the best way possible. We have a great potential to release creative power due to the sheer magnitude and strength of the tools at our disposal. But it is naive to think that this great potential energy can be tapped equally by all. Is the average man expanded in virtue, in creative expression, by his access to modern tools? Or is he bound in servitude to his employer, lobotomized by his phone and pharmaceuticals, kept docile by his streaming platforms and pornography, separated from and angry at his fellow countrymen by social media, social distancing, and the news?

At first brush, it seems that our new technologies enhance man’s agency and power. While this may appear so for the abstract collective>, it seems less convincing for the concrete individual>. It is analogous to the sum of human knowledge, which is rapidly increasing in the abstract collective sense. It may seem like an unmitigated good that the sum of knowledge is growing, but on the concrete individual level, it is dubious at best as to whether the average man has more knowledge (let alone, wisdom) than his grandfather or great-grandfather. In fact, much intergenerational wisdom has probably been lost, replaced by non-contextual factoids and buzzwords, unmoored from time and context and place.

And so when we look at the mean, it becomes less obvious that tools have provided higher potential energy for agency in the average individual. In fact, in many ways the power, creative energy, and spirit of the average individual have actually been diminished by the wide proliferation of unbounded tools that have become ends in and of themselves. It seems there is a distinction that begs to be made, a distinction between winners and losers>. For there are winners and losers associated with every new technology and to ignore this fact is to miss something fundamental.

I say the “average individual,” implying the 50 percentile of a normal distribution, but it is probably more like everyone below the 95 percentile that loses in some nontrivial way. Neil Postman presciently noted this over thirty years ago in the following passage:

“There can be no disputing that the computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like the armed forces, or airline companies or banks or tax-collecting agencies. And it is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable to high-level researchers in physics and other natural sciences. But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steelworkers, vegetable-store owners, teachers, garage mechanics, musicians, bricklayers, dentists, and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? Their private matters have been made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; are subjected to more examinations; are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them; are often reduced to mere numerical objects. They are inundated by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political organizations. The schools teach their children to operate computerized system instead of teaching things that are more valuable to children. In a word, almost nothing that they need happens to the losers. Which is why they are losers” [11].

The winners of this game will be quick to point out to the losers the myriad things a computer (or AI or insert the next new thing) can do for them. They will show them all the efficiency gains to be had with the adoption of the latest program. They will not let the loser stop and think about who these efficiency gains actually benefit, or why we are seeking greater efficiency in the first place. When these methods of persuasion fail, the winners will awe the losers with some magical new feature that is hardly even tangentially correlated with the actual quality of life of the loser—look at this slightly improved selfie camera on your phone, look at this new dating app, this new tool to offload your cognitively intensive functions at work! In many cases this shiny new feature is actually inversely correlated with quality of life, but it is nonetheless magical, mystical. In his dazzled stupor, your average individual—your loser—will come to conflate the highly specialized mastery of a certain technology possessed by the winner as true wisdom. And thus the winners in the technological age successfully cement their stead and keep the discussion well bounded so as to prevent any analysis of who benefits and who is harmed by a new technology. One must recognize that winners and losers exist in the technological age, and carefully think about who falls into each category.

It becomes harder to make the claim that the technological society is not a fundamental problem when we note that the majority of the world’s population falls in the category of “loser” one way or another. This is most strikingly apparent, and most disturbing, when looking at the effect that smartphones and social media are having on our children [12]. One would think that this phenomenon alone should be enough to sound the alarm.

Developments in artificial intelligence tell a similar story. For the average individual, according to Jon Askonas, LLMs tend to “knock out the bottom rungs of skilled practice that allow for the development of mastery in the first place.” The aspiring computer programmer, instead of wrestling with low-level, skill-developing problems like implementing the Tower of Hanoi in order to grasp recursion, asks chatGPT to do it for her. The high school student, juggling classes and extracurriculars, has Claude write his book report on The Count of Monte Cristo for him. Both of these individuals, instead of developing skills, independence, and clarity of thought, increase their reliance on a corporate technological monolith that diminishes their agency.

At this point, I have hopefully cast some doubt on the technocrat’s (i.e. the winner’s) promise of technology being an unalloyed blessing. Now we will dive into the mechanisms by which the technological society diminish the individual. What makes our epoch more pernicious and eschatologically significant than cultures of the past? Why is it actually different this time? The answer lies in technology’s all-pervasiveness, its totality in the modern world.

The Anatomy of Modern Technology: Totality

The totality of modern technology’s scope is a novel feature. While highly advanced civilizations in the past developed impressive technologies, these tools tended to remain well-bounded. Historically, man’s relation to technique “did not bind his fate with technical progress. Man regarded technical progress more as a relative instrument than as a god” [13]. But the hallmark of modern technique is its encroachment into all domains, its elevation to the status of a god. I will provide several examples below.

Example: Industry

Take, for example, the modern factory. Its machinery—and especially its organizational principles and practices—allows it to completely retool overnight at the behest of the few who own the means of production. The artisan or craftsman—to say nothing of the overworked laborer on the factory floor—cannot hope to compete with this scale of operation, especially with a public that has forsaken the ideals of quality and craftsmanship for those of quantity and cheapness (i.e. efficiency). But who is to blame the public when their society valorizes nothing but efficiency. Naturally, this pernicious ideal was destined to bleed into consumer preference.

In addition to the factory, modern agricultural practices, made possible by “the postwar availability of cheap ammonium-nitrate fertilizer” [14], have all but wiped out the commercial viability of small-scale, family-owned and oriented farms. This movement of production from small, distributed nodes of households, small farms, and artisanal workshops to large-scale factories and commercial agricultural operations increased overall productivity at the expense of individual agency and self-determination.

This trend is especially harmful to women. A cursory glance at industrialization may cause one to conclude “that women’s 20th-century accession to the workplace represented a gain in economic agency. This is true, relative to how women began the industrial era. But relative to life prior to this era, industrialization in practice reduced women’s economic agency: as work became more centralized, more mechanized and less agrarian, the resulting split between ‘work’ and ‘home’ drove women increasingly into a domestic-only role.” [15].

Beyond simple advancements in industrial capabilities, an entire and relatively unnoticed technological revolution in organizing and operating companies has occurred in the last century and a half. This innovation—which vastly increased the GDP of the United States and other nations—involved two key factors. The first was the invention of the theory of Scientific Management by Frederick Taylor [16]. This technicized> the process of operating an organization and was the first time science and engineering were applied to management. Its ends were economic efficiency and labor productivity, both of which it was immensely successful at. Secondly, a managerial class was developed—a class of specialists who ran companies and were distinct from owners (this phenomenon has perhaps reached its apotheosis in companies like McKinsey, and its efficacy seems to be waning). The decoupling of ownership and management along with the proliferation of the joint stock company furthered this economic efficiency. But again, with this new technology, one must ask who the winners are.

While the west’s GDP has grown many fold, the lion’s share of GDP is being produced by a smaller and smaller cohort of companies. They have become so powerful that governmental efforts in the form of regulation and antitrust lawsuits (even successful ones!) barely chink their armor [17]. And so we see more company men and fewer innovators and small business owners. We see the bureaucratization of even the deepest reaches of the private sector. We see the reduction of a man to an employee, a laborer, an economic unit, a fungible good.

This is not a narrow indictment of those who own the means of production, for even labor unions have reduced man’s labor—the sacred output of his hand and mind—to a mere tool that can be leveraged in negotiation, a mere commodity to be bought and sold. Indeed, “in conflict with an exploiting and irresponsible bourgeoisie, [the labor class] found no alternative but to avail itself of the bourgeoisie philosophy and stake back. Accordingly, workers’ organizations accepted in their practice the idea that labor is a commodity when they began the capitalist technique of restricting production in the interest of price” [18]. Thus even the institutions that purport to protect the individual from the cold, unfeeling technological monopoly, further diminish the individual and his creative life force.

Example: The Internet

The internet has brought vast change to our world—change on the level of, or perhaps surpassing, the printing press. It has created untold wealth and globalized societies. But is the average person leveraging it in an expansive fashion? Is he using this technology to achieve some higher, transcendental end? Or is he being used? Given that the list of the twenty most trafficked websites in the world include five social media sites, four pornographic sites, several for e-commerce, and only a couple that could be possibly considered educational, one becomes doubtful of the internet’s blessings. The internet—and by association, phones and computers—tend to diminish rather than expand the individual’s generative power. Data on this fact are overwhelming, especially for children [19]. But the reader does not need to rely on esoteric facts and figures—he may simply introspect for some time on his life and the lives of those around him to see the many subtle yet insidious ways that the internet has robbed him of his attention, forced a sacrifice of quality for quantity, disrupted his natural and necessary human relations, and distracted him from the essential. And we have not even touched upon how rapidly the internet marches towards centralization and totalitarianism on its backend [20].

The technological society destroys the conditions that make wisdom, slowness, and tradition possible. For how can a people preserve a millennium old tradition if we can not even preserve our iPhone for two years before it is obsolete, the object of scorn in public, and basically unusable from firmware updates that intentionally degrade its performance? The pace that the internet and its accompanying tools demand destroys the ability for human introspection, reflection, and thus, flourishing.

The effect of the internet is perhaps best summarized by the well known adage that “the user is not the customer, he is the product.” This statement, used by the big tech companies themselves, does more to summarize the individual’s role in the technological society than perhaps the entirety of this essay.

Example: The “Soft” Sciences

We see the encroachment of the technological worldview in the technicization> of even the most non-technical fields. Take for example the exponential boom of “soft” sciences. In a world where only the technical, the objective, the efficient are recognized as legitimate, it is no wonder that psychology, psychiatry, even history have attempted to rebrand themselves as sciences. They seek to understand man not on the human level but with statistics, literal lab rats, and other technical apparatuses. It is no longer good enough to simply be a parent, one must consult the “parenting experts” to learn how to rear a child. An unruly student cannot be dealt with by parent and teacher, but must visit one of the many “child psychologists” on staff.

The reader can judge for himself if some highly-specialized neurobiology phD student designing sadistic studies on rats understands the human mind better than Dostoevsky, who Nieztche considered, the “only psychologist from whom I had something to learn.” The reader might also judge whether yet another tired archaeological analysis of some bundle of arrowheads teaches us more about history than an episode of Dan Carlin’s deeply qualitative, human-focused Hardcore History. And yet the technological society insists that the best way to learn about the human mind—or brain—is in the laboratory.

Example: The Technological Society and Nature

The technological mindset does not look favorably upon nature. Nature is not some beautiful, dangerous, alluring force, filled with wisdom and mystery. To the technological society it is simply something to conquer, to subordinate. It is no wonder that the world of man and the world of nature have become sharply discretized. It is no wonder one has to reserve a day and a time and to pay to enter a national park, and once inside, must jockey with other vehicles on serpentine networks of roads to see the “sights.”

The land is no longer something a man can have any metaphysical relation to. It is a commodity, untapped (if not already exploited), and ready to be subjected to the most efficient means of wealth extraction. Ellul notes that “Since 1947 we have witnessed the same humanist rationalizing with respect to the earth itself. In the United States, for example, methods of large scale agriculture had been savagely applied. The humanists became alarmed by this violation of sacred soil, this lack of respect for nature; but the technical people troubled themselves not at all until a steady decline in agricultural productivity became apparent…the technicians have recommended more care in the use of fertilizer and moderation in the utilization of machinery; in short, ‘respect for the soil.’ All the nature lovers rejoice. But was any real respect for the earth involved here? Clearly not. The important thing was agricultural yield” [21].

In the technological society the earth loses its sacredness. There is no longer anything to learn from the seven-hundred year old tree, or the lonely hawk, or the babbling stream. Unless, of course, there are techniques scientists can extract from them in the name of material progress.

Example: Political Discourse Convergence

Perhaps the most convincing evidence of technique’s vice grip on the modern world is the fact that almost all discussions—political, social, even theological—fall underneath its purview. The capitalist and the communist squabble about ownership of the means of production, failing to call the morality of such mass production into question in the first place.

Worldviews of men and women who seem diametrically opposed speak with haunting similarity with regards to technological progress. On the surface there are perhaps no two people more different than Leon Trotsky and Sam Altman. And yet, they speak of technology with a reverence that makes it hard to distinguish one from the other. Take an excerpt from Trotsky, penned in 1912, and compare it to one from Altman in 2023:

“It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique…Through the machine, man in Socialist society will command nature in its entirety, with its grouse and its sturgeons. He will change the course of the rivers, and he will lay down rules for the oceans. This does not mean that the entire globe will be marked off into boxes, that the forests will be turned into parks and gardens. Thickets and forests and grouse and tigers will remain, but only where man commands them to remain” [22].

- Leon Trotsky

“And that, you know, if we keep going, if we survive a hundred years, a thousand years, ten thousand years, and we're still on this same technological, exponential, increasing and capability path, that's God” [23].

- Sam Altman

Part 2: Fighting Back

Is the totalizing force of technology not apparent? Is its insidious tyranny over all matters, public, private, social, political, theological, personal not apparent? Yes, it has made our days more convenient, our lives longer, our world more “abundant,” but at what cost?

How does any society, let alone any individual, combat the leviathan that is the technological society? How does the individual not feel completely impotent in the face of this all-powerful incarnation of Baal? Perhaps it is as simple as the individual taking small, actionable steps towards a more responsible relationship to tools and technology. Maybe these will propagate to his family, friends, community. Maybe this will cause a surprising network effect to manifest.

So what are these actionable steps? Below I list two: bounding tools and maintaining a transcendental worldview. The goal of these acts is to stand in opposition to the technological society, to subvert it, to reassert one’s humanity, and to reestablish the distinction between what is sacred and what is profane.

Bounding Tools

The most practical step to take on a day-to-day basis is for the individual to bound his tools. The hierarchy of power between man and his tool has been inverted in favor of the tool. This balance of power must be reversed. Since few governments, societies, cultures, or churches will do it for him, the individual must take up this task on his own.

Many tools need no artificial bounding, they naturally are limited in scope as to be only used as a means to an end. Take a shovel for example. You cannot get addicted to a shovel. You can move dirt or gravel with it. Use it to build a trail or work on a garden or a house. Even if it is used for murder, it was simply a means used to achieve some other end. The well-bounded shovel is not the problem.

Tools that are relatively unbounded should be our focus. The computer or the smartphone can be used in an infinite number of ways. One can do economically productive work with it, run a business, write code, watch YouTube or pornography, video call family members, browse online forums.

One can open up the computer or phone with no ends in mind and find himself on it for hours, sometimes almost unconsciously, as if in a trance. This is not an example of a tool being used as a means to some end. This is the tool using us, the tool becoming the ends.

To bound his tools, the individual may set simple rules for himself regarding each tool’s use. Below are a few examples:

• Only open the computer/phone with a concrete task in mind (i.e. To send an email to a client. To call my mum. To work on an essay. To watch a movie.).
• Restrict time on the phone to one or two 30 minute periods of the day.
• Don’t participate in group chats. Call or text individuals, not amorphous groups.
• Don’t read the news.
• Only read essays/articles over 5000 words in length.
• No digital technology on weekends.

Many other tools should fall under our scrutiny. For example, the individual may want to sit and ponder his relationship to his car: how it changes the way he lives, the way he interacts with the world, the way he thinks. The same can be said for his watch or timekeeping devices. This individual may set the following rules to bound these two powerful technologies:

• Bike to all destinations within 5 miles of the house.
• Do not set a timer on my workouts, meditations, or bike rides.
• Do not keep time on Sundays.

These are just a few examples of how we can introspect on the ways our tools shape—and in some cases, rob us of—our very identity, and how we can fight back. How we can put tools back in our hands instead of us being in their pernicious clutches.

A Transcendental Worldview

The technological society is so pervasive that no material worldview falls outside of its purview. Only a transcendental worldview is capable of subverting the technological one. Other than being captive to technique, material worldviews fall short because they demand an impossible monopoly on earth and are inherently transient and temporal.

A material worldview requires its techniques be applied in all areas until its ideal is accomplished. This, of course, is impossible, leading adherents to frustration and radicalization on one end, or ennui and nihilism on the other. The classical liberal will not be satisfied until every last country is a “democracy” rife with free market capitalism. The socialist revolutionary will not be satisfied until the entire world is a collectivist utopia. The environmentalist will not rest until society reverts to some pre-industrial mode of existence. Each of these frameworks views alternatives as an existential threat, an enemy to be eliminated. And with time, as a given material worldview reaches maturation—or is unable to progress any further—its followers become more violent, more tyrannical, more irrational as frustration mounts with the realization that their ideal cannot attain monopoly over the world.

One might leverage these very same charges about transcendental worldviews—did not Christianity once command control over half the known world, do many sects of Islam not seek monopolistic temporal power today? But the transcendental worldview's primary battleground is not the material, it is the spiritual. The transcendental ideal can be realized in spite of material conditions and does not inherently require the domination of one’s environment. The transcendental worldview seeks to conquer death, not the world.

In many ways the Catholic Church’s grasping for temporal power—its inquisitions, its crusades—were a devolution into the material, a forsaking of the transcendental aims for temporal power. Jesus resisted these exact temptations in the desert that the church gave into. But at least institutions that ostensibly aim at the metaphysical have a chance of realizing that ideal independent of, and often in spite of, worldly condition. By contrast the material worldview necessarily has to seek its ideal in material reality. Let us examine a historical example.

Russia’s long march towards the formation of the Soviet Union demonstrates this rule. Early utopian socialists of the 1840’s in Russia were influenced by thinkers like Charles Fourier and Vissarion Belinsky. They believed in a slow and gradual march towards the adoption of a collectivist framework for Russia. Over time, the utopian socialist movement of the 30’s and 40’s was replaced by more radical and violent movements led by the likes of Dmitry Pisarev and Nikolay Chernyshevsky.

Many of these radicals were heavily influenced by Marx, who pushed for Communism to establish a monopoly on earth. “Its best known propagator was Karl Marx, who believed that the direction of historical development was a purposeful one determined by the interplay of material forces, and would come to an end only with the achievement of a communist utopia that would finally resolve all prior contradictions. But the concept of history as a dialectical process with a beginning, a middle, and an end was borrowed by Marx from his great German predecessor, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel” [24].

And so it was no surprise the movements became more and more radical with every failed attempt to topple the existing order and establish a monopoly of the new ideal. Many advocated for the total destruction of the existing order, condoning terrorism and other acts of violence in order to achieve these goals. Tsar Alexander II, the Tsar Liberator, the great reformer who freed the serfs, was assassinated by the Narodnaya Volya (‘The People’s Will,’ a revolutionary socialist organization). Thousands of others in the regime suffered the same fate, including Pyotr Stolypin, another great reformer of the early 1900’s in the waning days of the empire. Followers of this emerging movement of the 1860’s, the Nihilists, eventually splintered into even more radical cohorts including the Narodniks, the Socialist Revolutionary Party (the famous SR’s), Bolsheviks, and Mensheviks. Bitter infighting persisted amongst these groups.

Eventually, the Tsar was overthrown and a provisional government set up in 1917. The Bolsheviks seized control from the weak socialist provisional government, and a civil war followed. The Red Army did not just battle the Whites, but also other radical socialist groups and anarchists. The brutal tactics of the ruling elite and bitter infighting persisted and even intensified throughout the entirety of the Soviet Union’s reign. Lenin denounced Trotsky who denounced Lenin. Stalin denounced Lenin and Trotsky. Khrushchev denounced Stalin. Gorbachev (albeit more tactfully than his predecessors) denounced Khrushchev.

The material worldview of the utopian socialists of the 1830’s necessarily became more and more radical, as other ways of ordering the world were seen as depraved, unjust, backwards, in need of remedy. Even when the revolution prevailed and the remarkably strong Soviet Union emerged and flourished, its leaders did not ease up on the throttle. Because no single material ideology can practically gain a monopoly over every individual in a country (much less the world), the regime became increasingly radical and violent, seeking any means to achieve its unattainable end. Eventually, the regime cannibalized itself, only to be replaced by another set of material ideologies, restarting the cycle once again.

We can observe these very trends in contemporary movements as well. The rationalist community—which venerates human reason and our rational faculties—also reveals that something fundamental is missing from material worldviews. It is not happenstance that this community, above all others, views AI as an immediate, eschatological threat in need of extreme regulation or, better yet, complete dismantling. The rationalist’s entire ontology is built around a worship of the human’s cognitive faculty—it is codified into the very name of the movement. Rationality is the highest virtue. But when our scientific discoveries unearth the fact that we are deeply irrational by our very nature, and AI shows us how very quaint our intellect and reason are, its worldview collapses, and so you see its thought-leaders like Eliezer Yudkowsky on desperate publicity campaigns to preserve their place at the top of the intellectual food chain by halting competitors to human intellect.

Strikingly, the rationalist community itself has acknowledged its fundamental flaw, catalyzing a new group, the Post-Rationalists, to form [25]. They seek to reintroduce what they call “woo” into their worldview, explicitly acknowledging the need for transcendental Truth. The movement is likely to fail, as compartmentalizing and diminishing grand and inscrutable spiritual Truths to just another objective piece of the puzzle or means of optimizing the human experience seems to miss the point. Indeed, “woo” is not what one seeks explicitly in pursuing a transcendental, religious way of life: it is a by-product of aiming at that something greater.

Beyond this, the rationalist worldview could really only exist in the modern world. It is inherently temporal, and relies on an extremely specific collection of material conditions to take form. This makes the worldview transient and ephemeral. In the same way, the environmentalist would find himself rudderless, or literally nonexistent, in Medieval Gaul.

One might lodge the argument that the Christian worldview was impossible before the coming of Christ. But man has always had the capacity for the religious outlook. Even in the most primitive societies, a sort of transcendental worldview emerged. And so a continuous, unbroken chain of religious progress has allowed man of all ages to partake in a durable, non-temporal worldview. Justin Martyr even went so far as to retroactively consider many pre-Christian thinkers as Christians in his First Apology:

"We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them; and among the barbarians, Abraham, and Ananias, and Azarias, and Misael, and Elias, and many others whose actions and names we now decline to recount, because we know it would be tedious” [26].

All material worldviews are inherently fragmented and atomized, offering no sort of continuity comparable to what we have seen in man’s progress in religion from prehistory all the way to modernity. That fact alone, that man has always sought a metaphysical ideal, suggests there is certain fundamental wisdom in seeking these ends.

To reiterate, there are a few key distinctions to be made between the material and the transcendental:

• The umbrella of the Technological Society: all material worldviews, almost definitionally, fall under the purview of the technological society. They are a collection of techniques and methods for attaining some material end, seeking some efficiency or optimization of one sort or the other. Only a transcendental framework, one that lies on an entirely different plane than the material, the technological, can subvert the technological society. The transcendental provides a higher vision that places tools and technique into their proper place as means, not ends. The material worldview can only wage war on the physical plane, whereas the transcendental is a spiritual war. The material worldview will seek to create an untenable heaven on earth and will naturally become more totalitarian in seeking to achieve its temporal goals. From the transcendental worldview’s perspective, injustice in the world or a certain mode of political thought may be seen as evil, but only in the capacity of it profaning or spiting God. Not every mode of political thought offers an existential threat to the transcendental worldview in the same way as is true for some worldview rooted in a specific mode of political thought.

• Durability: material worldviews can only exist given certain external conditions, are falsifiable, easily changed, updated, and commandeered by bad actors making them transient. They have no immutable core. Transcendental frameworks are based on simple, fundamental Truths that are unchanging with time. They are axioms demonstrated through powerful myths and parables. While temporal forces may hijack these tenets to seek temporal power, the core tenets remain untarnished and accessible to the individual.

Material ends won’t work because they are transient, temporal, and inevitably march towards tyrannical totality. But transcendental worldviews allow for a collective shared vision and a spiritual unity while at the same time granting material diversity, respectful of differing social mores and regional traditions. They communicate things that may not be factual but are True in a more fundamental sense. More importantly in the context of this essay, in the modern era, transcendental ends restore a healthy relationship between man and his tools. A relationship where the individual sets the ends according to his principles and the tools are a mere means with which to achieve them. David Foster Wallace explains the necessity of the transcendent in the following statement:

“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god-or-spiritual-type thing to worship—be it Jesus Christ or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness” [27]. 
We should not look down to find our place in the dirt or on our screens, nor cling to our transient material ideologies and fads, but look upward and seek durable, transcendental Truths. Only this will allow us to restore the simple relationship between man and tool that has been lost over the last several hundred years and is seldom talked about today. There are many great and durable traditions rooted in the transcendental, and turning to these can help the individual overcome the monopoly being sought by the Technological Society.

And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers;

For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ:

Till we all come in the unity of faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ;

That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive;

But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ; from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.

- Ephesians 4:13-16