I write here to elaborate upon, as well as further, the inquiry which Gary Gamble has presented to us over the last two weeks with his articles titled “Coincidence?” and “In denial”. I am thankful to have the opportunity to do so. For the principle issue which Gamble brings to light in those two articles is, I believe, paramount to our time. The issue though, is yet a question, really.
The question is: do we continue to rely on technologies (specifically in this case electrically derived ones) to attempt to solve our human problems, even after knowing that the implementation of such technologies carries negative effects which far surpass any benefits they may provide to the life and well being of human beings?
Gamble’s two articles are filled with pertinent references from Firstenbnerg’s book, The Invisible Rainbow, and demonstrate aptly enough that the last 220 years or so of external electrical technological innovations have been reciprocated with inner disaster for human health. Yet despite the obvious decline in human health concomitant with our growing electrical obsession, cultural opinion has nonetheless settled at “a universal belief that electricity is ‘safe’ for humanity and the planet”. I believe understanding why we have settled at this obviously sadistic belief requires going back even further in time, however.
In another well-researched and thoroughly referenced book, In The Shadow of the Machine, published 2019, the author Jeremy Naydler follows the relationship of human beings to electrical energy from as far back as the ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian epoch. He does this to demonstrate how it is that we have arrived at our current style of consciousness – which is one completely dependent on technology.
What Naydler reveals is that there is another stream of development that coincides with the cultural rise of applied electricity. This other stream of human development could be considered the internal counterpart to the external technologies which are developed from it. The internal counterpart is logical thinking. Naydler demonstrates in a very compelling manner how logical thinking and its rise to the forefront of human thought is ultimately responsible for the technologies which are developed by it.
The book, 288 pages long with 66 pages of referenced notes, is a deep journey towards “The Prehistory of the Computer and the Evolution of Consciousness’ as Naydler puts it in the subtitle. But there are a couple points within it that I would like to reference here to keep this conversation going further into the life of our community.
The development of logical thinking (beginning explicitly with Aristotle who died 322 BC) hits a profound inversion point when, “During the early thirteenth century, Dialectic rapidly displaced Grammer as the foundation of the Liberal Arts studied at the universities.” With this transference of Grammar to Dialectic as the foundation for educational experience, we find that logic (or ratio in latin) has now replaced contemplation (intellectus in latin) as the preeminent thinking style for human beings.
This transference of the human beings most highly revered manner of thinking from contemplation to logic is a monumental ‘achievement’. Still, this ‘progress’ took approximately 1,500 years to occur. And once it occurred, Naydler points out the result; “In post-medieval times it was the destiny of logic to be severed from the real world of things and it was precisely this severance that enabled it eventually to be deployed in the service of information technology.” (Machine, page 67)
This transition of the human beings internal disposition away from contemplation and onto logic, would eventually culminate six centuries later with the external representation – the birth of the industrial revolution and the rise of the mill. Again, in the words of Naydler, “The industrial revolution must be understood as introducing a new relationship between machines and human beings, in which the human being for the first time experiences the greater-than-human power of the machine as enslaving rather than as liberating. In the mill, the traditional relationship of machine to human being is reversed: rather than the machine serving the human being, the human being must serve the machine.”
Since the onset of the industrial revolution, it has become as William Blake imagined in 1788, that the “mechanical reasoning” which the world of machines embodies would come to turn everyone into “nothing more than a conglomeration of cogs and wheels”. But the point which is imperative is to recognize not the machines as responsible, but rather our faltering upon the evolutionary path of human consciousness. (Blake, There is no Natural Religion)
Another point Naydler brings in, which I will briefly reference, is that with the rise in use of the mill, there is also documented the first cases of human mental illness. He references one such case, incredibly foreshadowing and well-documented, in the text.
To tie this back to Gamble’s articles now. Although we can, and probably should, deduce humanities modern forms of illness as connected and arising from contact with certain technological innovations; we should not be so quick to blame those technologies as the origin of the illnesses. For the real origin of our modern malaise lies more deeply rooted in the form(s) of consciousness which have cultivated our times’ particular social environment.
We now are witnessing our obvious inability to solve our current problems through an inner disposition which overzealously demands only logical thinking. Technology is the result of logical thinking. This disposition fails us everywhere, because it deprives us of our potential. The either/or approach to life has gripped us, and divided us. We have in turn reduced our immense social dilemma to be an either/or, binary set.
The conversations we have around nearly everything (masks, schools, vaccines, politics, you name it) get reduced down to two sides, and forced into the constraints of logic. After all, logic is inherently binary. The rules of logic state that either “A is B or A is not B; there is no third alternative.” (Machine, page 36)
To quote Blake one more time, “That which is now proved was once only imagined.” So then, we can also say that which is now imagined will at some future time be proved.
In this regard, Isn’t it time we consider the human being as more than a point, an A opposing a B, or vice versa? Isn’t it about time we allow ourselves to be gripped and enlivened by the complexity of the evolutionary process we are immersed in?
I believe we all know it is such a time. And yet, to actually embrace this demand of our time will necessitate that we do as Firstenberg and Gamble imply, begin to question and ultimately relinquish technologies. But also, and perhaps more principally, that we begin to cultivate new capacities of imagination that take us beyond the logical deductions of life we have formulated for too long now.
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