Before the end - The Safety of Distance

From Hand's End: Technology and the Limits of Nature
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)

Having learned to make use of the elemental forces of physics to produce our own explosions, we can be said to be closer to nature in the sense of controlling the interaction of elements. Yet do we know enough to take responsibility for each catastrophe, to know when a Bomb should be let loose upon the world? A similar kind of closeness encroaches when we each accept some responsibility for the over-warming of the atmosphere. The images of a heated Earth are extreme, and frightening: the flooded metropolis, the rising ocean. The melting icecap, the spreading desert, the endless heat wave. And the simple technical measure of temperature shocks us into admission that it is real.

Ought we follow Spencer Weart and shun these utmost environmental images along with those pictures of nuclear devastation, unhealthy because of the hopeless paralysis they inspire? The extreme also incites concern. The mundane, difficult changes in machine and lifestyle which hold the answer do not. Perhaps our current fascination with ultimate images of elimination is something of an aesthetic experience, a feeling of awe that comes with the confrontation of dramatic and possible ends to our world. Immanuel Kant called such a feeling a judgment, a decision, an evaluation of the infinite in opposition to humanity. In his view, we only appreciate the earthquake or the violent tempest if our own position is secure:

we readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature [1]

For Kant we are moved by such upheavals only because we are detached from them. They are important solely because they remind us of the infinite greatness of our own mind. Pure reason is the domain of the beautiful, while nature only knows the sublime, a lesser category by virtue of the fact that it is only knowable in opposition to humanity, never pure nor in itself.

Today we cannot afford to be so innocent. The stark ultimatum of a nuclear explosion or an Earth in climatic imbalance are deeply tied to the core of humanity, never in aversion to it. Kant preferred inner, purely human beauty to the extreme beauty located within nature, because the latter always included some amount of horror in its distance from humanity. But now the most extreme edges of the natural are bound to the acts of humanity. We do not retain the luxury of admiring nature at a distance. The world must now seem beautiful or terrible with us, not against us. We need it more than ever to survive.

The world as a whole must be considered to be a home even after we have shown the potential to destroy it. Perhaps 'home' is a more tangible idea than the all-enveloping weighty abstractions of 'nature' or 'world'. The architect Christopher Alexander points out that a true sense of home may only be built once one admits the reality of impermanence and of death. He writes that if we are committed to "creating nature in the world around us, we cannot escape the fact that we are going to die." [2] Although he is most concerned with finding the rules for the construction of specific buildings that flow in a timeless, nameless, natural way, the idea becomes more challenging when applied to the shaping of the entire planet into our home. If we form the Earth into a place eternally designed for the promulgation of humanity, we neglect the ebb and flow of life. Does this mean it is better to live with the knowledge that our time on the Earth will be limited, temporary, passing and finite?

Do we prepare for the end, or move to tread lightly? After the approach of intended and unintended desecration of our world, we know the complete human tragedy: to have understood and conceived enough of our Earth to perceive that our way of life endangers the rest. This realization is potently described by the late Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe: "What we call nature shows neither morality nor reason. Its degradation is inevitable, and nothing, not even the most glorious of human achievements, can escape final annihilation." [3] Zapffe believes it is the human gift and curse to imagine morality and order in a senseless cosmos. Our tragic flaw is simply our prowess in transforming the world. Now we turn to assess what we have accomplished, and conclude that the world would be better off without our kind. Thus we are the only species to recognize our own redundancy after finding some truths in the world.

For Zapffe, there is only one solution: abdication of our reigning role. Let the species die out gracefully by refusing to reproduce. It is a vision hopeful for nature, hopeless for humanity. Few may follow him this far, but certainly the gravity of current problems lend support to his choice. It demonstrates how paralyzed we may feel after considering the whole situation, after taking in the perilous limits which humanity has unveiled in its investigation of nature.

Resignation comes only when we allow ourselves to be swallowed up by the immensity of the problem and the acceptance that it is so much easier to destroy than to learn. Though we may all be implicated by the extremities of human error, we need to find a way to focus on the specifics of our own actions, rather than on the stagnancy of universal malaise. Sure, the world as a whole may seem impervious to reason or the true. It is too large for that and we are too small. We locate order in those systems determined by what we have been able to construct; either those things we have made, or those parts of the external world that resemble what we have made. The unknown remains beyond our limited categories, yet we cannot let our discovered limits destroy it.

Humanity as a whole will not likely sit back and accept defeat, even if evidence appears against us. We are active and opportunistic, and will wish for a course to continue on after accepting the immanence of danger, not by rejecting or denying it. Our actions are direct, never as global as the overall peril they have revealed. This is why it is important to develop a conception of technology that examines how the individual technical act operates in response to the threat of the whole. This is why it is necessary to return to specific instances of tools which enhance our position in the world with an enlightened response to destiny.

It is as a totality that technology has come to seem evil, damaging the very humanity it was invented to extend. I have given as an example two of the most extreme instances of this dark side: first, a destruction planned for strategic purposes, revealed to be more significant as symbolic of an uncontrolled side of human purpose. Second, a warning of a global heat wave, suggesting that the sum total of human improvement is self-interested and irrespective of the context which permits humanity to flourish. The sheer magnitude of the devastation suggested by each supports a pessimistic outlook. If it is not humanity which has proved itself unworthy, perhaps it is modern technology as a whole. If it has reached limits which call everything into question, perhaps the technical might be isolated as a disease, and eradicated from infected humanity.

This is what thinkers like Jacques Ellul suggest, condemning technology as a force that "resembles only itself, with its form and being identical." [4] Automatic, self-augmenting, universalizing, monistic, and ever-expanding, the technology of our time seems to swallow all processes and activities in the service of an unprecedented growth whose limits prove that la technique lacks any morality whatsoever. How else could it engender such ruin? But, as should be clear by now, such a monolithic vision of technology is of little use in any future reform of specific technical cycles. It does nothing. We are responsible, and need instead an individual response to each situation, one cognizant of the dangers observed in the whole.

The 'positive peace' wished for in opposition to total, active eradication perpetrated by nuclear war is the establishment of nature as our home through the individual exploration of technologies which extend us by placing us further into the world, not above it or in control of it. Whenever technology is working, we should feel it as extension, rather than something which enslaves us or suggests our mastery. It must bring us closer to the Earth, by ensuring our fit. It should open us up to the environment, by heightening our dependence on the surroundings. It need not hide the world behind the mask of an artificial order, a grid only human because it is as simple or right-angled as we wish the world would appear. We do not remake the environment in our image, but extend ourselves to match up with an evolving nature.

The next step is to connect this overall imperative with the cycle of individual technical intention, realization, and renovation which is the central metaphor of this work. Technical changes are instituted through the solution of individual problems, not in the adoption of enveloping and pervasive guiding philosophies. The task is to temper the effect of a technical success on its initial intent with care for the sense in which each particular invention contributes to the overall limits which have been discovered for technology as it tests the tolerance of the world. Every single tool can be examined not only for ways in which it extends humanity, but for also what it teaches us about the demands we make on nature.

For as much as techniques reshape the way we conceive nature and the universe as idea and system alike, they also reveal how little we are without the world around us, as context and limiting force. When technology threatens to demolish this world, either on purpose or by accident, it has decidedly failed. We will need to consider whether each innovation cloaks the context with its solution, or unveils unprecedented ways in which humanity and nature are enhanced by the same new opportunity.

Our time is like that prophesied at the conclusion of the I Ching, that ancient Chinese answer to Spinoza's geometric system of human behavior. Here is a taxonomy of human situations contained wholly within arrangements of six lines, called hexagrams. The final hexagram is entitled Wei Chi (), "Before the End." This is the necessary close to any query of human fate, with us poised at the brink, ready for the worst, prepared to change it:

The time Before the End can be compared to a lengthy trek over a high mountain. At some point, before reaching the peak, you can see in detail exactly how much further you must travel. You will know what is involved in reaching the top because of your experience in the climb thus far. However, when you do reach the peak, which has been in your sight for many long days of effort, you will have done only that. You will have no experience whatsoever about descending the other side. To rush up and over the top in an overly confident manner could bring disaster. [5]

Now there remains a tension between danger and peace, between discovery and home. Go one step back in the I Ching, and you will find hexagram #63, Chi Chi (), "After the End," representing terminal balance, tranquility and settlement in a state of perfect equilibrium. But this is not the final resting place, instead one step back on the way of human change. Why can't we end with serene fulfillment, at one with nature? The end is never the last step. Preparing for the end is.

References

[1] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, tr. James Creed Meredith, 110-11.

[2] Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building, p. 154.

[3] Peter Wessel Zapffe, quoted in Wisdom in the Open Air, p. 71. This book contains the only published English translations of Zapffe's work. An intriguing take on his ideas also appears in Herman Tennessen, "Happiness is for the Pigs."

[4] Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, p. 94.

[5] Hexagram #64," R.L. Wing, The I Ching Workbook, p. 160., chapter 6.